Death Row Goes on a Hunger Strike

The strike had not yet begun when one death row inmate, Jermarr Carlos Arnold, issued a public letter denouncing it as "just a big hoax and con game staged by some Death Row flimflam artists and crybabies trying to cut deals for themselves." Whether Arnold had cut his own deal was unknown, but Fitzgerald, the prison spokesman, was soon distributing the letter to the media.

Perhaps death row convicts are not team players, or perhaps "mental strength and self-will" are not qualities they have in great supply. In any case, the vast majority on death row declined to fast. There was a core of 28 at Terrell who refused their food trays, but Fitzgerald still would not call it a hunger strike. The two sides could never quite agree on what a hunger strike is. Management maintained that it's when you drink only water. Rodriguez felt they could have a food strike and still consume fruit juices, canned milk and vitamins "for health purposes." He himself was drinking Ensure, which is promoted as a liquid meal. "Our objective," he explained, "was never to kill ourselves."

Rodriguez insisted he had lost 20 pounds, but none of the prisoners really knew their weight. After the scales showed they had put on a few pounds, the inmates became convinced the scales were rigged and declined to be weighed any further. Rodriguez sipped his Ensure and occupied himself with the mail. He had received only four letters of support, so he wrote more letters than he read. Mostly he wrote to the media. The major papers in Texas obliged him with short reports, each of them quoting Fitzgerald as he disparaged the hunger strike.

Jermarr Arnold had a suggestion: "What would be newsworthy and attention-getting," he wrote, "would be if prisoners suddenly started dropping their appeals in protest! Now that would be a bold and serious move."

But Rodriguez gave no sign of going that route. He had three more days on the hunger strike, and after that, if nothing changed, they might have to resort to the old tried-and-true, which was violence. A cornered animal will fight back, Rodriguez said.

"In the end, the public can't say we didn't try to do things right."

E-mail Randall Patterson at randall.patterson @houstonpress.com.