One Hour To Death: The Derrick Jamison
Story
-- By Luke Turf
Derrick Jamison refused to
sign for his last meal and he refused to
sign his death certificate.
For that matter,
Jamison said, he refused to sign anything
that the state of Ohio presented him with
in order to facilitate his own death by lethal
injection.
Jamison said that he doesn't know
if the needle would've gone into his left
arm or his right arm, but as the death clock ticked down from months to weeks
to days to hours - to the final hour, Jamison almost found out.
Ohio's death
row housed 186 inmates when Jamison received
his sentence on October 25, 1985. He befriended
many and knew of other defendants through
the media. As he got older during the two
decades that he spent on the row, the fresh
faces grew younger and younger, Jamison said.
He is one of six of those faces who have
been exonerated in Ohio. He said that he
saw 30 men die on death row in the meantime,
some of whom he said he knows were innocent.
"It's like you'd
be around someone for a decade, next door for 24 hours a day, talking and watching
TV. and you become good friends," Jamison said. "And then they kill
your buddy, if they killed one of your best friends, that's how you would feel.
It was so scary watching them kill guys, it broke my heart, a young guy who
should be in college on his way to death."
Sometimes the state killed
inmates. Sometimes they hung themselves or
overdosed on prescription meds. Sometimes,
Jamison said, they killed themselves inadvertently
by accepting prescription drugs that seemed
to render inmates incapable of assisting
with their own defense. "I think a lot of them were taking it to get away
from what they were experiencing and it backfired on them," Jamison said.
Jamison said that the feeling among death
row inmates is that they are going to hell,
even though they also feel that they are
already there. He describes death row as "suffering beyond imagination." He said that the guards,
the media, courts and lawyers all serve as constant reminders of your impending
execution.
During the two decades following Jamison's
wrongful conviction, he lost a lot of friends
and family on the outside too. He lost a
niece. He lost his mother. He lost his father.
And as he came closer to his own demise,
he cut off the rest of the world, unable
to cope.
Then exactly twenty years to the
date of Jamison's sentencing, he was set
free by the state of Ohio.
Jamison said that
he never received any compensation. He said
that the district attorney and the police
officers who withheld evidence expressed
some regret in the media but that they never
apologized personally, nor did the lying
witness who got a deal in exchange for his
testimony.
But Jamison isn't dwelling on
the past. He's moving on, fighting the death
penalty and coming to Colorado as the five-year
anniversary of his redemption approaches. "There ain't
nothing hard about being free," Jamison said, "I been on death row
for two decades so everything now is beautiful, I see things different now.
And that just breaks my heart knowing that they have killed innocent people.
Basically, what they did is kidnap that person off of the street and murder
them, there's innocence on death row, killing of innocent men."
Luke Turf is a criminal investigator and
a former Westword writer.
Derrick Jamison will be telling his story
in Colorado as part of this fall's Death
Row Exoneree
Tour.
