NEW HELL HOLE NEWS
PART 1 OCTOBER 27, 2008
NEW HELL HOLE NEWS - #1 October 27, 2008 Hello folks, I quit writing this column a few years back because we had a decent warden who was trying to run this place professionally (actually we had two (2) in a row – Biscoe and Massey) and I didn’t want to be disparaging them. Things since have taken a serious down turn for the worse, to the point that now that I feel compelled to once again take up my pen and deal with it. Running a prison is a difficult endeavor, I’d be the first to agree. Death Row is even more difficult due mainly to the attendant publicity of high profile capital cases. The prisoners themselves are some of the easiest to manage. However, we’re a laid back bunch. Kids grow up playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. Pow, Pow! with their cap pistols. It’s quite a different thing though, when the caps are live bullets, blood flies and people die. As I’ve told y’all 10,000 times in the past, I’m innocent of the crime I’m here for and I have evidence to prove it --- but I’m not here this time to belabor that point. The courts seem not to care – so far. My case is currently in the 5th Circuit U. S. Court of Appeals. So thankfully, one way or another, my time here is about to end. But for others, some of whom are guilty, I’ve seen what death has done to them. Causing death, and / or witnessing it, has a profound effect on even the hardest of persons. It will humble you. It’ll make you get your heart right with God. It’ll make you wish a million times you could turn back the clock and ‘fix’ your wrongs, see the people breathing again. For me, they’ve killed 322 people since I’ve been here and, by the time y’all read this that number will be way higher since two (2) a week are set to die every week through the end of November. Before I came here I’d seen exactly five (5) dead people – my grandpa in a casket when I was 6 0r 7; I didn’t go to my dad’s funeral in 1991. I just couldn’t do it. So I didn’t see him dead and I’m glad of it. I prefer to remember him alive. The only funeral I’m going to will be my own and I’m gonna be late to that one, if I can. I saw my girlfriend dead but have little memory of that, except that I fell on her feet and nudged them with my foot; so I knew she was dead. I didn’t see my girlfriend’s sons dead but later I was forced to look at them in photos after they were dead and wished I hadn’t. In 1991 my best friend was shot and killed while I was standing right beside him, less than a foot away. He was shot in the right chest with a .30-.30 Winchester rifle. It blew pieces of him all over me as the bullet exited his back. More recently I’ve lost every friend I ever had here. Texas killed them one by one. They leave here. They never come back. I read in the paper what they said and how they died, how many minutes it took them to die, what colors they turn as the chemicals course through their veins, how they strangle, gurgle, rasp, snore and die, 1
die, die. So, trust me, I’ve got experience here with death. Thirteen (13) years of it. 322 executions worth. For all the terrible things some may have done, I’ve never encountered any of the “monsters”, “demons”, “sociopaths”, “super predators” or “deranged killers” the D. A.’s and news media are always talking about. I’ve seen only human beings some wretched, true but mostly just twisted and broken by dismal lives and upbringings they themselves had little or no control over. I’m not seeking to lessen their responsibility, I’m just saying, it could happen to anyone and, it has. Acceptance and realization of the enormity of the deed of causing death has affected so many so profoundly that we’ve had quite a few suicide attempts and completions. Others drop their appeals, but that’s suicide too, in my eyes. The most recent was Michael Rodriquez of the Texas 7. The isolation, desperation, sensory deprivation and the utter despair of realizing the enormity of what he’d done drove him to conclude that he’d rather die than continue to live in this misery, this man made purgatory called Texas death row. The media describes our conditions as “stark”. Ha/ha! What a malicious understatement. Look at the Walnut street prison “experiment” mentioned in the case of in re Medley, 1890 U. S. Supreme Court. This is a form of the “Pennsylvania System” which was instituted by the Quakers in mid 1800’s. It was known that as now, over 154 years later, that THESE CONDITIONS DRIVE MEN MAD, as Charles Dickens stated upon his visit to one of those SHU’s: “The dull repose and quiet that prevails is awful. In his shroud [of a cell] is lowered an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and society, the living world; he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment has expired… He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years and in the meantime is dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair”. So, with all that said, you know I’m qualified as a lay expert on these subjects. I’ve been all over death row in my years here and talked to countless men, some guilty, some innocent, some in the murky gray areas in between. I can tell you that when a man lays dying on that gurney and says his is so sorry for what he did, he really means it and, when he sheds a tear, it is for the victims, not for himself. We’re scared of death, as everyone is; but most of us who have any sense left view death as an escape from this torment. Yes, dying is bad. But it’ll be over in a few minutes and thus it’s the easy part when compared to all we’ve suffered and seen here. It is profoundly disturbing to watch a sane man you’d just talked to in the dayroom, from your cell one day, when he just “snaps” and goes stark raving mad the next day, covers himself in feces and cuts himself to ribbons or, hangs himself with a sheet or mattress cover strips braided into a rope. The next day he’s gone, the empty cell a ‘stark’ (ha/h) reminder of what happens here. I’ve seen it many times. 2
All this brings me to Richard Tabler. He’s hardly some dark dangerous thug as portrayed in the media. First of all, this kid is mentally disturbed. He’s in his early 20’s, he’s 6’ 2” or 3”, weighs about 145 lbs and looks like a walking pixie stick with rickets, he’s so skinny. He’s bald headed, has big ears, no teeth and is goofy as the day is long. We call him “Gollum”, after the creature in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. If you saw him you’d readily agree he looks straight out of Hobbitville. His I. Q. is maybe 5 points above being profoundly mentally retarded. Go to the TDCJ website for death row and look at a photo of him. It speaks for itself. A few years ago some fool put a gun in his hands and showed him how to use it. Supposedly he killed two teenage girls and two grown men. Apparently he accepts his fate, since he’s dropped his appeals and asked to be executed and, he hasn’t yet been on death row long enough for this place to drive him crazier. Tabler loves attention. He’ll do anything to get it. I’ve seen him in the dayroom squatted down like Chuck Berry, walking back and forth with his thumbs under his armpits, flapping his folded arms like a bird and hollering over and over “quack, quack, I’m a duck! quack, quack, I’m a duck”! – to settle a bet. Well, most recently another fool gave him a phone. It was not an officer who gave it to him and Tabler did not pay anyone $2,100.00 for it. I certainly agree he had no business with it at all and I’d repeatedly voiced that sentiment to several, previous to these latest happenings to verify that Tabler is a mental patient. He’s recently tried to kill himself and (I think) he is currently on suicide watch at Jester IV nut hatch. I’ve read a handful of news stories out of my own and various associates’ newspapers about this fiasco and had reported to me what others heard on the radio about it, most notably excerpts from Senator Whitmire’s special hearing of his Committee on Criminal Justice on October21st. (http://www.senate.state.tx.us/75r/senate/commit/c590/c590.htm) So I’d like to point out the following: The news media keeps saying Tabler threatened Whitmire’s daughters. That is simply NOT true. From what Whitmire described at the hearing of their phone conversation, Tabler never threatened him or his family. Tabler called Whitmire in a desperate plea for help. He’d dropped his appeals, he was maybe having second thoughts and most of all he wanted Whitmire’s help to see his mother and grandmother one time before he died. He appealed to Whitmire as a parent and mentioned he knew Whitmire had daughters. Whitmire took the original call despite the fact that Tabler misrepresented himself as an 3
old friend Whitmire knew he did not have – once he verified that, all he had to do was say, “I don’t know you, don’t call this number again” and hang up. Instead, he led Tabler on, discovered his real identity, gave Tabler his personal cell phone number, told Tabler he could call him anytime and promised to help him any way he could – now though he’s crying that “no one should have to go through what he’s been through the last three weeks”. Well boo hoo. He invited it all upon himself by his own actions! He could’ve just hung up and walked away. But no, he instead set out to entice and entrap Tabler. Make no mistake about it, his actions are the quintessential definition of entrapment. Just to make a little political hay in the media and attack TDCJ for gain on his own little personal hate agenda. He says Tabler “frankly, scared the hell out of” him. Tabler’s locked in a box. He can’t hurt anyone. He doesn’t hold any sway with anyone in the world – except maybe his mama and his sister, who allegedly helped pay his phone bill. Whitmire enticed Tabler’s mother to believe he would help he. She flew to Austin for a last visit with her soon-to-be executed son. Instead he made a public spectacle of arresting the poor old woman, 61 years old. I guess Tabler’s 84 year old grandma was left to fend for herself and only because she didn’t buy her grandson a few phone minutes? What I really can’t understand is, why can’t someone see Whitmire’s actions for the ridiculous stunt it is? Why? Best regards to one and all, Hank Skinner h.w.skinner@gmail.com http://www.hankskinner.org 999143 Polunsky Unit H W Hank Skinner 3872 FM 350 South Livingston TX 77351-8580
4