“Great, thank you! Thank you so much. I don’t want you to lose your job because of my oversight. Talking with him handcuffed in the same room is better than talking to him through glass. I
promise I will get the letter right next time.”
“You will also need to sign this.” Gilcrease handed Steve a document that said at the top, “Complete Waiver of Liability for All Dangers and Harm, Regardless of Actual Knowledge, Potential Knowledge, or any other Possible Knowledge of the Danger. This Waiver Has No Exception, even for Intentional Conduct and No Exception for Any Reason.” Steve read the rest of the document and realized that he would have to waive his right to sue for any harm done to him in the prison, no matter who was at fault.
Gilcrease, virtually reading his mind, said, “Basically, Mr. Hanson, even if a corrections officer purposely shot you in the back, your family cannot sue the prison—not that any of our highly professional guards would do such a thing, but I can’t let you in without you signing it.”
Steve scribbled his signature on the waiver. Gilcrease handed him a visitor badge.
“Let me walk you back to the guard station, Mr. Hanson,” Gilcrease said, leading him out the door. During the short trip there, she continued on to say, “You know, I do admire something about people like you who have a belief that everyone should get a fair shake. But on the other hand, you set very bad people loose, and they kill or rape or do something much worse again, and then I end up feeding them after they have destroyed more lives—I’m not just talking about those killed or raped, but also the victims’ friends and families.” Steve stayed silent.
“Whether this was a crime of passion, or your client is just plain evil, it was absolutely horrible what he did. He deserves an execution or, at best, to rot here until he dies.” Seeing that Steve didn’t respond to her lecture, Gilcrease turned to the guards. “Please direct this young man to H-Unit.” She walked back to her office without another word.
CHAPTER 5
Steve drove around to the special wing for capital punishment inmates, built after Tim McVeigh made the death penalty fashionable again in the 90s. The State of Oklahoma called the place a bunker or H-Unit, Steve would go on to call it a dungeon when he relayed this visit to friends and colleagues in the future.
Gilcrease had told him that he was not allowed to bring his cell phone inside. As he placed his phones into his glove box, he noticed that he had just received a Snapchat message on his work cell from an anonymous sender. He decided he could check it later and walked towards the entrance.
After being screened and searched again, Steve was escorted to a wall of metal bars. He stared at the vertical bars and determined they were each approximately three inches in diameter with a half-inch space between them. Two-inch-thick rectangular metal bars were welded horizontally across the vertical bars every twelve inches, from floor to ceiling. They were the thickest bars he had ever seen.
The officer beside him signaled to someone in the control room. The door in front of them slid open; the dull slow scratching of metal against metal echoed through the corridor. They took two steps forward and were faced with another wall exactly like the one through which they had just passed. Once the door behind them fully closed and locked, the same dull metal sound began again as this door slowly slid open. This sound would forever be etched in Steve’s memory, the sound left a scar. As this process happened over and over again, Steve was reminded of an early scene in Silence of the Lambs: the first time Clarice visited Dr.
Lecter in the insane asylum, she went through locked door after locked door to theatrically show the depths at which they keep Lecter confined. Here, however, this containment was not plotdriven; it was simply where the state kept Steve’s client and all the other death row inmates.
The pair finally arrived at the H-Unit manager’s office, where “Jerome Baldwin” was printed neatly on the door. The nameplate was newer than the one on the deputy warden’s office, but even here, it looked like it’d been there for a while.
Steve knocked.
“Come on in!” Steve heard. He opened the door to see a middle-aged man in a red-and-white checkered sweater emblazoned with the University of Oklahoma logo. The man was brandishing a golf putter and standing on a strip of artificial green turf with a hole at the far end of it.
“Mr. Hanson, how the hell are you? Welcome to H-Unit!” Baldwin stuck out his free hand like he was going to sell Steve a car.
Steve shook it politely. “I’m fine, Mr. Baldwin, thank you.”
“Call me Jerome. My old pal Ackerman… well, maybe not pal, maybe I don’t even like him, but he’s a smart egg who says you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. If you’re good in his book, you’re good in my book.” Baldwin turned his attention back to his putting course. “Anyway, more importantly, word from Fasso is that you never miss within five feet of the hole. I could use a few pointers sometime, as I’ve kind of lost my mojo here—not today, of course, you have to meet Scottie.” He grinned. “But I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next few months, so let’s set aside some time to work on that.”
Steve was speechless but recovered quickly. “I’ve always said putting is like making an omelet. You have to get the spatula in that sweet spot to flip it just right. Otherwise, it goes everywhere but the pan.” He cleared his throat. “And I’d be happy to work on putting practice with you, Jerome—as you said, some other time.”
“Right, right. That sounds dandy. We actually have a French chef here who killed his wife in a spat. Makes a helluva omelet. I’ll treat you sometime,” Baldwin chattered on as he handed Steve a paper. “Anyway, I have a waiver for you to sign.”
Steve was confused. “I already signed a waiver.”
Baldwin laughed. “You signed that waiver, not this one. The first waiver just gets you past the sadistic guards who we can barely control. Now, you will be in the pit with nothing but killers, some of which would love to take another life just for the sake of it. Should things turn bad for you in there, we will try to help, but I’m not going to lose any of my precious, mentally unhinged guards to bail you out. Rather than lose one of our own, we would just gas the area and scrape up what’s left of you. But don’t worry, I need those putting tips, so we’ll try not to let you get killed.”
“Or worse,” Steve apprehensively joked, not quite reassured by the warden’s words.
“Naw, we probably wouldn’t stop that. Improves prisoner morale when a cutie-pie lawyer gets sexy time.” Baldwin laughed and slapped Steve’s shoulder. “Anyway, you have one last sally port to venture through—past those large young men to the right of my door—and your H-Unit cherry will be officially popped.”
Steve passed through yet another set of cookie-cutter, massive guards and found himself officially in the bowels of society.
He carefully took in what Oklahoma’s death row actually looked like. The interior control booth was constructed from three-anda-half-inch-thick bulletproof glass, and it was manned by two correctional officers. The bulletproof room was a perfect square inside a square. Three-fourths of the outer square was comprised of the inmates’ cells. Steve stood on the fourth side, staring at the open square “C” of cells before him.
From this vantage point, Steve could see the three sides contained two stories of cell doors wrapped around the perimeter. He remembered reading a report from the Federal Public Defenders Office that H-Block currently held one hundred and forty-seven people on death sentences. There was a cell door about every six feet and ten cells on each wall. Inside of each cell was a prisoner or two who faced the most severe penalty and would likely spend a decade or more waiting for it.
One of the guards pushed a button, and the door to Steve’s left slid open with the same dull, slow screech he already knew he would never get used to hearing. He walked through, entering the heart of H-Unit for the first time. He felt hollow.
Everything he had previously seen was now on his right. To his left was the outdoor area each prisoner was constitutionally required access to, for at least one hour per day, according to U.S. Supreme Court precedent. The high court had determined that keeping a man locked up in his cell for twenty-four hours a day was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eight Amendment.
The yard consisted of a thirty-by-thirty-foot square of concrete that was surrounded by walls reaching three stories high on all four sides. Steve saw a basketball hoop on one wall and a weight bench in the other corner. As his eyes scanned upward, they stopped at the steel grate with evenly spaced slats each the size of a Hershey’s chocolate bar covering the ceiling of this outside area colloquially referred to as “the yard.” As Steve looked at the slivers of blue sky he could see through the metal roof, he wondered how exactly one hour out there each day changed their imprisonment from cruel and unusual to something else.
He would later learn that the prison officials sometimes gave inmates their hour in the yard at less-than-favorable times. The law didn’t specify when the hour each day had to occur, only that the inmates were entitled to one hour per day. So, when the warden believed a show of control was necessary, he scheduled the hours at extremely inconvenient times for the prisoners.
In the winter, the yard time was set at 3:00 a.m. In the summer, yard time was set at 5:00 p.m. Thus, most of the incarcerated men chose to stay in their cell rather than be woken up to go outside in the cold night or leave the slight comfort of their cell’s small oscillating fan to stand in the steam-inducing Oklahoma heat.
As Steve stared at the empty yard, the clang of the door closing behind him signaled that he was now locked in death row. The back of his neck tingled slightly. The door down the hallway opened. He went through one last metal bar door. It closed behind him. To his left, a solid metal door with a small square window clicked open.
Steve entered the eight-by-eight-foot room and noticed first the table and three chairs in the middle. Then, he noticed the window to his right, made of bulletproof glass embedded with steel mesh, which allowed him to see into the unit manager’s office he had left just minutes ago. Baldwin looked over, grinned, and went back to his putting practice. Other than the thick metal door, the four walls were uniformly made of some old form of sheetrock. The color reminded Steve of the stained ceiling in his fourth-grade classroom at Lincoln Elementary School back in Pryor, Oklahoma where water had seeped through on who knows how many occasions; the stains in this visitation room appeared somehow dirtier and the walls themselves older than even those decrepit classroom tiles.
He took a seat, pulled out his legal pad and pen, and waited.
CHAPTER 6
After a few minutes, he peeked through the small window in the door facing back out to the H-Unit. There, he saw Scottie Pinkerton standing in the middle of the cellblock. Scottie was a white man a little over six feet tall, slightly overweight, with a belly that pooched out like a starving African child in a late-night infomercial. His black hair was cropped short against his scalp. At the moment, he was being strip-searched.
Steve knew this was for his own safety but wondered how degrading it must be to be searched like that in front of everyone. Not that anyone was looking, but all of the inmates and guards in the cell block had a clear view of the ceremony. He wondered how many times Scottie had to go through this and similar experiences over the past seven years. Steve slowly walked away from the window and slumped back down in his chair.
When the door opened, Steve quickly stood as his client was escorted into the room. Steve reached out, and Scottie tried his best to shake Steve’s hand, but the wrist restraints were chained to his waistband. Scottie appeared to be feigning interest in meeting him until the officer left; Steve was certain the man was not happy about something. He sat down and gestured for Scottie to take the seat next to him.
