Then I heard a rattling noise that wasn’t coming from my throat, and I realized it was the sound of the phone shaking in my hand.
I lit a cigarette. “I ain’t stupid, you know,” I said to Watkins.
The aide in the front seat shook her fleshy arm at me. “Quit it with the cigarettes. We talked about this, Mr. Buck. I know you ain’t forgot. My little boy got asthma. He don’t need to be smelling your smoke on me.”
“It’s my goddamn car, isn’t it?” I said to her. “Crack the window.”
In my ear Watkins said, “What does that mean?”
“I know you’re trying to set up some sort of smear on me with your little program. Why should I help you do that?”
“I am going to tell this story whether you participate or not. If you’d like to tell me your side of it, I’m willing to listen. But your input is not required.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I flipped the phone closed. This was the start of a real mess, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to handle this reporter on my own. “We’re going to have to call William,” I said to Rose.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess it’s time we told him about the cancer.”
“Who has cancer?” I asked.
TRANSCRIPT: AMERICAN JUSTICE
CARLOS WATKINS (NARRATION): In the state of Tennessee, they send the worst of the worst down to the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, in Nashville. About 750 men live in this complex of twenty low-slung buildings, and two-thirds of them are “high-risk inmates,” convicted of serious violent crimes and considered to pose a continuing danger to society. Sixty of those high-risk inmates have been sentenced to die by lethal injection. Riverbend is where Tennessee’s death row inmates live, and Riverbend is where they will be executed, unless they’re spared by Providence, a court order, or death by natural causes.
Of those sixty condemned, half are black, even though black folk comprise only 17 percent of the state’s population. And half of the state’s death row inmates hail from “West Tennessee,” and that mostly means Memphis.
Philip Workman was put to death here at Riverbend in 2007 for the 1982 killing of a police officer in the parking lot of a Memphis Wendy’s restaurant. Ballistics experts had some doubts about the evidence that convicted him, four of the trial jurors later repudiated their verdict, and two Tennessee State Supreme Court justices asked the governor to grant clemency, but none of that was enough to stop Workman’s execution. He tried to donate his last meal, a vegetarian pizza, to the homeless. The state denied his request.
Riverbend is also the home of serial killer Bruce Mendenhall, a long-haul trucker who traveled America’s highways murdering sex workers. Mendenhall isn’t on death row; he was sentenced to life for the 2007 murder of Sara Hulbert. But he’s facing more charges here in Tennessee, as well as in Alabama and Indiana, and he’s under investigation in five other states, so he may yet get his date with the needle.
It was from an inmate who dwells in these bleak environs that I recently received a letter. It’s not terribly uncommon for journalists to get letters from prisoners. Prisoners send a lot of letters. Writing letters passes time, and passing time is the chief occupation of those who are trapped in the teeth of the American criminal justice apparatus.
But this letter stood out immediately as unusual. I’ve asked the man who sent it to read it aloud for you, and then I’ll tell you more about him and the circumstances in which he finds himself. I apologize for the poor audio quality.
* * *
CHESTER MARCH: Dear Mr. Watkins,
I listened to your recent feature on the plight of three prisoners who have spent decades in solitary confinement at the Angola penitentiary in Louisiana, and I thought it might be worthwhile to reach out to you, and to share my experience.
My name is Chester March, and I have been on death row in Tennessee for about thirty-five years. Death row isn’t quite as restrictive as a segregated unit; I am allowed to have books and a small radio. These things go a long way toward keeping me sane. However, condemned inmates here are confined in an eight-by-ten space for twenty-two hours each day, I take my meals alone in my cell, and my visitation privileges are extremely limited.
I am one of the oldest men awaiting execution in the United States. Tennessee doesn’t relish keeping a man around who holds that distinction, and it seems my appeals are soon to run their course. I wonder if you and your listeners might be interested in hearing my story before the state kills me by lethal injection. I just learned that I have an execution date scheduled in two months.
I am in this place because I was hunted and persecuted by a famously brutal police detective, and convicted on the basis of a confession extracted during a torturous interrogation, in violation of my constitutional rights. I have spent decades fighting for a new trial, but the criminal justice system refuses to acknowledge the insufficiency and illegality of the evidence supporting my conviction.
My appellate lawyers, who work on my behalf at no cost to me, seem competent and dedicated, which is something I cannot say of my trial counsel or about some of the lawyers who worked on my previous appeals. However, I no longer believe my salvation can come through the system in which they operate. The only way I will be spared is if there is a public outcry against the injustice perpetrated against me. You are my last hope, Mr. Watkins.
Yours in Christ,
Chester A. March
* * *
WATKINS (NARRATION): Compared to most prison correspondence, this is grammatically polished and well structured. Erudite, I’d even call it. It aroused my curiosity, and if I’m being honest, it also tickled my ego a little bit. It was like getting the message from Star Wars. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” I had to learn more. How could the man who wrote this letter be sitting in a Tennessee prison, awaiting execution? And when I began to look into the circumstances of Chester A. March, I found he is quite different from most prisoners.
The American carceral state inflicts its cruelties primarily upon the underclass. Black men are locked up in proportions that more than triple their representation in society at large. And among the whites who find themselves behind bars, they too emerge primarily from disadvantaged communities.
But not Chester March. Chester March is the wealthy son of one of Mississippi’s agricultural oligarchs, a descendant of slaveholding planters, a graduate of Ole Miss, and a brother in Sigma Alpha Epsilon. He is, it goes without saying, a white man. And yet even a man like this, born with the privileges of whiteness and of aristocracy, could not protect himself from the violence of the state, which has locked him away for decades, and which plans to kill him. The machine is designed to process the marginalized, but it will crush anyone unlucky enough to be fed into it.
You might have noticed that this story has a ticking clock; Chester March is scheduled to be executed. After I got this letter and pitched the story to NPR, I spent about two weeks doing background research and making contact with some of the people involved. Each episode of American Justice airs about a week and a half after I finish editing the audio, so by the time you hear this, we’ll be about a month away from the date Chester March will either be put to death or given a stay of execution. So this is an interesting, experimental project: long-form, serialized coverage of a developing story. This season of American Justice will be six hour-long episodes, released once a week, and we’ll learn what happens to Chester in the fifth. As I record this, I don’t know how the story will end.
But along the way, you’ll find out how Chester came to be in his current situation, you’ll meet the heroic lawyer who is trying to save Chester’s life, and we’ll try to talk to the man who waged a twenty-year campaign to bring the full weight of the criminal justice system down on Chester: a notorious Memphis police detective named Baruch Schatz.
3
William Tecumseh Schatz Esq. arrived on a Delta flight from New York with a stopover in Atlanta. He used to be able to get here direct; Memphis w
as a hub for Northwest Airlines. But Delta bought up Northwest in ’08, and since then, there have been far fewer direct flights from LaGuardia. Memphis is still the international hub for Federal Express, but that won’t get you here nonstop unless you want to ride in a crate.
The Memphis terminal opened in June of 1963, one of the first two-level airports in the country and a masterpiece of cutting-edge modern architecture by the acclaimed Memphis designer Roy P. Harrover, who built it with huge tapering columns that made the terminal look like a tray of martini glasses.
With its sparkling new facility complete, the Memphis municipal airport was rechristened the Memphis International Airport. It was a time of great optimism, and Memphis felt like a city on the rise. I shot a bank robber in the face that summer and got to shake hands with the mayor at a ceremony honoring my bravery. My son was about to turn ten.
A few months later, though, the president was killed in Dallas, and after that, we had several years of racial unpleasantness, culminating in a certain unfortunate incident at the Lorraine Motel, and then the Vietnam War. Once we got through all of that mishegas, the jet age was at an end, the river port was being automated, and I was nearing retirement. The celebration promised by that giant tray of martinis never quite seemed to happen.
William T. Schatz—who used to be called Tequila by his brothers in Alpha Epsilon Pi, by the way—never knew what it was like to hope or to believe that an international airport would make this an international city. As he trudged through Harrover’s masterpiece, dragging his carry-on suitcase behind him on its squeaky plastic wheels, he probably just thought the place was small and dated, a decrepit monument to a failed dream in a crumbling region that never quite got over its humiliation in the War Between the States. A place you couldn’t get to from the civilized world without first making a stopover in Atlanta.
His mother—my daughter-in-law, Fran—was waiting for him outside the terminal, and she took him to lunch at a chain Mexican restaurant where he ate two full baskets of chips with salsa, and drank five Diet Cokes. In New York, you see, the Mexican joints don’t give you free chips, and none of the restaurants do free refills on the fountain drinks, so he gorges on that trash when he comes home.
Rose always tells me to leave him alone about it, because he says he doesn’t eat like that when he’s off on his own and he doesn’t come here often, so I shouldn’t start fights over trivialities when he’s in town. And I know he is a grown man and I should mind my own business. But something he is eating up there is making him go soft around his midsection, and also, it’s unseemly. I’ve sat there and watched him do it, and I was disgusted. And I wasn’t happy to have to go to a verkakte Mexican joint in the first place, because I don’t like ethnic food and those places always smell funny.
Anyway, sitting at that table, as he picked at the last of the chips, not minding that the paper lining of the basket was soaked with so much grease that it had become transparent, Tequila’s mother told him what Rose didn’t want to have to be the one to tell him, and what I couldn’t seem to remember for more than a few hours.
Rose had got the lymphoma. It isn’t the worst kind of cancer, but even the best kind of cancer is still cancer. The doctors caught it pretty early, and in a younger patient, the prognosis would be very favorable. The usual treatment was a course of oral chemotherapy and targeted radiation. But chemo drugs and radiation wreak havoc on even a fit human body, and Rose was eighty-six years old.
The doctor had walked us through the side effects of chemotherapy: anemia and fatigue. Nausea. Vomiting and diarrhea, which meant we’d have to be really careful about dehydration. Hair loss. Her fingernails and toenails would fall off. And the big ones: thinning skin and easy bleeding and heightened vulnerability to infection.
If she took a fall while she was undergoing these treatments—and she had fallen before—she was likely to rip open like an overstuffed garbage bag.
As for the infection, well, lymphoma is a cancer that starts in the lymphocytes, which are white blood cells—the immune system. Chemo attacks the cancer by attacking the lymphocytes, and when you kill off the lymphocytes, you strip the body of its defenses against things like influenza, strep throat, and the common cold, any of which can be extremely dangerous for someone who is elderly and immunosuppressed. It’s very easy for something like that to progress into pneumonia, and when you are old and weakened from cancer treatments, pneumonia will kill you.
The alternative was not to take the chemo and not to do the radiation and just die of cancer. I hit the goddamn ceiling when Rose told me that this was even under consideration—actually, I hit the ceiling each of the half dozen or so times she had told me about it. But the case for refusing the treatment and letting the cancer run its course made a certain kind of morbid sense. It would likely take eighteen months to two years before the cancer spread everywhere, and then she could go into hospice and drift off on a morphine cloud. She’d make it almost to ninety.
That’s a good run. Maybe a good enough run. If she underwent cancer treatment, she might die anyway, and she might die sooner because of it, weak, bald, emaciated, and drowning from the inside with her lungs full of fluid. Even if she fought the disease into remission, how much longer could she expect to live, and what kind of quality of life would she have? Was it worth the suffering she was certain to endure if she took poison drugs and assaulted her body with radiation? Would it leave her wheelchair-bound? Bedridden?
After Tequila’s mother told him the news, she brought him over to Valhalla, so we could all have a fun conversation about it, together.
“What do you think I should do?” Rose asked, after the hugs, condolences, and various formalities had been exchanged.
“I don’t know,” said our grandson.
“Well, a fat lot of use you are, then,” I said.
Since we only had two chairs, Tequila and Fran were sitting on the bed. Our space at Valhalla was tiny, even smaller than Tequila’s studio apartment in New York. Besides the chairs and the bed, we had a shallow closet, a chest of drawers with the TV sitting on top of it, and a pair of large speakers Tequila had ordered from the Internet so I could turn the TV volume up loud enough for me to hear what people were saying and for the neighbors’ walls to shake. We also had a small refrigerator, a microwave oven, and a tiny square of counter space with a couple of cabinets mounted on the wall above it. The kitchenette was situated opposite the bathroom, which was fine, since we had no room for a table and ate on TV trays next to the bed on days when we didn’t feel like getting dressed to go down to the common dining room. The whole space was maybe 350 square feet, which was plenty for me. When things were close together, I didn’t have to move around as much.
“I’ll figure it out,” Tequila said. “It’s just that you blindsided me with this. I’m still trying to absorb it.”
“Why did you think your mother told you to come home, when you’re taking the bar exam in six weeks?” I asked. “You had to know it wasn’t for good news.”
“Actually, I just thought she wanted me here so she could make sure I was watching my Barbri course videos,” he said.
That got a bitter laugh out of Fran. “Are you?” she asked.
“I’m a little behind,” he said. “But it will be fine. Everyone from NYU passes.”
“Great,” I said. “That will make you feel extra special when you don’t.”
He bit his lower lip and sort of puffed himself up. “There are some things you should take care of right away, whether you decide to undergo treatment or not,” he said. “You need a document giving medical power of attorney to Mom. That will allow doctors to talk to her about your condition and show her your medical records, and it will allow her to make decisions on your behalf if you’re in a situation where you can’t make them for yourself. You also need a living will, which absolves her of having to make some of the most serious of those decisions. It’s a document that directs your medical treatment, so that you are the one who gets
to determine how you will be treated in an emergency. Basically, it stipulates that you don’t want radical measures taken to keep you alive when you’re comatose or brain-dead. If you reach a point where you are end-stage metastatic, you don’t need to have your ribs cracked by doctors performing CPR if you stop breathing, and you don’t want to be kept alive on a ventilator or a feeding tube.”
“Can you draft those for us?” Rose asked.
“I shouldn’t,” Tequila said. “I haven’t even taken the bar exam yet, and I am not going to be taking one in Tennessee. These are pretty standard documents, though. A local lawyer should be able to draft them, witness them, and notarize them for maybe a few hundred dollars. I can find somebody who will take care of it for you.”
“What do you think I should do?” Rose asked him.
“You should definitely put a do-not-resuscitate instruction in a living will,” he said. “If you get to that point, they’re not going to be curing or saving you. The best they can do is prolong your suffering. And not for very long.”
“Yes, but how do I decide whether to undergo the chemotherapy and the radiation?”
He lay back on our bed, with his feet dangling over the edge, like a sullen teenager. “Oh, God. I have no idea. I can do some research online. If you’d like, I can talk to your doctor.”
“So, what you’re telling us is that you have nothing to contribute, and your presence here is in no way useful,” I said.
He sat up and clenched his fists. “Get off my nuts, Grandpa,” he said. “I didn’t know I was walking into this shit.”
I pointed a finger at him. “Let’s take this out into the hallway.”
“What?”
“You’ve bothered your grandmother enough. Let’s go outside.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Are you asking me to fight you?”
“What? No. I’m not going to kick your ass and put you in the hospital a month before your bar exam, as much as you probably deserve it. Let’s just talk outside, so you can stop upsetting your grandmother.”
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