Hello there my friends! I want to start off by saying HAPPY NEW YEAR and I hope everyone that reads this had a good holiday season! The year 2006 is gone and 2007 is in. It is going to be a good year, I can feel it already! After everything that has happened since I left death row, things can only get better!! I wanted to write and give everyone an update of what has been going on in my world of constant struggle and chaos. Currently I am on Ellis one unit in Huntsville, Texas. Back where my nightmare started in 1996 when I first hit death row. I have been shut down the last few months as I have struggled mentally and emotionally with being back in a place that holds so many bad memories. But let me not get ahead of myself. Let me tell you how I ended up on the 4th unit since leaving death row 18 months ago. As of my last writing, I told of what happened at the Wynne Unit and how they shipped me off that unit and I ended up at Darrington. I hit Darrington on January 23rd, 2005 in medium custody. Meaning I was housed in a more restrictive level. I was only allowed out of my cell 4 hours a day and had to live 2 people to a cell. NO contact visits. Darrington was a wild unit to say the least. Fast paced and something always going on. A lot of racial problems as well, no matter what your opinion, that is just how it was, period. When I got to the unit, I checked out what type of programs I could get involved in to pass my time until I could get back into minimum custody. I found several programs in church that would allow me to use my writing in different ways. Developing songs and plays, I also met some really wonderful people who understood my struggle and helped me get involved in something productive and not get caught in the madness that was always readily available on that unit. For several months I adjusted to this unit, and things were manageable. Then the media got hold of the corruption going on and several newspapers ran articles about the unit. The directors of TDCJ decided to try and overhaul the unit and get it under control. They started by bringing in a couple of new wardens, one being a Major who was promoted from Eastham. I�m not going to use his name in this writing. He came to Darrington as assistant warden and was very aggressive in his attempt to bring the unit under control. He wasn�t there a week before he slammed his first prisoner into the concrete floor and busted his head open. This warden was white, Darrington was probably 75% black at that time. Needless to say, it started shit! What caused things to get out of control is this warden seemed to like to do that over and over again. It seemed everyone he slammed in the hallway was black. This caused tension between the white and black prisoners. It seemed that even though it was �the man� that was being oppressive and attacking the prisoners. The black prisoners were turning towards the white prisoners for �revenge� instead of having the courage to take it to �the man� doing it. Well, the incident that I got caught up in, that got me locked up and shipped again happened one day after lunch while talking to a few associates of mine. As I walked down the hallway I could see the warden in the section head of the crash gate. He was having some kind of interaction with a black prisoner. All of a sudden the prisoner brought his hands up as if to make a point and the warden grabbed him , scooped him up and slammed him to the bars of the crash gate, then down on the floor and twisted his arms up behind his back. The prisoners head was busted wide open and blood was everywhere in the hallway. They hollered �fight�, cleared the hallway, and rushed all the medium custody back to the block. This warden was no small dude! He was about 6 foot 4 inches, and 250-275 pounds, no fat. Well, when we got back to the wing there were not a lot of people there, the field squads were still out. There was probably about 50 or 60 people on the block in the day room. There were several black prisoners running around, pacing back and forth in the day room and around the staircases pumping themselves up talking trash about white people in general. These prisoners had just been moved over the medium custody about three weeks before from close custody. There was a race riot between the blacks and Mexicans about one month before, the whole unit was locked down, a few were stabbed. Anyhow, this handful of black prisoners are now running around mad. I�m sitting in the day room and look around and assess the situation. I see things are about to get out of control. I came out of the day room and up the stairs to 3 row, where I lived. There are people standing around the staircase area on all three rows now. Everyone has come out of the day room now. I�m standing on the stairs talking a dude next to me and I see the handful of black prisoners start coming up to two row and three row area where the other prisoners are, mainly the white prisoners. I knew it as well as I could feel it in the air, there was about to be trouble. No matter my attempts to stay away and out of it, I was caught in it and I knew it. Then it happened, one of the black prisoners threw a punch at a white prisoners on 3 row, he dodges it and kicks him down the staircase and then everything just erupted. It seemed like everyone just started fighting all at once. Then I got hit, now I�m in it, total chaos. Everything stopped just as fast as it started when the laws started running in the wing spraying gas. They lined everyone up and checked for busted knuckles to see who was involved, even though it was literally everyone on the wing! Everyone that had blood on them or busted knuckles was put in handcuffs and locked up. I had a little cut under my left eye that would not stop bleeding so I got locked up too. Now I�m locked up for 24 hours a day for doing nothing other than defending myself in a dangerous situation, in which I was attacked first. There was no where to run, no where to hide, it was stand your ground and fight for your life! In a situation like that you don�t know who might have a weapon or who might come at you with a weapon. I was angry and full of adrenaline. Angry because I was dragged into a stupid situation, scared because of the unknown, and adrenaline filled with the will to survive! Anyhow, they kept me in lockup for over 2 and a half months under investigation and then put me on the chain and shipped me off the unit. The morning they told me I was on the chain they would not tell me where I was going. It was Friday morning. When I got to the back gate along with all the other people on the chain that day, the would only tell me that I was going to the Huntsville Unit. There are several units in Huntsville, I did not know which one. By midday I arrived at The Walls unit. The Walls unit houses the death chamber, where they execute all of Texas death row prisoners! When I arrived and was taken off the bus, I thought I was going to be on that unit. I was told me I would only be staying the weekend and would catch another bus to my final destination Monday morning. They brought us through shakedown and then housed us on the transit wings. I was allowed to walk through the chow hall, escorted of course. The last time I was at the Walls unit is when my sentence was first commuted nearly 2 years ago and I was still in chains and shackles. This was the first time I had been there as a �regular prisoner�. I was full of questions, I had to ask several before I found a law that would actually talk to me. I asked him where the death chamber was, he pointed in the general direction and said he�d show me the doorway. That is the last daylight and fresh air a death row prisoner will get when he arrives. This is also where they take his body out. As we walked around the rec yard back to the wing, he pointed to an area almost behind the chapel and told me that is where �old sparky� was before they removed it and turned the room into a pill window part of the infirmary. I walked past the back part of the main entrance, what people in the free world see as the front door of the prison with all the brass bars, I could see through the other side outside. As I walked across the rec yard that day I thought of all those who have been executed, murdered by the state of Texas. I thought of how many had come through this way just since I had been on death row. I got goose bumps, I could feel it in the air, that unit is haunted! All the restless souls of the men and women that have been murdered by the state. Of course I did not dare say I had been on death row. I simply acted as if I was just curious as I was passing through. The law never stopped talking. When we came back through and up the steps to the back door of the transit wing the law pulled me aside and pointed behind what looked like shops, prison work shops, to a black doorway at the other end of what was some type of ally. The ally could easily be accessible to a van, like the one they bring death row prisoners in to the death chamber. He said that is where they �bring them in� and �bring them out�. As I stood there in silence, in respect for my fallen comrades, he told me that on execution days that you can only see up to the last fence as they pull a tarp across it so that you cannot see the door, the way we could see it. I just stood there on the steps and wondered, with goose bumps on my arms, how this man could stand there and talk about this with no emotion, as if it meant nothing. I realized that it doesn�t mean anything to him, he somehow looks at it as a �job�. As the other prisoners passed me going into the transit wing I stood there looking down this ally, thinking how this was the last vision of so many of my friends and comrades. I cannot totally explain all the feelings I had that day, or all the thoughts that went through my mind. Those couple of minutes seemed like hours! I went back to my cell and that night I lay in my bunk and wondered what the reason was I was sent to travel this path. Was there a greater message that was before me and I was somehow missing it? I thought about how thankful I am to God for saving my life. I got down on my knees right there in the cell, Friday night, and thanked God for blessing my life with life, for blessing my eyes to see, for making me be able to appreciate the smallest things in life that most take for granted or don�t see at all. It was an emotional weekend. We walked the same path 3 times on Saturday, 3 times on Sunday and again Monday morning on my way to the chain bus. Then the strangest thing, I found myself telling my closest friends that have been executed goodbye in spirit and that I would NEVER forget! That first night there was a sleepless night. I lay there thinking back of how I used to wonder when or if I was going to be executed. Thinking of how many times I lay in my bunk thinking of what my final meal would be, what would I say to my friends and loved ones, what would my last words be, my last actions. How would my death affect my friends and loved ones, and if it would truly affect anyone at all. So many thoughts and worries. Thankfully I will never have to make those final decisions. I just hate that so many before me had to and many more still will.
Monday morning I am on the chain. I get to the front gate and they put us in pens, like big dog pens and divide us into groups of who is going to what unit. I am put into the Huntsville group. Still not knowing where, what unit I am going to. We wait all morning for the bus to arrive, when we load up and are driving out of the prison back gate I found myself looking back at that haunted prison for the last time!
Late in the day, after several stops at other units in Huntsville, we arrive at the back gate of Ellis and my name is called! I thought to myself, �no way�, it was like returning to the house of horrors! I got off the bus at the back gate and came into the unit. As I walk down the hallway to classification I pass all the old death row wings. During the years that I was on this unit, November 1996 until November of 1999 when they moved all of death row to Polunsky, I had lived on every one of those wings. I pass J21 and J23, which are now administrative segregation wings. I look in through the doors and I have a little flash back. So many bad memories from those wings. I was in J23 day room during rec when some Mexican prisoners jumped on one of their gang members and cut his stomach open, his intestines came out on to his hands before they got him out of there. He later died. Another time on J21 on the rec yard a prisoner stabbed another with a big bolt out of the wall that had been sharpened, he died as well. I was in the day room in J21 when one stabbed another in the neck with a pencil, no one died though. I am walking down the hallway passing these wings, thinking of old friends and they basketball games I played on these wings. I pass the old death row work program wings, H17, H18, H19 and H20. These were the four work programs we had. H17 is the wing that the 7 prisoners cut the fence of the rec yard and tried to escape Thanksgiving night in 1998. This led to all of death row being locked down and moved to segregation cells at the Polunsky unit. A lockdown that has still not been lifted! I continued down the hallway to the G wings, G15 and G13. I looked inside G15 and think of the first time I was jumped on back in 1997. I was handcuffed, then beat and stomped right at that doorway until I was bruised and bleeding by 3 corrupt, sadistic prison guards. Anyhow, G15 is now regular population wing but they�ve turned G13 into a close custody wing. When I looked into this wing it probably stopped me for the longest time. I looked in and was staring at the first cell on one row, that is the old death watch cell. That is the cell everyone that had a date was moved into for the last 72 hours before their execution. They would put them in there and monitor them for those last 72 hours. When that day came they would chain them up and walk them out of G13 and through the infirmary right across the hallway from 13 and out the back and into a van to go to the Walls unit. I stand there looking also at the black legal booth cage that is in the middle of the wing. The same one, still there!! That was the booth that they used to let us visit with the prisoner on death watch. When you have a friend who is about to executed they were allowed to write a list of people they wanted to say goodbye to and you had an hour. I have sat on the visiting side of that booth many times saying goodbye to friends and comrades. It was after one of those visits that I was inspired to write my first article, I think the name of it was �how to say goodbye when you don�t want to cry�. I thought about the very first person I was close to when he was executed, Ernie Baldree. I�ll never forget old Ernie, he schooled me when I first hit the row on G15. The day I got here, the first cell I was in was G15, 3 row, 3 cell. I can still remember all 15 people that were in my rec group when I first arrived there. Needless to say I felt as though I had walked into the twilight zone. I was tripping out. First the weekend stay at the Walls and now back to the old death row unit! What is the message here that I can�t quite put together? For the last few months I have been going through some, actually a lot of personal issues within myself. It has not been easy and I do not like being back on this unit..at all! But it is a new year now, 2007, and I feel this is going to be a good year. I have come to terms with my inner struggle and I am at as much peace as I can be with the whole situation. Good news, I come up for minimum custody this month and I should get my status back. Which means out of cell time, more outside, just a bit more freedom. More importantly to me, I will be allowed to have contact visits with approved family, if they come. These last 18 months since leaving death row have been a learning experience. It is a totally different world in general population than on death row. A totally different breed of prisoners. But after 4 different prisons in 18 months, I am starting to adjust now. I am just trying to lay low and wait on a ruling from the federal court on my federal habeas appeal, which is still pending. Please say a prayer for the federal judge to give me a favorable ruling so that I can get back in the courtroom and set the scales of justice straight and expose the corruption in this case! I have been in prison way too long and I want my life back!! They locked me up when I was 17 years old, I hit death row at 19 and I will turn 30 years old on January 30th! I can�t believe that I am already turning 30, all of my 20's are gone. I�ve been caught up in a nightmare that I hope I wake up from soon!
Before I end this, I want to extend a sincere, heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone for the cards and letters I have received during this difficult time I�ve been having. I appreciate it very much and I want everyone to know that no matter what, I�ll never give up, never lose hope! Sound familiar anyone? SMILE! I can see the sky now, and it goes well beyond the prison gates!
I will close here for this time. Take care and please never give up no matter what you are facing out there! Remember there is always tomorrow and I�m on your side, just a letter away! Hope to hear from you! Until next time...............
In the struggle and fighting for justice,
John Curtis Pipps Dewberry