Via Ryan
The following essay is by William Blake, who has been held in
solitary confinement for nearly 26 years. Currently he is in
administrative segregation at Elmira Correctional Facility, a maximum
security facility located in south central New York State. In 1987,
Blake, then 23 and in county court on a drug charge, murdered one deputy
and wounded another in a failed escape attempt. He was sentenced to 77
years to life.
This powerful essay earned Blake an Honorable Mention in the Yale Law Journal
’s Prison Law Writing Contest, chosen from more than 1,500 entries. He
describes here in painstaking detail his excruciating experiences over
the last quarter-century. “I’ve read of the studies done regarding the
effects of long-term isolation in solitary confinement on inmates, seen
how researchers say it can ruin a man’s mind, and I’ve watched with my
own eyes the slow descent of sane men into madness—sometimes not so
slow,” Blake writes. “What I’ve never seen the experts write about,
though, is what year after year of abject isolation can do to that
immaterial part in our middle where hopes survive or die and the spirit
resides.” That is what Blake himself seeks to convey in his essay.
—Lisa
Dawson
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
“You deserve an eternity in
hell,” Onondaga County Supreme Court judge Kevin Mulroy told me from his
bench as I stood before him for sentencing on July 10, 1987. Apparently
he had the idea that God was not the only one qualified to make such
judgment calls.
Judge Mulroy wanted to “pump six buck’s
worth of electricity into [my] body,” he also said, though I suggest
that it wouldn’t have taken six cent’s worth to get me good and dead. He
must have wanted to reduce me and The Chair to a pile of ashes. My
“friend” Governor Mario Cuomo wouldn’t allow him to do that, though, the
judge went on, bemoaning New York State’s lack of a death statute due
to the then-Governor’s repeated vetoes of death penalty bills that had
been approved by the state legislature.
Governor Cuomo’s publicly
expressed dudgeon over being called a friend of mine by Judge Mulroy was
understandable, given the crimes that I had just been convicted of
committing. I didn’t care much for him either, truth be told. He built
too many new prisons in my opinion, and cut academic and vocational
programs in the prisons already standing.
I know that Judge Mulroy was not nearly
alone in wanting to see me executed for the crime I committed when I
shot two Onondaga County sheriff’s deputies inside the Town of Dewitt
courtroom during a failed escape attempt, killing one and critically
wounding the other. There were many people in the Syracuse area who
shared his sentiments, to be sure. I read the hateful letters to the
editor printed in the local newspapers; I could even feel the anger of
the people when I’d go to court, so palpable was it. Even by the
standards of my own belief system, such as it was back then, I deserved
to die for what I had done. I took the life of a man without just cause,
committing an act so monumentally wrong that I could not have argued
that it was unfair had I been required to pay with my own life.
What nobody knew or suspected back then,
not even I, on that very day I would begin suffering a punishment that I
am convinced beyond all doubt is far worse than any death sentence
could possibly have been. On July 10, 2012, I finished my 25th
consecutive year in solitary confinement, where at the time of this
writing I remain. Though it is true that I’ve never died and so don’t
know exactly what the experience would entail, for the life of me I
cannot fathom how dying any death could be harder or more terrible than
living through all that I have been forced to endure for the last
quarter-century.
