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Helping Karl
Friends Journal
April 2008
Reflections from Death Row
How long have you been on Texas death row?
I committed this crime in August 1991. I wasn't a suspect and was not arrested until July 1996. I was sentenced to death in June 1997, and I arrived on Texas death row, then at Ellis unit, on September 17, 1997. So it has been over 16 years since my crime.Do you feel that the process that put you here was handled professionally?
That's a tough one. It was handled by hard-working professionals. I understand that the members of our police force, as well as prosecutors and judges, have a very difficult and demanding job. This terrible crime was one incident during a time when I was breaking down under mental stress—I was having flashbacks, displaced emotions, panic attacks, and using alcohol and drugs to try to cope, as well as committing crimes to support myself financially.After I began to face my responsibility and change my life (which began in December 1991, when I quit drinking and drugs), I went through a dark time where I was very close to suicide. I had to change or die. I can only imagine how it would be for law enforcement professionals to have to deal with this kind of trauma and filth every day. People must get jaded by repeated exposure to such wanton violence and destruction, and start seeing such broken, degraded human beings as less than human.
Did they do a professional job, handling me as a criminal and probably a "psychopath"? Maybe—I'd say yes. Just looking at the horrific crime scene photos would color any normal human being's chance of seeing me as "possibly innocent," much less "not a future danger." There's almost no way they could see me as a fellow human being who was just messed up by trauma in my past.
Did they treat me professionally, equally, as a fellow citizen? As a human being? No, of course not.
Do you feel justice served you or failed you?
When does justice ever serve the poor? These days, in the United States, almost never. Even innocent men are left in prison until they gain enough outside support to turn the tide of systematic injustice. Court-appointed attorneys, plea bargains, elected judges, and prosecutors have added the deadly influence of political ambition to what is already a hard job: meting out punishment and mercy to create justice.If the law said "an eye for an eye," I never would have appealed; I never would have gone to trial. I would have gone to the gallows, full of remorse but resigned to my fate. However, the law in Texas requires that someone sent to death row "probably" would commit future, violent criminal acts—and for me, that is absolutely, 100-percent not true. Even without the evidence they neglected, the lies they insinuated at my trial were based on a few handpicked facts, and then spun into a story. What's worse is that the judge barred the testimony of an expert witness for the defense who was ready to rebut this half-truth, and then my lawyers refused to call witnesses back (friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers) who had come to my trial to demand to be heard. And finally, when I was ready to take the stand, despite all, even knowing they might not even ask me crucial questions—they got my mother and father to tell me, "Son, don't do this. It will be legal suicide."
If I have any great regret since December 1991, when I changed my life, it is that I did not at least take the stand to look into the victim's family members' eyes, and say: "I am so sorry for what I did."
Nothing can make up for that. I am well aware that, to those people, my every breath and heartbeat must seem like proof of the injustice of life. The only reason I have not dropped my appeals is that death seems to be too easy a way out—and for the sake of my mother. Just as I killed that innocent young woman, her goodness has haunted me. The only reason I did not kill myself in 1992–93 when I felt I had to "change or die," is because I found a purpose in life. I felt suicide would be the coward's way out. Instead I chose to live, to try to learn and change, to try to do some small good each day in that dear woman's name.
