American Way of Life

Donald Jones was alone in a bare room. He had finished his meal of chicken strips, pizza, coleslaw, fries, and apple crisp with ice cream. Jones lay on the metal gurney, covered in a thin sheet. It was 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning. He was about to die.

On the other side of the glass window, his family was waiting. Sally Vavrek, his pen pal of eight years, stood among them as Jones was given the first of the three injections that would soon take his life.

“It wasn’t a peaceful death,” said Vavrek, 56, now a board member of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions (MD CASE). “I envisioned us holding hands and ushering him into the kingdom in a loving way. But it was just – an amusement park ride with a black light or something. With his mother screaming, he jumped off the gurney. It was just the most horrible, horrible few minutes you could even imagine,” Vavrek said.

Vavrek had to have seen this day coming almost a decade earlier, when she selected a letter from Jones at a conference of religious groups organizing against the death penalty. Yet, she, like many other men and women across the country, chose to build a relationship.

“The most important thing is for us to realize that these are people like everybody else,” said Vavrek. “In some places, those prisoners get locked up and nobody even thinks about them.”

Whether motivated by religion, conviction or simple curiosity, death row pen pals, as these writers are commonly called, connect often-isolated inmates to the world beyond their cells. While no one knows how many pen pals are out there, they are on the frontlines of a burgeoning anti-death penalty movement, bringing the stories of death row into America’s classrooms and offices.

Recent years have seen an upswing in moratoriums on state executions and death row exonerations. New Jersey banned the death penalty last December. New York and Illinois have general holds on executions and ten other states have holds due to execution methods, according to a representative from the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions across the country have been declining since the start of the century, with 53 in 2006 compared to 98 in 1999.

Yet, even as the incidences of executions fall, conditions on death rows have remained essentially the same, if not deteriorated. In the last twenty years, security concerns and social isolation at prisons have only increased, keeping prisoners even further from outside society, said Robert Johnson, author of Condemned to Die: Life Under the Sentence of Death and an expert in social isolation on death row.

“Death row inmates sometimes talk of themselves as the living dead because they’re alive but they are seen as dead men or women,” said Johnson. “As a general matter, the inmates feel that even the limited social world of the prison is closed to them.”

While death row prisoners are not necessarily the most violent, the sentences they are serving are dreadfully severe. “Essentially, Death row is seen as a place to store bodies before execution, so there is little, if any, effort towards rehabilitation and integration,” he said.

“We’d have fewer executions, I suppose, if we came to know and care about everybody in prison, but people don’t. Part of the rationalization is to have distance,” said Johnson, whose own sunny corner office with its collection of knick-knacks and family photos seemed a world away from the concrete cavern of Baltimore’s death row. A wall of books on prison life and gold-embossed scales of justice could not attest to the poignant death row stories this white-bearded academic told.

Bonnita Spikes, a death row pen pal and field organizer for MD CASE, spoke of the moving power of inmates’ stories.

“Once people hear how some have actually lived, it gives them food for thought and starts the process of ‘okay, maybe I need to change my mind about this,’” Spikes said.

The letters of Abby Wihl are now just a few of the ones that flow into the Baltimore penitentiary. Wihl is a twenty-year-old sophomore at AU. She wears a Catholic Student Association T-shirt, denim jeans, and an assortment of silver and gold jewelry around her fingers, wrists, and ears.

“I don’t think my parents even know that I met a death row inmate yet,” she said as she nervously played with the trifecta of religious medallions resting under her collar.

Wihl’s relationship with Maryland death row inmate John Booth began last March, after a class assignment piqued her interest in death row prisoners. The two have corresponded about six times, and Wihl is planning her second visit to the Baltimore Supermax where Booth resides. “To see how things are,” she said, blond ponytail bobbing rhythmically.

At the age of 29, Booth, a heroin addict with a tortured past, was convicted for the murder of an elderly couple in Baltimore. Irvin Bronstein and his wife Rose were found bound, gagged, and stabbed twelve times each in the chest, according to court documents. Their television, jewelry, and 1972 Chevrolet Impala were missing.

Twenty-four years later, Wihl receives Booth’s letter at her dorm mailbox; it’s typed in blue ink and closed with a simple hand-written ‘John’.

“It has been the shadow or memory of that very bright smile of yours, coupled with your willingness to share in this experience, and assist me in this struggle – that has given my heart a reason to smile,” he writes.

Booth came to know Wihl’s smile after she made the two-hour trek from AU’s sheltered campus to the barbed wire complex that contains the Baltimore Supermax.

On that first visit, Wihl brought Booth pairs of socks and some undershirts; items that were novelties behind prison walls.

“Having the physical face and just seeing how sad he was, it was difficult,” she said. Maryland death row inmates can receive eight visits a month, however contact visits are rarely permitted and guests communicate through a speaker in a glass wall.

For Wihl, the pen-pal relationship turned a classroom assignment into a dedication to social change. She is now the co-president of AU’s chapter of the Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and an active participant in the Maryland campaign to end capital punishment. She has studied the documents surrounding Booth’s case and sent Booth’s former judge a copy of her findings. After sharing Booth’s story as part of her final class paper, Wihl changed her major to journalism so she could continue to tell the stories of those who couldn’t tell them alone.

“My conception changed,” she said. As for her effect on Booth, the 53-year-old cornrowed convicted murderer, she shrugged. “He got clothes out of it.” But for other pen pals corresponding with “the living dead” went deeper than socks and schoolwork.

Bonnita Spikes, the field organizer for MD CASE considers the prisoners on Maryland’s death row to be her personal friends; she follows their cases. She attended Wesley Baker’s execution in 2005 and keeps in touch with his mother. Herself a mother of four boys and a grandmother of ten, she has traveled across the country, from Miami to Atlanta to College Park, MD., to advocate against the death penalty. However, Spikes, 54, is also an active member of another organization – Murder Victims Families for Human Rights.

In 1994, Spikes’s husband Michael was shot to death. His killers were never found. But rather than seeking vengeance for her husband’s death, Spikes turned to activities she thought Michael would want her to do. She worked with hospice, homelessness and eventually the death penalty. “I understand, I really understand because I lost my husband. And I loved my husband. I mean, I love him today. If I had a chance to be with him today, I would be with him. But I just don’t think that executions are the way to go.”

Spikes’ own son attempted suicide after his father’s death. Still, she believes forgiveness is essential to breaking cycles of hate and crime, cycles that wouldn’t be broken by just locking people in the Supermax.

The families of the offenders are also victims and deserve help and support, said Spikes, who plans to write her Master’s thesis on helping the families of both murder victims and offenders.

When dealing with other victims’ families, Spikes acknowledges that not everyone can forgive the way she did. “I say to anybody, I’m not trying to tell you how you should feel about this,” she said. “I’m just saying if you knew the way it’s handled, it’s not handled right. It’s flawed, she said. “The list of exonerated alone that should let you know there’s something wrong with our system.”

Spikes’ role as an anti-death penalty activist has changed more than her opinion on the death penalty. After working with death row inmates, Spikes has seen the humanity of the offenders she had once tried to hate.

She says her relationship with death row inmates has freed her to love her family and her life. “I wanted to find the killers that killed my husband and wanted them to be jailed and really suffer in jail,” said Spikes, adding that holding onto that lust for revenge stagnated her family.

“Letting go,” she said. “I just wish more people could know that feeling because it’s just not fun living with hate, waking up to hate every morning.”

Thanks in part to her forgiveness and willingness to share the stories of her pen pals, Spikes may soon be waking up to a new job: working to abolish the death penalty.

A bill repealing the death penalty, H.B. 225, should come to a vote in the Maryland Legislature this session and many at MD CASE are predicting that their work might soon be over.

Maryland has not used the death penalty and frequently as most states, said Johnson. The state has executed five people since 1976, said a representative from the Death Penalty Information Center.

Maryland’s reluctance to send convicts to their death reveals a public divided on methods of punishment. When asked to choose between life in prison without parole and the death penalty, 46 percent of Marylanders favored life without parole, according to a poll by Gonzales Research and Marketing Strategies from March 2007. Forty-two percent preferred the death penalty. Twelve percent did not answer.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley counts himself among the 46 percent. In a February 21, 2007 statement to the Maryland Legislature, he urged representatives to repeal the death penalty, stating, “While there are good people on both sides of this issue, in the long run, the death penalty cannot coexist with a republic founded on the inalienable dignity of the individual person.”

For members of the Maryland Legislature, O’Malley’s tenure signals a key moment in abolishing the state’s capital punishment laws. Freeing up the money spent on the death penalty would allow Maryland to spend money on safety and crime prevention, according to Delegate Samuel Rosenberg, the sponsor of H.B. 225. “So many people will feel safer where they work, where they live and where they play,” said Rosenberg, anticipating the programming possible if the death penalty was repealed. In his testimony to the legislature, Governor O’Malley estimated that since 1978, Maryland has spent $22.4 million more than the cost of life imprisonment by sentencing 56 people to death.

Besides mere financial gains, Maryland stands to influence other states if it repeals this session. “We’re looked upon as the next big state,” said Rosenberg with a bit of boyish enthusiasm.

If O’Malley and Rosenberg have their way, pen pals like Vavrek and Spikes may no longer be standing on the other side of the execution chamber’s glass. For Vavrek, however, experiencing the life and death of her pen pal has only cemented a commitment to a larger movement.

“I’m still not sure about my motives,” she said, her grandson’s Raffi music trailing in the background. “All I know is that it did strengthen my resolve to keep working until this is gone from the world.”