Anthony Ehlers is a Communications Fellow for the Northwestern Prison Education Program and a recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences from Northwestern University. In 2002, Anthony’s sentence was commuted from the death penalty to life in prison. He is currently imprisoned at Stateville Correctional Center.
He wrote the following essay to commemorate World Day Against the Death Penalty, held every year on October 10 to advocate for the abolition of the death penalty and to raise awareness of the conditions and the circumstances that affect prisoners with death sentences.
Today, people are still split about the death penalty. Some feel that it’s an appropriate punishment. Others, however, feel that it’s inhumane or, in legal language, “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Honestly, I don’t speak about my time on death row much; it’s difficult to describe the utter desolation I felt there. I was young, just 20 years old when my crime happened, and 23 when I went to death row. I was so alone and angry.
I’ve never had much of a family, and the police ran off my friends, trying to pressure them. My lawyers, who I trusted, did absolutely nothing for me, and a court system I had thought would listen to me wanted me dead. No one loved me, but worse, I didn’t love myself.
This is how most men come to death row. We’re damaged. I really could have used some type of anger management or therapy. The state, however, does not believe in “wasting resources” for those of us on death row.
So I lashed out. I spent a lot of time in segregation — all told, about five years. In seg, I was put in a steel-fronted cell; my door had a metal box that opened at the front so I could receive my food tray. There was a small window on the door, but they would often close that so I couldn’t see who was out there. I had absolutely no human contact. In order to speak to other guys, I had to lie on the floor and yell through the cracks at the bottom of the door.
Executions were difficult to bear. Those guys may have been “monsters” in the eyes of society, but they were my neighbors, my friends; some were as close as brothers to me. We shared a unique bond of men fighting for their lives together, literally fighting to stay alive. It was difficult when one of us lost that battle.
Death row was always tense around the time of an execution. Sometimes it got violent, we lit fires, or we would let out our rage in other ways. Some guys would hurt themselves; some would try to hurt others.
Every time the state killed someone, they served fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and cornbread. Every time, without fail. Imagine the cops come to grab your best friend, or your brother or sister, to take them away to kill them. What do you think that would do to you? Those fried chicken dinners were served as a means to try and placate us, as if to say, “Well, we’re killing one of your friends — but it will be finger-lickin’ good!” To this day, whenever we get fried chicken, it still makes me think of my friends who they killed. I can’t eat it.
Robert Boyd and Anthony during a study hall at Stateville Correctional Center (photo credit: Monika Wnuk)
Everything you knew and held true in your precious life is different on death row. It’s backward. Life is about living, and learning how to live as best as you can. But being on death row is about learning how to die. Your instinct is to try to hold on to life as hard and strong as you can. On death row, death is all around you. You have to loosen that grip.
You see death all the time. You see it when the state reads someone their death warrant and takes them away. You hear about it when another prisoner gets their appeal shot down and they are another step closer to their execution. You feel so much anger when you hear guards talking about the “next up pool” — where they’re betting on who is next in line to be executed. Your own death creeps up on you.
I struggled with that often. Some days, I wanted to fight to hold on, to make sure the state didn’t kill me. Other days, though, I wanted to die; I wanted to end it all, to be free of this intense pain I felt.
I thought about suicide a lot while on death row. Sometimes I thought about it out of defiance. I wanted to rob them of their ability to kill me; I considered it better for me to decide when I die, not them. It was all I could think of to take their power away. Other times, I thought about killing myself just to stop the hurt. I wanted the chaos to stop, I wanted to be free. I don’t know who is on the “other side,” but I figured it had to be better than where I was.
While on death row, I was given a medication called Klonopin. Amongst other things, it helped me sleep. I honestly thought it was a narcotic. It’s not. I learned that after I saved each of my pills for a whole week and took them all one night, hoping that when I fell asleep I would never wake back up, hoping that all of this would end. When I woke up the next morning, I wept. I was wrenched.
Death row does that to you — it eats away at who you are, and instead of being executed, you die many, many more times. How is this not cruel and unusual?
I thought often of my day. What would it be like? How did I want to die? I’d see men go kicking and screaming. I’d seen men who were zombies, already dead. I was afraid — not of dying, but of not dying well. All those people watching, like a morbid magic trick: “Now he’s alive, now he’s not.”
I didn’t want to give any satisfaction to those who wanted to see me suffer. I used to lay on the floor of my cell, arms outstretched as if I were strapped to a gurney, and practice my breathing, my focus, to try to stay in control while the state killed me. Can you imagine that? Can you picture what it is like to rehearse your own death, night after night? It’s sick. But my life on death row was centered on just that.
How is that not torture?
People have told me that I’m one of the “lucky ones” because I got off death row. It’s funny — I don’t feel so lucky. My sentence was changed about a year before Illinois Governor Ryan let everyone else off of death row in 2003. [Editor’s note: In 2003, Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of all 167 incarcerated people on death row in Illinois to life in prison. In 2011, Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation that abolished the death penalty in Illinois.]
For me, it’s been difficult to adjust to no longer being on death row. I spent so long figuring out how to die that I forgot how to live. It’s taken me many years to feel comfortable with life again, to feel okay with walking away when so many of my friends didn’t.
Death row still haunts me. Sometimes I dream about it, about being back there, about feeling the straps tightening on the gurney. I still think that one of those nights I might not wake up I may have left death row, but it will never leave me. Death row changed me, it twisted me, and often I wonder — will I ever be whole again?