On 8th August 1999 I finally managed to meet Teddy. Despite the unbelievable experience of being turned away at the door during my previous visit, my determination to see him had never diminished.
I had been married for precisely one week. We planned to fly from England to San Francisco and drive across the States to New York. On the way, we would fetch up in Phoenix and I would try once more to see this man to whom I had been writing for a decade.
Phoenix was as I remember it: like sitting under an electric heater in a woolly coat. It's flat and sprawly and brown and dusty and hot and oppressive, and we weren't going to be there long enough to give it a chance to contradict those admittedly shallow impressions. In addition, the fast-food joint opposite our motel displayed a request that patrons must leave their fire-arms outside. My wife, who had never been to the US before, felt a little uneasy and a trip to the prison the next day did nothing to help that feeling. It started to get to me, too.
The day after we arrived was a Sunday and our visit to the jail was at 10am. Florence is about 70 miles south of Phoenix, and I wanted to get there early. Consequently, it was a quiet start as we pulled out on to the main drag that runs past the airport and drops you on the Interstate. What few cars there were around us thinned out as we took the desert road to Florence.
Florence lies in the middle of some fairly stereotypical Western US scrub/desert surroundings. There are very few trees and once off the main road the streets of the scattered towns and communities are rarely anything more than dirt tracks. The town itself is a low, dusty place made up of a few dozen wooden buildings and a couple of brick-fronted municiple amenities. The official site for the town promises sites and history, but in reality the place doesn't really encourage you to stop long. The main street
We pulled in to the car park where I'd been two years earlier, and got out of the car. Unlike last time there was no-one there to meet us, no guards with german shepherds ready to search our car. I walked up to the entrance gate and told the officer my business at the jail. He said that the Death Row prisoners had all been moved to another unit, about a mile away, too far to drive (we'd probably have been picked up anyway if we'd tried it). He gave us directions and off we went. The directions were pretty vague and we made a wrong turning. By the time we got to the right unit (SMU2) we were ten minutes or more late. We checked in with the two guards there and joined another visitor waiting for access to the Visiting Area. By this time we were a quarter of an hour late and I was certain that Teddy would've given up and gone back to his cell.
Access was across a dusty 'moat' between two high security perimeter fences. The sun was beating down at about 98� and I was feeling quite anxious about the whole thing. My wife, Sarah, held my hand and squuezed as we walked into the shaded building where the visiting booths were located. We saw Teddy immediately, sat behind a glass screen, smiling broadly at the two of us. It was an astonishing feeling meeting someone I'd only ever conversed with by letter, irrespective of all the other factors involved, this was quite breathtaking. We pressed our hands against the glass and he did likewise, and then we sat and talked. I can barely recall the conversation we had, it all seemed to go so quickly. Remember that we had less than the allotted hour that had been scheduled, and there was no option for returning the next day, or later that afternoon: this was it. I know that we didn't talk about the prison, his case, or anything connected with the real reason we had originally been matched up as pen friends, so I guess we must have talked about our holiday, his Mom, San Francisco (where we'd just been), the Grand Canyon (where we were going), anything but about where we were.
Before we knew it, the buzzer sounded and we were herded out. We had been told there'd be a 5 minute warning, but we didn't hear one, and so without very much ceremony the visit was over. Teddy pressed his hands against the glass, we did the same, and then we had to leave. In the bright sunshine I put my arm around Sarah, who was shaking, and led here back to the check point, where we collected our keys and wallets and other stuff. It was a peculiar feeling, a sense of relief and happiness that we'd finally met, anger that he was there at all, that he'd known people who'd managed to push him into a crappy situation, anger that crappy situations happened in the first place, a rush of adrenaline that we'd actually done something pretty amazing. Was that last feeling for me? I don't know. It felt odd, but there was a frisson of elation somewhere along the line ... maybe the white middle class liberal in me thinking I'd done something worthy, I don't know. Sue me for being honest. What I do know is that this unfair system that hides behind the word Justice is a mockery of everything I've always considered to be right. The death penalty is racist. The U.S. Department of Justice says it is (in a recent review of the federal death penalty system, a DOJ study shows that the federal death penalty is used disproportionately against minorities, especially African Americans - and that it is applied in a geographically arbitrary way, with some states accounting for a large share of death penalty prosecutions) and yet nothing will be done about it because it is sold to an increasingly vengeance hungry public by an increasingly scaremongerering Press.
Anger took over once that feeling of "we've done it!" passed. And if you're not angry after reading a few of these links you bloody well should be.