AgendasAgendas
By Brandon Astor Jones
"Yes, as my swift days near their goal,/ 'Tis all that I implore:/ In life and death a chainless soul,/ With courage to endure." — Emily Brontë, 1818-1848
I received a letter recently from my sister who lives in Gwynedd, Wales. She relates having met with a man who several years ago was a prisoner on Georgia's death row with me. I remember the man very well. The thing I remember most about him was his courage.
One clear and sunny morning, a man named Richard Tucker was taken from the cell block by the execution squad. They took him to a cell next door to the execution chamber.
Michael Cervi, the many my Welsh sister met, was Richard Tucker's best friend. Long before the squad took Richard out to kill him, Mike literally begged the officer in charge to give him a moment to say goodbye to his friend. It would have been a very human thing to do. Of course, the request was denied.
On the day of the scheduled execution, that particular cell block was scheduled to go outside onto the fenced-in exercise yard. Once he was outside on the yard, Mike quickly scaled the 12 feet (3.6 metres) of razor-wired fence and climbed up onto the roof of the cell block.
Mike never went in the direction of the prison's perimeter fences — which are 10 and 16 feet, also topped with razor wire. Still, several automatic rifles and shotguns were zeroed in on each step he took as one guard after another shouted, "Get down or I'll shoot".
Undaunted, Mike walked several hundred yards to the other end of the roof, and near the end he sat on the edge just above the window of the cell in which his friend was awaiting death in Georgia's electric chair, just a few feet away. From that position, he and his friend yelled last words to one another.
Before guards came and took Mike away, he lost a lot of blood because he had been cut to ribbons by the layers of razor wire.
The newspaper accounts of the incident said that Mike had tried to "escape from death row". That kind of reporting scared the government so much that $30,000 of state funds were immediately allocated to purchase more razor wire for all of the state's prisons. To this day, most of Georgia's citizens do not know that there was no escape attempt, but a forced and dangerous farewell between two good friends.
These days Mike, in his spare time, gives lectures on (and against) capital punishment. After that British lecture, my sister went up to him and shook his hand. I was deeply moved by the things that both of them said about me. Her letter went on to say of him that "he married his high school sweetheart and [now] has a two-year-old daughter".
I am glad for him and his family. He is yet another example of how stupid the death penalty is.
It is too bad that a story like this one will never get ink in big mainstream newspapers, but we know that the facts of this story — and others like it — conflict with the elite status quo in US politics. They are not into humanising convicts, or even ex-convicts. We do not fit into their agendas.
[The writer is a prisoner in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, Georgia State Prison, HCO1, Reidsville, GA 30453, USA. For the first time in 17 years, Brandon has the real hope of his sentence of death being mitigated. If you can help by contributing to his defence fund or in other ways, please contact Australians Against Executions, PO Box 640, Milson's Point NSW 2061. Phone (02) 9955 1731, fax 9427 9489. Cheques can be made payable to "Brandon Astor Jones Defence Fund".]