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My Texan Friend
Maggie founded Karl's original website and is close to Karl and his ongoing quest for a fair deal to secure his future. Here is her original introduction published in 2005.
"Mailcall... would you care to come and wait by my door with me? Bated breath ... no mail yesterday, Friday: you and my Baby, Wednesday and Thursday, none ...HEYA, let's keep our fingers crossed and HOPE."
This is from a letter written recently by my pen-friend Karl, on death row in Texas. I made contact with Karl through the organisation 'Human Writes', which has advertised a few times in the small ads at the back of 'The Friend'. Human Writes is a British based organisation whose members write to pen-pals on death row. It is not a campaigning organisation - Amnesty International already does that, we take on the simple act of writing regularly, introducing a taste of normal life into lives which are so bizarre and so abnormal that at times it is difficult to imagine.
I have only been writing to Karl since the beginning of June, a year and a half now, and our correspondence has already opened my eyes to so many things. I am shocked at the casual cruelty of Death Row: prisoners being woken up in the night for no obvious reason, for example. Karl was once woken at 3.00 am to give a DNA test. Why? I hear about mentally unstable prisoners being taunted by prison officers to make them flare up, I hear about prisoners being teased by being told that they are to be allowed access to televisions - they are not. I hear about an old prisoner being deprived of his walking frame. I hear things which, were they to occur in British prisons, would cause headlines and serious editorials, and probably a Home Office enquiry. Or at least, I hope they would.
When I applied to Human Writes I think I expected that sooner or later I would hear something that would shock me. What I did not realise was how much I would gain from the friendship which has developed. Karl is largely a self-educated man but he reads widely and thinks about many things. He writes to me about so many aspects of his life that I find I, in turn, can write to him about all sorts of things. We find we agree about much, particularly politics and many aspects of religion, and Karl is becoming interested in Quakerism. I find, too, that I look at the world a little differently now. Karl has never been to Europe, he was really impressed by postcards of the High Street and the Cathedral, for him they are like places out of a book. I find myself walking around thinking, 'I wonder what Karl would make of this?'
What is happening in the States is nothing less than a scandal. Prisoners still in their teens are sentenced to death. People wait on Death Row for years, even decades. At a recent Human Writes conference one of the speakers had been held on Death Row for 22 years before being found innocent. He has received no compensation nor any assistance from the state or federal agencies to make a life for himself. Last year in Texas alone 22 people have been executed and several more prisoners have been given their dates. There are things we can do, however. We can campaign through Amnesty, and we can write to pen-pals.
M.A.A
