Solitary confinement, isolation – the hole. Help me to understand the impact on an individual, whether yourself, someone else, or as a whole. Share an aspect of this method of punishment that I can’t understand, never having experienced it.
Woven into the purpose of prisons is the idea of rehabilitation. Prisons are not designed to be the end. They aren’t viewed as the ‘disposal’ of people. The majority of society perceives, is under the impression, prisons are places of punishment and preparation for a more productive life. How does solitary confinement fit into that design?
Every writer I have ever encountered has either had first hand experience with solitary confinement or has witnessed its use and the consequences. Help me to understand what that means.
Only those who are incarcerated are eligible to participate.
We can’t accept anything that has been previously published.
Submission is free – BUT, even if an entry doesn’t win, we consider entry permission to publish and edit. Sometimes we get so many excellent entries, they can’t all win, but they need to be shared.
Entries should be 1,000 words or less. Poetry is considered, as long as it is inspired by the prompt.
Submissions can be handwritten.
As done in our previous contests, I will narrow down the entries to the top ten, and then hand them off to individuals to rate the writing with a point system to determine winners.
PRIZES:
First Place: $75 Second Place: $50 Third Place: $25
DEADLINE: September 30, 2022. Decisions will be posted on or before October 31, 2022.
MAILING ADDRESS:
Walk In Those Shoes Writing Contest Entry P.O. Box 70092 Henrico, Virginia 23255
Footnote: Entries that do not follow the prompt are not passed on to the judges.
For all posts from this site as well as current criminal justice issues, you can also follow us on Facebook or Instagram.
Our Book Club has been off to a great start in 2022. One of our members just made the next selection –
The books were ordered and shipped to our book club members on NC’s Death Row this morning. It usually takes us about four or five weeks to read our book before we discuss it. If you want to read along, we’d love your thoughts. Free free to reach out to me directly, or I can give you the address of one of our book club members at Central Prison to send your thoughts to.
Recently, I was thrilled to see a post in social media regarding a successful model of a corrections facility in Nebraska intended to give women a safe and structured place to prepare to reenter society. The post was accompanied by a photo of a lobby that was clean, comfortable and modern looking. There was art on the walls. There was a photo of a cafeteria with typical cafeteria furniture, long tables and standard stools, but there was artwork and it appeared very clean and painted in a soft blue – nothing fancy, but certainly a nice place to eat. The description spoke of an area outside for children to play, how the facility encouraged interaction between those that lived there and their supporters on the outside, as well as classrooms. There were several positive comments after mine, and then there was this one –
“Wow, nicer than a lot of homes in Lincoln. Guess they deserve that?”
And that is the inspiration for our writing contest. NOT who deserves what. We won’t waste time trying to figure out who deserves what. Rather…
PROMPT: Have you ever received or witnessed someone else receive ‘grace’ – unmerited mercy and compassion – and how did that impact you or them?
My best bit of advice for any entry – remember the prompt. There are a lot of ways to approach it, as long as the prompt is the focus, your entry will be considered.
Only those who are incarcerated are eligible to participate.
We can’t accept anything that has been previously published.
Submission is free – BUT, even if an entry doesn’t win, we consider entry permission to publish and edit. Sometimes we get so many excellent entries, they can’t all win, but they need to be shared.
Entries should be 1,000 words or less. Poetry is considered, as long as it is inspired by the prompt.
Submissions can be handwritten.
As done in our previous contests, I will narrow down the entries to the top ten, and then hand them off to individuals to rate the writing with a point system to determine winners.
PRIZES:
First Place: $75 Second Place: $50 Third Place: $25
DEADLINE: December 31, 2021. Decisions will be posted on or before January 31, 2022.
MAILING ADDRESS:
Walk In Those Shoes Writing Contest Entry P.O. Box 70092 Henrico, Virginia 23255
FOOTNOTE:WITS was inspired, in part, by the story of a boy named Jamycheal Mitchell. He stole some food – snacks – a haul of $5.05. He was mentally ill, but rather than being transferred to a facility that could help him after his arrest, he was left in a jail in Virginia to essentially starve to death. He was just 24 years old when he was arrested. He was dead several months later. ‘Wasting’ is a word used in his cause of death. In the months it took him to die, I wonder if anyone who passed by him wondered if he ‘deserved’ that.
Deserve? What does anybody deserve and how different would our world be if nobody spent time worrying if anyone else received compassion – whether they ‘deserve’ it or not?
We just finished up The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. Overall, we felt it was an easy read, entertaining, but a little predictable. One member compared it to his all-time favorite movie, It’s A Wonderful Life.
This was also the third book read by our newly formed club. If anyone wants to join us, the book we just ordered is I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes, chosen by a member, as are all the books. We will be rating all future books on a five-star scale.
If you would like to read along and forward your thoughts on I Am Pilgrim to the club, feel free to send me messages here. I will pass them along to the group.
My grandmother died a day after my quick conviction. “She saw you on TV after you were sentenced to death and she died. You killed her by breaking her heart.” I got hate mail from my own flesh and blood after my conviction. – Charles Mamou
Charles Mamou’s family was divided, according to Mamou, half quickly disowning him and wishing he were dead.
But, what did they know, really? They knew the same thing I did when I first looked up articles on Charles Mamou, a new writer for WITS, what the prosecution wanted them to know – what the jury, the defense, and the media heard. I read various versions of a brutal, lone murderer who sexually assaulted a girl before killing her in an abandoned house. It wasn’t a wonder he got hate mail. I’d learned to look past the headlines, things not always as they seem.
After reading the transcripts, I got a slightly clearer picture. As the prosecution’s story goes, Charles Mamou went on a killing rampage sparked by a drug deal gone wrong, drove off with the victim, sexually assaulted her, and murdered her in a very hard to find backyard in Houston – a city he didn’t live in. All the other individuals involved in the drug deal, all residents of Houston, slept after the initial drug deal and knew nothing, a couple of them testifying for the state…
So – I looked even closer. If it were a card game, there would be money on the table, not a life, and some would say the deck was ‘stacked’. It turns out, the state had information that not only could have supported Charles Mamou’s claims of innocence, but the information could have also led to finding out what really took place that night. Evidence that existed all along and more recent interviews reveal a few things. The state had a list of phone calls that were made that night. All of the callers in those records, the individuals involved in the drug deal, from the ‘cooker’, to the driver, to the introducer, were not sleeping that night according to their phones. Not only that, recent interviews put them all in the parking lot of Howard Scott’s apartment that night, along with Charles Mamou – who was supposed to be off on a lone sexual assault and murder. If Charles Mamou was in the parking lot along with the car he was driving – so was the victim. Which is what Charles Mamou has always asserted – that he fled the drug deal gone wrong and drove back to Howard Scott’s apartment complex.
In the absence of shared information, the existing phone records, witnesses were not called to testify, and those who were called testified they were sleeping – even though the state knew their phones were in use. Does an attorney have an obligation to bring it to the attention of the court or his witness when they are not telling the truth and the attorney is aware of it?
Phone calls that should have been traced, never were – no one will ever know where the calls were placed from. They could have been dialed from the backyard where the body was found. They could have been placed from anywhere in Texas. The calls would have certainly helped determine what happened that night. The callers never had to answer questions about where they were when they placed the calls. The owner of the phone line they called – never had to explain who was calling and what they said. The man whose phone was receiving the calls testified for the state, saying he was asleep and his phone was not ringing. Regardless of records indicating that was not true, the state’s witness was never corrected by the prosecutor. No one questioned why his phone was ringing until 3:43 a.m. the night the victim was murdered and why one phone call went out at 3:59 a.m. requesting a cab – yet the state had information these calls took place.
One of the callers to the home did the same, testifying for the state and saying he went home to bed that night and didn’t use his phone. The witness and driver in the drug deal did not have to explain why his cell phone dialed Howard Scott’s apartment at 2:37 a.m. or where he was at when the call was made. Rather, he testified he had went to bed.
The other callers on the record never even had to step foot in a courtroom. They were never called by either side. But, all the callers were up and about that night, not sleeping, and witnesses have since said they saw all the callers in one parking lot that night – Howard Scott’s parking lot.
It isn’t surprising the jury came back with a guilty verdict, no more surprising than it would be in a poker game with no aces in the cards dealt to the other players, but rather held in the dealer’s hand. Charles Mamou certainly looked the part, he was a drug dealer. Just in case though, they hung on to one more card. The sexual assault. While fighting for the death penalty, the prosecution called him ‘vicious’, ‘ruthless’, and ‘cold-blooded’. The jury was told he ‘devastated and destroyed’, that he ‘marches her to the back, and he makes her commit oral sodomy, makes her suck his penis. Imagine that, ladies and gentleman’.
While saying those words to the jury the prosecution knew not only about the phone records that could have been used to defend Mamou, they also knew something else. There was a rape kit collected from the body along with trace evidence, and that kit was collected by the medical examiner who did not make one note of it in his autopsy report. He also did not breathe one word of it in his testimony. The prosecutor’s office not only knew about the collection of the evidence, they requested that it be processed and they had received the results. The results indicated there was ‘no semen found’. In addition to that, trace evidence was collected that Mamou never knew about. For two decades – he never knew. Neither did the jury, or his family, or the victim’s family.
There is no nice way to say it. The state had information that not only could have supported Charles Mamou’s claims of innocence, but the information could have also led to finding out what happened that night. Evidence and interviews that have since taken place tell us a few things. All of the callers in those records were not sleeping that night. Recent interviews put them all in the parking lot of Howard Scott’s apartment, along with Charles Mamou – who was supposed to be off on a lone sexual assault and murder. Involved parties, according to the phone records, were not called to testify, and those who did testified they were sleeping – regardless of what the state knew.
Charles Mamou absorbed the anger for the loss of his grandmother. He had no other choice. Since his conviction, he has been living in a 9 x 6 cell in solitary confinement. No one sees his tears. No one can measure his depression. People have moved on with their lives, his children have been raised, his grandchildren don’t know him. As it stands now, he will be executed. His appeals are exhausted, he is waiting on a date, and if his parents are still alive when it comes, they will watch their son be belted down to a table as poison gets pumped into his veins and he takes his final breath. Is that the justice we should be shooting for?
Many anti-death penalty activists find their stance not because they are necessarily opposed to the death penalty. They base their stance on the knowledge the deck sometimes gets stacked. Not every prosecutor is as interested in finding out exactly what happened as they are in securing a win. If anyone wanted to know what happened to the victim twenty years ago, those phone calls would have been traced. The individuals making the calls would have been interviewed, their stories documented, statements taken and compared. It defies logic to even try and argue differently, to suggest those individuals not be interviewed and those calls not be traced. A girl was murdered – every stone should have been turned over to find out what happened. Instead – nothing. There is not one recorded interview with two of those callers that night, both of whom are said to have been in the parking lot, and one of who’s name is recorded as being the caller for a cab from Howard Scott’s apartment at 3:59 a.m. Yet – not one interview with him or the other individual calling the apartment and seen in the parking lot that night. As a matter of fact, Howard Scott’s first interview with police that was performed on the first day he was transported to HPD – is not in any file. It does not exist. I was told, “Not everything makes it into the file.”
What could have been discovered if, in 1999, this case had been investigated and the phone records and physical evidence shared? Where were the phone calls made from? What would the callers have said about what they were doing that night had they been asked? What would the recipient of the phone calls have said if he had been confronted with the question, rather than allowed to say – ‘I was sleeping’?
The window of opportunity on what could have been determined is shut. The Harris County prosecutor’s office did that, not Charles Mamou. The deck was stacked against Mamou, the victim’s family, Mamou’s family, the jury, and anyone who has ever read the story. Everybody loses. The prosecution may have felt not sharing the information they had would secure a ‘win’ for their office, but how is that winning? You can’t win when you cheat, it’s a façade, a farce. One person does not get to decide what part of the puzzle we can use. To argue a case in a court of law, what people look towards for truth, justice, equality and fairness, while keeping information to yourself, and not only doing that but also exploiting the lack of knowledge and arguing scenarios such as witnesses sleeping and sexual assault – that is not a win.
There is also a facebook page dedicated to sharing Charles Mamou’s troubling case.
TO CONTACT CHARLES MAMOU: Charles Mamou #999333 Polunsky Unit 12-CD-53 3872 South FM 350 Livingston, TX 77351
You can also reach him through jpay.com.
SIGN HIS PETITION – LEARN ABOUT HIS CASE. Charles Mamou is a long time WITS writer. He is part of our writing family and his case has been studied and shared here for a couple years. Please sign a petition requesting that his case be truly investigated – for the first time. If you learn enough about his case, you will likely agree, there was not much done in the way of investigation. What we have been able to learn, supports that. Please sign.
Our North Carolina Book Club is an amazing bunch. The club is based in Raleigh, NC, on Death Row, and we are starting our next book this week, chosen by one of the members. This particular club has chosen to determine book titles on a rotating basis, each member having a turn. That in itself has proven to be interesting – pondering what a book choice says.
If you would like to join us, our next book is The Shape Of Water. They should receive their copies on Wednesday of this week, so you have plenty of time to order yourself one. The group consists of Roger, Antwan, Rodney, Warren, Marcos, and Terry. Our last book, The Hate You Give, started some in depth conversations about race and perceptions that we never would have had. Sometimes its not always about the book, but the insight we gain through the conversations the book inspires.
Feel free to reach out to me, if you would like to contact the group or are reading along and would like to send in your thoughts on the book for their conversation in five weeks.
I had been thinking of the next theme for a contest. It came to me as I was thinking about one of our writers. He was sentenced to death over twenty years ago in a case that would be laughable if it hadn’t started with a death and resulted in a death sentence. Any reasonable person can look at the evidence and wonder – how did he get there, and why is he still there?
As an observer of his and many other cases, the biggest challenge has been the resistance from within the very system to acknowledge flaws or mistakes made within that community. As I reflect on that, I think – it would take one person with a lot of grit to take the case on, buck the system and do the right thing, rather than follow the norm – just one person. They do exist.
The Oxford dictionary defines grit as ‘courage and resolve, strength of character’. Tell me a story, describe a person you know or have witnessed – display true grit. Resolve in the face of repercussions, ignoring what people are comfortable with and doing the right thing, over and over again if necessary. Courage to take the path of most resistance for a just cause.
Inspire us. Give us an example we can look up to. It could be a family member, friend, or someone you witnessed from afar. It could be in prison or out of prison, an action taken by a fellow inmate or an officer.
That’s the theme of this contest: Describe a display of ‘inspirational grit’ you have seen or been touched by or heard about.
Only those who are incarcerated are eligible to participate.
We can’t accept anything that has been previously published.
Submission is free – BUT, even if an entry doesn’t win, we consider entry permission to publish and edit. Sometimes we get so many excellent entries, they can’t all win, but they need to be shared.
Entries should be 1,000 words or less.
Submissions can be handwritten.
As done in our previous contests, I will narrow down the entries to the top ten, and then hand them off to individuals to rate the writing with a point system to determine winners.
PRIZES:
First Place: $75 Second Place: $50 Third Place: $25
DEADLINE: August 31, 2021. Decisions will be posted on or before September 30, 2021.
MAILING ADDRESS:
Walk In Those Shoes Writing Contest Entry P.O. Box 70092 Henrico, Virginia 23255
I’m truly anxious to hear the stories of people to inspire us, people who remind us that grit does exist.
As a reminder, WITS gives away a book each month to one ‘Writer Of The Month’. All it takes to be considered is to have an essay posted on the site that month. The last book was Ordinary Grace, and the titles are often books we use in our book clubs.
Charles Mamou is a WITS writer. He has always maintained his innocence. He has been on death row for over twenty years. There is evidence and information the Harris County prosecution had that Charles Mamou didn’t know existed for over two decades. That information could have been used to determine what happened to the victim if anyone had pursued it.
Nothing physically ties Charles Mamou to the scene of the crime, other than the testimony of witnesses that were involved in a drug deal with him that night. There is not a fingerprint of his there. There is not a footprint of his there. No witnesses saw him there. There was a shell casing – that cannot be tied definitively to any weapon, but no weapon was ever found. Mamou was from out of town, the men who testified were not. The body was found in a location even the police described as difficult to locate. One of the witnesses worked for Orkin – on the side of town where the body was found behind a house for sale.
The individuals who testified against Charles Mamou were apparently never charged for their involvement in any of the events that took place that night – and phone records the prosecution had access to indicate two of those witnesses were not telling the truth on the stand.
A letter never presented to the jury and written by the ‘star’ witness who said Charles Mamou confessed to him says, “I’m glad you didn’t tell me shit about that cause I don’t wanna know shit, I feel better off that way.”
Charles Mamou has waited long enough for someone to help him. He’s not asking for any breaks – he’s asking for an investigation into his case, one that includes all the evidence the Houston Police Department had twenty years ago, which includes trace evidence obtained in a rape kit that was never shared with Mamou.
Please sign the above letter asking the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to reinvestigate this case.
UPDATE: This post was temporarily removed, after I was contacted and told I couldn’t share this information. After a thorough review, I disagree. The information came from trial transcripts that Charles Mamou gave me access to. In addition to that, the other records are public and the letter was written to Charles Mamou and belongs to him. Walk In Those Shoes is about writers in prison and trying to understand their experience with the justice system. If I can’t share public information without being warned and told not to – is it a wonder people end up on death row that are innocent?
Jesus was executed, as well as countless others throughout history. Although Christians believe that was a necessary evil, looking at what was done to a man that had a reputation for kindness and advocating for the downtrodden, one is struck by the injustice and immorality of it. Jesus wasn’t a murderer or a rapist or a thief. Can anything justify the torture and execution of a man that committed no crime, other than irritating those in power?
Even if looked at from the retributive theory, Jesus’ execution was not justified. He did not commit murder, and Pilate most likely did not believe Jesus deserved the sentence he was given, but felt pressure at the time. Thus, Jesus was executed. The most famous of all retributive punishments is an illustration of all that can go wrong with the perspective that execution is acceptable. Although Christians know that Jesus had a path to walk, looking at this case apart from the religious aspects, it couldn’t have been more poorly justified.
Jesus’ crime, according to authorities, was treason, calling himself king. For that he was beaten, tortured, and left to die on a cross. The punishment did not fit the crime. Those same words can be said about what sometimes happens in the halls of justice every day on every reach of the planet – outside forces, such as pressure in this particular case, influence the sentence. It could be a court appointed attorney with no time to adequately prepare up against a highly motivated prosecutor, well practiced at manipulating a jury. It could be a police force that has a tendency to toy with evidence. It could be the color of the defendant’s skin in a courtroom full of people that don’t resemble him or her. But, as we saw in the case of Jesus, people are not perfect and sentences don’t always match crimes. This happens more than anyone would like to believe, and it is certain to continue happening.
As of this writing there is a man on death row in Texas, and he has been there for over two decades. In his case, the prosecution had evidence they did not share with the defense that could have been pursued, and if it had been shared, could have very well impacted the outcome of the case. This information is now known, documented and available to anyone who wants to see it, but Charles Mamou has had four attorneys over the last two decades who never located the information. It wasn’t until an unpaid advocate came along and started researching the case that everything that had been there all along came to light. It wasn’t a trivial tidbit, there was actually a rape kit discovered twenty years later that has physical evidence in it. There were phone records of key witnesses who testified they were asleep. The information was never shared with the defendant. Mamou’s case is not an anomaly. If you work with the incarcerated for any length of time, you will come to learn cases like his happen more than anyone would like to admit.
The argument that the number of lives saved from the use of capital punishment as a deterrent, is hard pressed if the true number of unfair prosecutions were tallied. There is no way to even calculate them all accurately, as most cases are left unpursued in spite of questions left behind. It is naivety that believes wrongful or over incarcerations are few in numbers and therefore a viable trade off. From the beginning of time, and the execution of a man whose reputation has remained that of a ‘good man’ over hundreds of years, until today when you can walk in any well-populated death row facility and find people that have not had a hand in murder, we have gotten it wrong. The numbers are greater than anyone would like to publicly acknowledge.
For the sake of argument, and although unarguable evidence has shown us differently from the beginning of time, we will pretend justice is always perfect. We will overlook the imperfections and intentional mistakes along the way, such as the execution of Jesus, a good man. Let’s say then, punishment should reflect the crime, an eye for an eye. Yet, we have been getting it wrong one way or another from the beginning of time on that as well. If it were truly to be an eye for an eye and a reflection of the crime, we would rob from robbers, we would rape rapists and we would murder murderers. In the world of right and wrong and if we are going to make rules of order, you can’t compare apples to oranges. A perfect system of an eye for an eye that punishes according to crime, can’t have exceptions to the rule. What makes murder any different than rape?
In our country, we execute people who have not actually had a hand in a murder, sometimes letting the actual ‘murderer’ receive a lesser sentence. It is called the Law Of Parties, and people who have not had a hand in murder have been and will continue to be executed under it. So, in the ‘eye for an eye’ thinking, we make exceptions for all cases except murder where we stand firm on taking a life for a life, while letting the rapists go unraped, and not only do we make exceptions, we make exceptions within the exceptions. If a murderer has the right attorney and chooses to testify against other parties, involved or not, he betters his chances of not having to pay the price of murder with his life, making himself an exception, and in doing so, assists in the execution of an individual who played no part in the murder, creating another exception. The overall theory of justifying capital punishment under the ‘eye for an eye’ platform that justifies the act as the appropriate punishment has no foundation, as it is not even close to being uniformly performed and enforced.
To the argument that there is no equal punishment to the taking of a life other than the taking of a life, there is the nasty side of the argument that most like to sweep under the rug. Let’s suppose that we never make mistakes, and the system is always fair, and we always execute the actual ‘murderer’, and not the driver of the murderer or the friend who was with the murderer on that particular evening and had no idea a murder was going to take place. In a perfect system, murder would be the appropriate choice, but should we require a murderer to murder themselves? How do we accomplish taking a life without getting our own hands dirty?
When we get to the point when we are going to actually take a life, what justification can we use for our action of taking a life, and how are those who have a hand in the act absolved? Does that call for more exceptions to the rules? Is it acceptable to murder a person who we have ‘decided’ is guilty of murder, not necessarily guilty? At this point, we have to embrace all the exceptions to all the rules that we have already established as acceptable, and accept those who are innocent, those wrongly accused, those who were involved but did not murder and those who actually did commit murder and lump them all together. They are all equally ‘guilty of murder’, and we can only accomplish this if we have decided we are justified in killing an innocent person in the name of maintaining the death penalty. So, we find ourselves having to pay people to then become murderers of the innocent as well as the guilty because of all the exceptions to the rules that have to be in place to maintain a death penalty.
It doesn’t end there. According to our own policies and systems, involved parties are sometimes executed along with the actual murder or murderers. One would have to label those who purposefully lead a person to the execution chamber, the one who voices the command to start the process, the actual medical personnel involved in the process as all parties to the taking of life of the guilty and innocent, we have determined that exception has to be made. By our own standards, what about those who have fattened up the victim for the kill for over two decades, are they not a party to the murder? Can it end there? What of the prosecutor and his co-counsel? What of the Judge and jury? What of the defense counsel who did not bother to look for the evidence? So, the actual taking of a life of someone like Charles Mamou, will have participation of countless people along the way, including some who simply turned a blind eye. Should we include those who were informed before his execution but chose to proceed with the knowledge that his trial was unfair and did not provide all the information to the jury?
How many people have a hand in the murder of the innocent, in a society that endorses capital punishment? How many people turned a blind eye to what was happening to Jesus when he was executed? Which brings us back to the religious justification, people often building their argument on words from the Bible, using their interpretation of segments to further their cause. What can be certain about the teachings of Jesus was his call for love, mercy, and compassion. Portions of the bible can be picked out to justify murder, but there is no strong case for it, not nearly as strong as Jesus’ teaching of loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek. Who are you to condemn? Although the execution might be punishment of the murderer, who is to say that vengeance is not God’s? I’d much prefer to err on the side of caution, and not hold someone down in an execution chamber and pump poison into their veins, assuming that vengeance is mine. Using religion as an argument to justify murder is at best a stretch, at worst a mockery.
So, what of the argument that there is only one punishment called for when a person walks into a movie theater and starts shooting, murdering fifty innocent people before being taken into custody before witnesses. Death, surely, is the only choice. That is the strongest argument I have heard, and I appreciate the sentiment and desire, yet, it is not that simple. It comes full circle, back to the beginning. We have a system that has been proven unjust repeatedly since the execution of Jesus. Influence brought about his execution, not any action on his part. The ramifications of leaving the door open in the name of our hypothetical deranged murderer who murdered fifty in cold blood in front of witnesses needs to be considered. The system doesn’t just end with his execution. Let’s say we all want that one man dead. At what cost? We have an unfair system, influenced by power, money, race, and, believe it or not, sometimes bad intentions. The system is run by humans, both good and bad. The price to pay for leaving the door open to execute our theater murderer, is, in part, the lives of the innocent lost, the humanity of the officers who have spent a decade with the individual they have worked around and know is innocent and a good man, and the future resentment of the children of the innocent man who in turn possibly become murderers because of an unjust system. By leaving the door open for our theater murderer, we are leaving the door open to the mistakes that have been and will continue to be made, along with the unjust on-purposes, and the chain reaction of it all.
The death penalty is not cost-effective. It cannot be justified by religion. It makes murderers out of innocent people. It has and will continue to be used to kill people who have not committed murder. It does not make us safer by taking mass murderers off the streets, when that person is already removed from the streets. It does not deter the mentally ill or suicide bombers or people determined to inflict pain. The death penalty leaves the door open to all that can and does go wrong and has no moral justification. There is a heavy moral price to pay for maintaining a method of disposing of our movie theater madman.
“But, what does my innocence matter? Where did it get me but a bus ride to prison while shackled both by ankles and spirit to a dread that becomes so unbearable – death is a welcome resolve. How relevant is innocence to time long gone and opportunities forever missed, when your dignity is in a shambles, you’ve been stripped of your identity and you have nothing left to call your own but an Opus number. With no pride left for which to hide behind, to admit wrongdoing would not be so difficult – the hardest thing to do is continue proclaiming my innocence.” – Terry Robinson, Death Row, NC
Have those words ever made a difference in your life? It might not have been said exactly that way, but do those words make you think of someone in particular?
WITS supports and believes in the limitless potential of positive reinforcement, and wants to hear about a time in your life when someone believing in you – had an impact on your actions and/or choices.
Is there anyone who ever believed in you – and that confidence and belief in you influenced you in a positive way? It could have been a child, a parent, a teacher or a friend – anyone, even a stranger.
That’s the theme of the first writing contest of 2021: Has Someone’s Belief In YOU Ever Impacted Your Decisions And Actions?
I say it all the time – be vulnerable. That may mean writing about your own insecurities.
Only those who are incarcerated are eligible to participate.
We can’t accept anything that has been previously published.
Submission is free – BUT, even if an entry doesn’t win, we consider entry permission to publish and edit. Sometimes we get so many excellent entries, they can’t all win, but they need to be shared.
Entries should be 1,000 words or less.
Submissions can be handwritten.
As done in our previous contests, I will narrow down the entries to the top ten, and then hand them off to individuals to rate the writing with a point system to determine winners.
PRIZES:
First Place: $75 Second Place: $50 Third Place: $25
DEADLINE: March 31, 2021. Decisions will be posted on or before April 30, 2021.
MAILING ADDRESS:
Walk In Those Shoes Writing Contest Entry P.O. Box 70092 Henrico, Virginia 23255
As always – I’m excited to see what comes in!
As a reminder, WITS is giving away a book or magazine subscription once a month to a random submission that gets posted for each month of 2021. These posts can be on any topic, and are unrelated to this contest. January’s random book will be Where The Crawdads Sing.
