Riffs From The Row

By William Van Poyck - September 18, 2007

Turning 53 today prompted me to pause and reflect upon how much I have changed and evolved as a person over the last two decades. Evolution, on a mental / philosophical / moral spiritual level is arguable our highest calling, our reason for existing, and most of us would agree with the proposition that we are not the same person we were 20 years ago. This applies equally to prisoners in general and death row inmates in particular. Having lived my last 20 years on the row, having watched hundreds of condemned prisoner arrive on the row and settle down to live out their fate, I know from first-hand knowledge that many of them, over the years, transform themselves to a remarkable degree. Removed from the drug and alcohol addictions which ravished their lives or the abusive relationships which dominated their psyches, placed into a regimented, structured environment conductive to deep introspection, many men (though certainly not all) undergo transmutation which renders them unrecognizable from the person who committed the crime for which he was condemned. Thus arises an anomaly peculiar to death row nationwide, that man who is executed is not the same person who committed the crime.

It is a profoundly dispiriting thing to live in immediate proximity with another person for many years, to get to know him better than perhaps your own brother, to know that he is a kind, caring, intelligent and thoughtful person with much to offer, a man who would never repeat the terrible deeds which first brought him to prison, and then watch as this man – perhaps someone you call a friend – is dragged away and put to death like a rabid dog. In the post-execution news reports you see this man described in terms at complete odds with the man you came to know, you hear his entire existence, the content of his whole life, condensed and distilled down to the hours surrounding the worst thing he did on the worst day of his life. This, the reports aver, constitutes the entire sum of this man’s existence. But you know it is a lie, the lie we tell ourselves in order to accept and believe in what we as a nation are doing, murdering a living, breathing fellow human being, relegating the vast majority of that man’s life to something less than a footnote in our collective consciousness. It takes such a lie, it takes a continuous, passionate belief in such a lie, to keep premeditatively killing our fellow men and women, and it seems to be a lie which most Americans are peculiarly well-suited to embrace. Why this is, well, I simply don’t know.

William Van Poyck was sentenced to death in Florida but was transferred to Virginia’s death row by the governor of Florida after Florida State Prison guards murdered Van Poyck’s codefendant, Frank Vales, in his death row cell in 1999.

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