The Journey

A Lot of Pain...A Lot of Joy...Exhilaration Overflowing!

Jul 05, 2025

Good Morning and Happy (?) 4th of July!

So, my journey to our nation’s capitol is completed. I can say that I gained:

A lot of pain
A lot of emotional agony
More than a few tears fell
A serious drain of energy
A minor medical emergency
Some amazing new friends
People committed to the cause of abolition of the death penalty
A few donations
Some serious credit card debt
And - finally - tremendous exhilaration!

I was able to fulfill several dreams I had made during my 47 years of prison in Angola State Penitentiary, deep in Louisiana’s brutal landscape. After all, there isn’t much to do there but make impossible dreams and dream of how you’ll someday fulfill them.

You're able to find yourself, and in doing so, you lose yourself. You're aiming but don't have a clue what for. It's a bliss. I’d go to sleep, and I would dream and think of what I wanted to do if somehow or another, the gates ever opened up.

So what you can do is, you dream. I guess some people would call it an out-of-body experience, something like author Jack London wrote about in The Star Rover. I was in prison for 47 flat years. 52 weeks a year x 47 = 2,444 weeks. It's very, very, boring. Every day is a repeat of the day before.

And, for me, the gates finally opened up on March 30, 2023. And what had I dreamed of? All those weeks of dreaming…What had I dreamed of? What did I want to do?

Were there some overriding, overreaching things that I couldn't make? I didn't know. All I knew was that for the moment, for the time being, anything was possible. Where would I start? Every single thing that happened for the next however long we would have would be a miracle so I would be neither picky nor hasty. This was a second chance, and second chances don’t come along very often and I couldn’t count on a third chance if I messed this one up.

I certainly hadn’t dreamt of going to a WalMart. or using a cellphone, or getting top-level medical care from a physician who actually cared about more than his paycheck and hadn’t had his license to practice revoked for Medicaid fraud or selling or using prescription drugs.

I hadn’t dreamt of becoming an author or having my stories published, or of having a truck to drive or having an iPhone or a computer, or anything remotely like that. No, I had dreamt of more mundane things like going fishing on a Saturday morning, going to a ballgame with a pretty girl, having a cold beer on a hot day.

And it should be noted that:

I’m a military veteran (USAF, RVN 1970-71, Thailand and Cam Rahn Bay)
The state once tried to sentence me to death
I used to work on Angola’s death row for a number of years, and many of my friends are there.

And let me add that Louisiana has one of the worst records in the country with wrongful convictions and especially death sentences. Since the US Supreme Court restored the states’ right to resume executing people in 1976, with the Gregg decision, Louisiana has carried out 28 executions. Considering the fact that the nation has carried out over 1,600 executions since Gregg, and that there have also been 200 exonerations, the odds are pretty high that we have executed innocent people.

Louisiana has no patience with claims of innocence when there is a Republican governor in charge. Since Landry has assumed control of an at-your-command super-majority legislature, he has brought out horrific new methods (nitrogen hypoxia suffocation) and gotten laws passed to speed up the pace of executions. His attorney-general, Liz Murrill, is personally pushing for executions to resume at a faster pace. Cases where the defendant has not even completed their appeals have been pushed forward. Louisiana is simply bloodthirsty.

Somewhere along the line, I decided that the dream I wanted to pursue was the abolition of the death penalty. I had a lot of experience with the death penalty. I wrote about it here in The Last Breakfast, where I was personally affected, and in another story of a prisoner who was without an attorney at the time of his scheduled execution.

I thought, no more….not in my name. I oppose the death penalty. I have seen the inequities in the way it is used, the way it is administered, or as we say in prison, “issued.” It is horrible. So, this became my dream - the chance to speak out and to build a platform from which I could speak. To change people’s minds about this horrific abomination.

I found that.

Now my second dream….I wanted to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. I wanted to pay honor and homage to my brothers and sisters who never made it home - those who will eternally remain “forever young.” I managed to experience both of these dreams in this trip.