Philadelphia Weekly

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.

Nationally, things have been looking up of late for death row inmates. Besides Corzine's landmark action, the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments related to a 2007 lawsuit two Kentucky death row inmates filed against that state's lethal injection protocol.

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.