JUSTICE

Death (row) watch: Rita Thorpe advocates for prisoners awaiting capital punishment in Pennsylvania.

Soft Cell

For the first time in decades, Pennsylvania's death row inmates have cause for hope.

by Frank Rubino

It’s a sunny Saturday, not cold for January, and Rita Thorpe could be shopping at the Gallery, lunching in Chinatown or lazing around at home on a day off from work. Instead she’s vying with the cheerless conditions on Pennsylvania’s death row.

In a figurative sense, anyway.

Thorpe sits at a conference table inside the Friends Center at 15th and Cherry streets. She and a dozen fellow members of a nonprofit headed by Germantown prisoners’ rights activist Peggy Sims meet here monthly to brainstorm about helping their incarcerated loved ones. And to commiserate about the gloom surrounding death row.

“It’s one of the worst things in the world to see,” Thorpe, 37, says of the death row at State Correctional Institution Greene, where three-fourths of Pennsylvania’s 226 inmates who’ve been sentenced to die languish in an atmosphere she describes as beyond moribund.

“It’s like a tomb,” adds retired Philly cop Herbert Blakeney, whose son has been at Greene for five years.

Thorpe’s best friend Ronald Gibson—he’s also the father of her 18-year-old daughter—has been at Greene since he was convicted of murdering an off-duty Philly cop and another Southwest Philly bar patron during an aborted robbery in 1990.

“He’s a loving father,” Thorpe says of Gibson. “All human beings should be treated with basic decency.”

Pennsylvania rarely executes—the state has killed only three prisoners since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. But conditions are harsher on death row than elsewhere else in prison.

Death row inmates must remain inside their cells 22 hours a day, says Department of Corrections (DOC) spokesperson Susan McNaughton. Whenever they venture out—say for exercise or to peruse the law library—they’re handcuffed, shackled and accompanied by two guards.

They’re even handcuffed during visits, which take place in booths with windows separating them from their visitors.

Touching is forbidden.

“Horrible,” Thorpe says bitterly.

At least there’s something positive to chat about at today’s gathering, the group’s first since New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine abolished capital punishment in that state Dec. 17.

“That makes us hopeful,” Thorpe says as others around the table nod.

The inmates contend the three-drug cocktail Kentucky uses (Pennsylvania administers the same mixture) causes extreme pain, thus violating the constitutional amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment.

Although the high court, expected to rule by June, is unlikely to ban lethal injections nationwide, it may order states to switch to a single-drug protocol and to provide better training to executioners.

And the case has temporarily halted executions across the country—even in Texas, which has executed 405 prisoners since 1982.

Still, those plugged into prison issues in Pennsylvania don’t believe the death row at Greene (or the smaller one at Graterford) will disappear soon.

“This is a tough-on-crime state, and no, I don’t see a lot of support for abolishing the death penalty at this time,” says North Philly-based state Sen. Shirley Kitchen, whose 3rd District was once home to many of the 120 death row inmates who hail from Philly.

Kitchen and several other senators have since 1999 repeatedly introduced a bill that would impose a two-year moratorium on executions while a study was conducted to determine whether death sentences are doled out proportionally by race and class.

Kitchen is convinced they aren’t.

“I think the study would just illustrate what everybody already knows,” she says, “that the death penalty is all about race and class.”

Kitchen and her colleagues have never gotten their bill through.

“Once an article comes out in the newspaper, it puts a sentence on the entire family,” says the 58-year-old Sims, who has no relatives in prison.

She says some mothers become so ashamed they’re even reluctant to attend church, fearful of the whispers that will accompany their entrances.

“I’ve had pastors tell me the guys on death row are monsters,” she adds.

Sims is perhaps Pennsylvania’s busiest advocate for death row inmates and their families. Probably the most important service she provides (and the reason she’s dubbed her nonprofit Reunification Transportation Services) is monthly bus transportation to and from Greene, situated about 330 miles west of Philadelphia. It’s a six-hour trip.

Sims also succeeded in persuading DOC secretary Jeffrey Beard to allow people to visit with their loved ones on death row for seven hours on Saturdays. Previously they’d make the long trek only to return home after a two-hour visit.

Asked what death row reminds her of, she echoes Blakeney’s tomb reference.

“A death row cell does look like a tomb,” Sims says. “There’s a wheel that has to be turned to open it, and a picture of the inmate on the door. The first time I saw one I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I thought, ‘Jesus, these are human beings still.’”

Frank Rubino last wrote about the fifth anniversary of Community Court. Comments on this story can be sent to letters@philadelphiaweekly.com