Kerry Max Cook. Death Row, Texas, 1979.
First contributor Bruce Jackson writes: “I met Kerry Max Cook on Death Row in Texas in 1979. He figures prominently in the documentary film Diane Christian and I made there. Kerry had several retrials, at each of which more and more of the ostensible “evidence” against him was found to be faked and tossed out. After 22 years on the Row, the State of Texas let him go, without a dime of compensation for his stolen years.
He is one of the six individuals depicted in the play and film The Exonerated. He’s written an agonizing and fascinating book: Chasing Justice: My Story of Freeing Myself After Two Decades on Death Row for a Crime I Didn’t Commit.
A day ago, he got to thinking about our current COVID-19 quarantine and his experience on the Row. He sent me this note, which I thought might interest First of the Month readers.
On Quarantines & Lockdowns
I have a vast amount of experience when it comes to quarantines & lockdowns.
During my 22 years of false imprisonment on Death Row in Texas, I experienced a deadly pandemic similar to the one we’re all battling today, only it wasn’t Covid-19. The virus I fought to survive, there were no antigens or a vaccination for.
It was a deadly virus caused by inmate prison violence—and it was everywhere. Like the Coronavirus, it didn’t discriminate. And I was infected.
The Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections is the original home for death row. It is also home for old timers, repeat offenders or incorrigibles. Men doing prison sentences of life and never getting out.
I will never forget what I call “The Saint Labor Day Massacre.”
That’s when two opposing prison gangs operating within the catacombs of the prison system were at war over dominance and no one was immune from danger.
The Ellis Unit is an oblong sprawling red bricked building broken up in North & South partitions. Each has its own massive shower stall.
In prisons, the universal code word instructing all available guards to stop what you’re doing and bolt to the location of the shouted word is “Fight!” This is for two reasons. First, because most inmate-on-inmate scuffles involve a home-made knife and end in death. Secondly, these home-made weapons are sometimes used on prison guards.
The code word for all available officers went out.
What guards didn’t know—couldn’t know—is that this was a ruse to distract. The guards were all converging on a fake fight.
With the guards preoccupied at one end of the building, inmates entered the shower stall at the opposite end, and surrounded three opposing gang members and stabbed them to death.
The entire Ellis Unit—including the Administrative Segregation and Death Row—went on lock-down.
Showers and visitation were suspended. Mealtime was a metal cart with squeaky wheels telegraphing its arrival long before rolling into the cell-block where it dispensed stale, ice-cold, mayonnaise & bologna sandwiches twice each day.
Water (sink & toilets) was turned off. Once every two days the water was turned back on so we could flush our toilets, and then turned off again.
The purpose for this tactic was so the inmates couldn’t try and flush drugs (black tar heroin), or the weapons, a pending massive “shake-down” might uncover.
When this lock-down took place I was in a 5 by 9 cell with a cellmate. It went on for several weeks.
Our current lock-down, this quarantine we’re all in, is a cake-walk compared to the types in the past I had to survive.
There were always lock-downs on death row for one reason or another.
While they lock-down our bodies, they don’t have to lock down our minds.
That’s the point.