The New York Times

Friday, September 10, 1999

On Death Row, Death Is No Longer a Stranger

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

TRENTON (NJ)-- Since it opened in 1983, New Jersey's death row has existed in a kind of no man's land between life and death, a place of languid rhythms where condemned killers await execution by lethal injection, even though no one has been put to death since New Jersey reinstituted capital punishment in 1982.

Prisoners at the unit at New Jersey State Prison, about a third of them sedated by medication prescribed for various psychiatric disorders, tend to move slowly or not at all. While their cases crawl through the appeals process, they spend at least 21 hours a day alone in 7-by-12 cells equipped with a sink, a toilet, a television and a few belongings, with only a narrow window onto the unit's common area of institutional blue walls and fluorescent lights.

But when Ambrose Harris stomped Robert (Mudman) Simon to death on Tuesday, just a few months after a judge's ruling seemed to move another case toward an execution date, the slaying served as a brutal reminder of what death row is ultimately about.

"This is the land of the hopeless," said Cathy Waldor, a lawyer who represents one death row inmate. "These people are convicted of murder, surrounded by no one but other convicted murderers. When you have people waiting to die, you're going to have a morose environment. What else is there but death?"

Security has always been tight on death row, officially the Capital Sentencing Unit, on the theory that condemned prisoners are more dangerous and desperate than other inmates. They are forced to strip each time they walk out of their cells, and to walk out backward, so officers can search them for weapons. When an inmate is moved out of the unit, for a medical appointment or a court appearance, a warning siren sounds throughout the entire prison, and all other traffic comes to a halt.

But residents of the unit said that the possibility of the state's actually executing someone had seemed so remote that condemned prisoners used to joke with corrections officers about a stretcher kept in the common area of the unit.

"We'd ask them if that's where they were going to strap us down and give us the injection," said Kevin Jackson, who was sentenced to death for fatally stabbing his neighbor, Meredith Levithan, in 1985. "It seemed like a joke. The place just didn't have the aura of death."

Jackson is one of about 40 inmates to have death sentences overturned because of various procedural errors during their trials, and he left the unit in 1990 when his sentence was commuted to 30 years to life.

Death row has moments when violence seems to be hovering just out of sight, and it is impossible to forget how macabre a place it is.

One afternoon in May, for instance, a television news report on a shooting rampage at a Georgia high school elicited a brief, ghoulish moment of shared recognition between Simon and Ambrose Harris. who were lived in adjacent cells.

While a reporter, photographer and corrections officials stood outside the cells during a tour, Simon shouted through the thick cement wall separating the two inmates: "Did you see they shot up another school? They only got six. Too bad. They should have brought more ammunition."

Harris, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of a young artist, and Simon, who murdered a Franklin Township police officer, then shared a moment of appreciative laughter.

Tuesday's assault apparently followed less convivial exchanges.

Corrections officials investigating Simon's death said the two men had apparently exchanged insults in recent weeks because Harris had accused Simon of waking him at night by banging on the wall between their cells. When Simon and Harris entered a caged recreation area so their cells could be treated by an exterminator, they muttered at each other. Simon said, "Let's get it on,' and he lunged at Harris, witnesses said.

The men exchanged blows until Simon's head hit a table which is bolted to the floor, and he fell to the ground. Harris climbed on the table and jumped on Simon's head repeatedly, while three other inmates watched and corrections officers scrambled to assemble a response team to enter the cage.

But it is not violence that characterizes everyday life on death row; instead, it is a listlessness that seems to give the place a sense of suspended animation.

So many prisoners are lethargic from medication that the unit sometimes seems more like a psychiatric hospital than a prison.

In recent months, however, a series of court rulings have made death seem more imminent. In July, a judge in Bergen County set an execution date for an inmate, John Martini Sr., and for 17 days, corrections officials busily prepared to put a prisoner to death for the first time since 1963. Martini, condemned to die for the 1989 kidnapping and murder of Irving Flax, a Bergen County businessman, had been trying for five years to hasten his execution.

He has since changed his mind and is pursuing a Federal appeals process that will take at least three years.

But inmates on death row have become edgier, according to Anthony DiFrisco, who was sentenced to death for killing Edward Potcher, the owner of a pizzeria in Maplewood.

"All of a sudden, since the Martini decision, it all seems more real," DiFrisco said through his lawyer, Larry Lustberg.

Death row, prisoners and lawyers say, is like prison, only more so.

Meals are delivered to prisoners in their cells through a hatch, and every other day, inmates take turns bathing in a locked shower the size of a phone booth.

Many inmates pass the day sprawled on their beds reviewing legal documents, writing letters or watching television. Raymond Kise, 36, said he is still haunted by the year he spent on death row after he was convicted on charges that he beat, robbed and drowned Thomas Smothergill, 22, on New Year's Day 1986, tossing the body in the Delaware River. Kise said he kept himself occupied by focusing on his legal appeals and using his telephone calls (inmates are allowed two collect calls daily, of no more than 15 minutes each) to stay involved with his family.

"But you can tell when the pressure is getting to a guy," Kise said. "When the doctor comes around, they complain about nightmares or insomnia, and they're given psychiatric drugs. One day they're normal; the next time you see them, they're just shuffling around with their heads down. Zombies."

Kise's legal work paid off. He was granted a retrial, he hired a new lawyer, Raymond Castiliero, and he was acquitted of murder charges. After serving nearly 10 years for conspiracy charges related to the killing, he was released from prison, and today he works as a carpenter and raises his 2-year-old son.

Like most prisoners, Kise said the highlight of death row inmates' lives is the brief recreation periods that break up the monotony and shape much of the unit's social order.

New Jersey regulations allow inmates two hours of indoor recreation a day and an hour outside, in the courtyard, every other day. It is during those hours that inmates exercise, play cards, chat, exchange legal advice and, on occasion, fight.

After Simon's death, some prisoners' advocates criticized corrections officials for allowing such dangerous prisoners to congregate. But New Jersey has relatively tight restrictions on the movements of its death row inmates' compared with other states.

In Missouri, for example, death row inmates have been allowed access to a recording studio and face-to-face visits with family members, and one inmate apparently conceived a child during one visit. New Jersey allows death row inmates to meet visitors only through thick glass panes and does not allow them to participate in any of the work crews available to the prison's general population.

Before Simon's death on Tuesday, New Jersey corrections officers and inmates alike said that death row is in some ways less physically demanding than other New Jersey prison units. Because there are fewer inmates, there is less chance of an officer's being overwhelmed by prisoners, said John F. Cunningham, vice president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Local 105.

Thomas Koskovich, who was tried this year for the 1997 murder of Giorgio Gallara, a pizza shop owner, and Jeremy Giordano, a delivery driver, told his lawyer he was worried about being subjected to the rapes and assaults that are common in more crowded sections of the prison. When Koskovich, 19, was convicted and sent to death row, he said he was relieved by the relative solitude of the unit.

"The isolation can be difficult," said his lawyer, Lucas Phillips. "But it spares someone from having to adjust to the harsh society of general population."

Jack Terhune, the Corrections Commissioner in New Jersey, has ordered a review of the regulations for death row inmates that may further restrict inmates' recreation privileges. Some other states allow inmates to take recreation one at a time, restricting them to lives of near-total isolation.

Prisoners' rights advocates say that such a policy would be dangerous to the mental health of inmates because many condemned inmates already have psychiatric problems that could be worsened.

"When most people think of prisons, they think of the noise, but death row is quiet and in some ways the quiet and isolation is worse," said Ed Martone, director of the New Jersey Association on Corrections, a prisoners' rights group.

"Try to imagine being locked in your bathroom every day for 23 hours," Martone said. "The isolation would break the healthiest of people. So you can only imagine what it does to someone already mentally unstable, especially when they know that their only way out is death."