Death Row Breakout

by Edward Bunker

  “That’s almost true, Your Honor. The only thing is that, if a plea is entered, we will lose the right to file a demurrer.”

  “A demurrer! On what grounds?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps none. But I would like to investigate the possibility of some jurisdictional flow.”

  “What’s the people’s feeling in that regard?”

  “The State doesn’t see any chance for a demurrer being granted.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Judge Drury, “failure to hear such a motion would constitute reversible error, right?”

  “Probably so, Your Honor.”

  To Sally: “How much time do you need?”

  “About a week.”

  The Judge looked to his Clerk, who brought a large ledger to the bench. They looked at it together. “How’s the 9 of the month, eight days from now?”

  “Very good, Your Honor.”

  “This matter is continued until next Wednesday, March 9th, at 10:00 am.”

  Sally wrote it down in her book. As the Bailiff, deputies and prison guards unhooked the three black men from their chains to the table, Sally turned to say goodbye. “I’ll see you before next week,” she said.

  “Can you come back to the bull-pen right now?” “Sure.” She looked to Dupree and smiled. His response was a nod. As she walked out of the empty courtroom, she didn’t realize that this was the last time a hearing in this case would have anything but a packed, obstreperous (and sometimes riotous) courtroom.

  She went to her car and deposited a quarter in the meter, then headed for the side entrance to the jail area. As she turned the building corner, the prison van was pulling away. “Shit!” she cursed, and her exasperation showed in her body movement.

  Inside the van, Eddie looked back and saw her and recognized her reaction. So did the guards beyond the heavy mesh screen.

  “Think that commie bitch is gonna save your ass?”

  Eddie’s shrug was noncommittal, and his face was expressionless. The van left the town for the highway that passed the prison. When it turned onto the prison property, he finally said something. “Officer.”

  “Yeah, Johnson?”

  “Do you know what a fat, stupid pig you are?”

  “Yeah… At least I’m not a nigger.”

  “You fuckin’ dog!” said Scott. Eddie nudged him with an elbow and shook his head. Scott choked back his curses.

  During the rest of the drive the van was silent – but thick with tension. The guards saw the three young black men as vicious killers who had killed one of their brethren. The young black men saw the guards as racist oppressors who might as well have worn Nazi uniforms.

  The van went through the sally port below the gun tower. The inner gate slid open and it pulled up to the loading dock. Waiting for them in Receiving and Release were Captain Moon and four guards of the Special Security Squad, better known as the Goon Squad. They wore jumpsuits instead of the regular uniforms, and a belt of tools useful in making searches, consisting of screwdrivers and pliers and mirrors with bent handles to look up and under or around a narrow corner. Now, however, they had on skin-tight leather gloves and carried night-sticks that were officially called “batons”.

  “It’s the trap,” Dupree said from the side of his mouth.

  “Shaddup,” said Captain Moon. He stepped up to Eddie, eyeball to eyeball, except he was shorter and Eddie was in waist chains. “So you gave my officers some shit, did you?”

  “If you say so,” Eddie could see a look on the Captain’s face, a narrowing of the eyes, then the way he hefted the night-stick. He was a second away from ramming the stick into Eddie’s stomach.

  Eddie struck first, kicking him in the testicles. He let out a groan and jumped back, bent over. The others rushed in, swinging clubs and fists and feet. The black men tried to fight back, but were virtually helpless in the waist chains. The clubs rose and fell and the blood spattered on the walls. Afterward, the guards laughed. They knew that nobody cared what was done to convicts; especially not black convicts who had murdered a correctional officer.

  San Francisco and Berkeley combined to make the most liberal and radical community in America. The constituency of San Francisco was the only one in California to vote in favor of pot and against the death penalty. The politics ranged from Yellow Dog Democrats at the conservative edge to straight-out revolutionary guerillas on the other. It was fertile ground for a Defense Committee and a Defense Fund, which Sally’s husband seeded with a $500 check. She knew a reporter for the Chronicle, and a black organizer of the Students Union; and San Francisco in the late sixties was conducive to the reaction.

  Sally also visited Eddie’s mother, a strong black woman with younger sons, Charles and William, who she feared might follow their older brother. Most likely it would be William. He was sixteen and read whatever Eddie told him. Eddie could write, he could convince her but, right or wrong, he was going to be destroyed. “No, they won’t let him get away,” said his mother with anguish in her voice. She brought out a packet of letters Eddie had written and, after Sally had read a paragraph or two, she said, “Let me take these. I’ll get them back to you. I think they will get us sympathetic attention, and money for the defense.”

  “If they’ll help, take ’em.”

  Sally read many of them in the hotel room and during the short flight to San Francisco. Before Sally entered her front door, Eddie’s letters were represented by a good literary agent, who would come up with the idea of asking William Styron to write an introduction, which proved a great idea and inclined reviewers and critics to take the work seriously. It needed editing, but so does the work of many acclaimed authors. Despite some spelling and grammatical errors, the letters were a powerful exploration of a strong-willed young black man trying to formulate a view of the world that fit the realities of his existence. Sally was sure that the letters would arouse a tide of sympathy.

  As the prison van pulled into the plaza outside the civic center buildings, the brothers in the van looked out at the two-dozen sign-carrying protesters and the television news crew. The television reporter was talking to Sally Goldberg.

  “Ahhh, man… check it out!” said Big Scott. “We got some help.”

  “Yeah… but they all be white,” said Dupree.

  “So what? The shitstorm we’re in, I’ll take anybody’s help.”

  A news photographer was waiting as they exited the van at the side loading dock. “Hey!” he called; they all turned and he took a picture of their battered faces. It would be on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle the following morning. The guards were indifferent when the picture was taken. Beating on convicts was routine. The public had no sympathy for the convicts, and the courts invariably took the position that prisons were better left to the experts – prison officials.

  That wasn’t Sally’s reaction when she saw Eddie through the bullpen bars. “Oh my God, what happened to you?” His right eye was shut beneath a swelling the size of a golf ball.

  “They said shut up and I thought they said stand up.”

  “Tee hee, haw haw – but it ain’t funny, McGee. Tell me what the hell happened.”

  So he told her in detail. “Do you mean to say,” she inserted, “that they did this to you while you were cuffed up?”

  “There were too many for us to win, but you better believe there would have been some marks on their lily white –”

  “Maybe we can twist it to our advantage,” she said, and in the courtroom she was both flamboyant and fiery: “Imagine, your Honor, how it looks to the world to have black men chained like slaves in a courtroom in the last half of the twentieth century. Look at their faces. They could very easily have died, and the Court would have had a modern lynching –”

  “Miss… Miss Goldberg. Lynch is a pretty extreme term.”

  “What word better describes it? Let the record reflect that their faces look like hamburgers.”

  “No, the record should not reflect that. They have some brui
ses, that is all. I’m informed that they assaulted the correctional officers who transported them, and they were subdued with a minimum amount of necessary force.”

  “Your Honor,” called the young Deputy District Attorney, “if it please the Court, this morning’s hearing is for pleas and setting trial dates – and deciding what Mr Johnson’s co-defendants are going to do about representation. We can set a date for hearing counsel’s claims about collateral matters.”

  “That’s true,” said Judge Drury. “We can stipulate there is no presumption of waiver of any right otherwise available.”

  “So stipulated,” chirped the prosecutor.

  “I’ll stipulate to that – as far as it goes. But I want the Court to order a complete medical examination independent of the prison, plus a photographic record of their injuries, and those of the officers, if any, as of today.”

  “There’s no need for that,” said the deputy district attorney.

  “I believe it is more than merited. I think it’s worthy of investigation by the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, which I’m going to file for when I get back to San Francisco.”

  Judge Drury put his head back and looked down his nose at her. “I’ll see you both in chambers in fifteen minutes, after bladder relief. Defendants need not be present.”

  As Sally turned to go, Eddie gestured the question, what’s up? All Sally could do was shrug her own confusion. In the courthouse corridor she asked the deputy district attorney, “What’s on his mind?”

  “I have no idea. He definitely marches to his own drummer.”

  The judge was out of his robes and putting on his suit jacket when they entered his chambers. “Look,” he said, “I can see that this is going to be a circus… and I don’t want a circus in my courtroom or my courthouse,” he looked at the young deputy district attorney and shook his head while clucking sadly. “Do you?”

  “We’re not going to be intimidated by troublemakers and noisy protesters. If our local police can’t handle it, we can call in reinforcements from the highway patrol, or whatever.”

  “That’s true enough, but I don’t like it… so I am going to order a change of venue to San Francisco. You’ll still prosecute.”

  “I think that’s a wise decision,” Sally said. Her heart was beating in exultation. Even San Francisco was a long shot, but it gave her hope.

  Eddie, however, was still pessimistic. “It don’t matter where the trial, they’re going to give me the gas chamber.”

  *

  Every man in the Adjustment Center was entitled to an hour of exercise each day. Actually, they got an hour every other day. When the Day Watch came on duty, they opened one cell gate. The prisoner came out onto the tier for an hour. He could shower – the first cell had been converted into a shower – and stay out on the tier until the hour ended. He could pace up and down or stop outside someone’s cell and talk through the bars. When the hour ended, he was locked in his cell, and the next man came out. As there were seventeen men and only eight hours on the Watch, it took two days to exercise everyone.

  A black convict named James Brown was out on the tier. He was still drying his hair when he stopped outside Eddie’s cell. “Look here,” he said, motioning Eddie to come close to the bars where they whispered. Brown leaned close. “Look here, my woman will bring us a pistol. Can we do anything with it?”

  Eddie snorted. “Can we even get it?”

  “I dunno. That’s why I’m tellin’ you, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah… well… shit… I don’t know. Lemme think on it.”

  “If we goin to die, let’s take some white mothafucka’s with us.”

  In the night, while the men talked from cage to cage, usually about violence, Eddie thought about getting the pistol. His first thought was the difficulty of getting it into San Quentin. Then he realized it seemed difficult because it had never been done. The idea of a firearm inside prison walls drove the officials up the wall. Still, abundant drugs got in. Why not get a pistol in the same way? Of course, most drug packages were small and light, but not so the kilo of marijuana smuggled in through a brother from Oakland. Someone on the outside had driven to the edge of the prison reservation, to the “village” with houses for personnel, or the firing range, or the marsh beside the reservation. The car turned off the highway, its headlights were doused and it bounced along the rutted dirt-road past the sign: “NO TRESPASSING. California Dept. of Corrections”. The package was dropped off at a designated spot, probably a trash can. When the prison trash truck made its rounds, it was easy for the convict worker to pick it up without the guard seeing anything. The trucks were not searched coming in the back gate. If a brother worked the truck it would be easy to do. No black would refuse Eddie, not unless he was ready to die or seek protection from the Captain. The latter choice would mean death. If a white boy refused or sought protection, they would likely kill him. Most whites hated Eddie as much, or more, than the prison guards, since his case was making headlines all over the world.

  Yes, he could probably get it inside the walls, but getting it into the Adjustment Center, that was something else entirely. It was as secure as Death Row. Indeed, the third floor was Death Row. Everything that came in was searched by hand and with a metal detector. No doubt there was some way to smuggle it into the building, but he had never thought about it. But then – so what? He could cause confusion and take out a couple of guards, maybe, but he wouldn’t end up anywhere except back in his cell or in the morgue. He knew that. Still… what were his choices? Better to die with a gun in your hand, than being strapped into the gas chamber and have a lot of white faces staring at you as you died. If he was to go, it would be as the black leader he was to his people.

  *

  On many nights the fog came from the sea and rolled across the Bay. The outside prison lights grew dim as the fog thickened around them. Soon the only sounds were the water slapping against the pilings and hulls, and the foghorn lament. San Quentin’s reservation covered a couple of thousand acres. The security area, inside the walls, was a fraction of the total. The rest was a housing development for personnel and big Victorian houses for the Wardens and Captain. They sat on a hillside and looked down inside the walls. There was a farm, and even some wetlands. All of it was hidden by heavy fog. Inside the walls there was special “fog-line” security. Certain gates were locked, others were out of bounds, and extra guards were posted in spots made blind by the fog.

  The extra security was in the prison interior, not the outside reservation. A rental car with changed license plates turned off the little-used public road onto the prison property, “No Trespassing, California Dept. of Corrections” read the bullet-pocked sign. The car parked off to the side where, in the fog, it would not be noticed by the occasional correctional officer coming home. A figure got out carrying a small Macy’s bag. The figure hurried along the narrow, rutted roadway. Headlights appeared like a pair of bouncing yellow eyes. The figure ducked to the side and lay prone until the vehicle passed by.

  The terrain here was a combination of mud flat and wetland. The figure followed the road bed around a jutting headland and vaguely perceived a mercury vapor street light over the entrance. Its reach was very small in the fog. The figure circled outside of the glow and stayed in the gray of the fog and the black of night as he covered the last quarter mile and put the package where it was supposed to go.

  In the morning, the prison trucks went out of the rear sally port-gate to perform their duties. One was the trash truck; it picked up barrels of trash, dumped the contents into the crusher and, eventually, made it to a trash dump in Richmond, then returned to San Quentin. The laundry truck came out, made it to the officers’ reservation, delivering clean laundry and picking up dirty. It even stopped at the Warden and Associate Warden’s houses to get dirty underwear and bedding. Other trucks took out work crews cleaning up drainage ditches clogged with weeds, or shoveled hot asphalt into potholes.

  A convict o
n one of these trucks picked up the package and carried it back through the sally port-gate and into the walls of San Quentin State Prison. A gun inside the walls was the rarest contraband of all. It was a hundred times more likely that convicts would smuggle in heroin than a gun. The last pistol smuggled in was turned in as a ploy to get parole. It worked. This pistol was no ploy. It was the key to a breakout plan of such desperate bravado that it could not conceivably work.

  In his cell on the bottom floor of the Adjustment Center, Eddie was doing a hundred fingertip push-ups, twenty at a set. It was morning and nearly everyone else was asleep. They talked all night and slept until the afternoon. Nobody cared.

  He was unable to see out into the plaza and Garden Beautiful because of the eight-foot redwood fence outside the building, but the windows were open and he could hear convicts crossing the walkways of the formal garden toward the pedestrian sally port. They worked outside the walls in the Employee’s Snack Bar, Gas Station, Barber Shop, or as House Boy for the very top officials.

  He stopped his push-ups and stood listening at the cell bars. Every morning a few black convicts called out, “Stay strong, Eddie!” or “Power to the People, Eddie.” These, however, were not the words he wanted to hear. The tension of anticipation was a great vice crushing his chest. Where the fuck was he…?

  He heard the key turn in the grille gate at the front. It was done softly – but a pig was on the tier.

  “Hey, Eddie,” yelled the voice he waited for. “Where ya be, comrade?”

  He stayed silent. He hoped the man outside would do the same. No such luck. “Hey, Eddie, are you there?”

  Fuck it. “Yeah, me and this pig.”

  “I’m gone,” he whispered, “but Killer Shorty say it be okay. He has the package and he’s ready to deliver when you want it.”

  “Be careful. Be silent.”

  “Quiet as the grave.”

  Simultaneously, he heard the jangling keys on a chain and the guard came into view. It was Sylvester, Esque’s only black officer.