John Grisham - The Confession

But after a year in isolation, he began to fear that he was losing his memory. The scores of his old games slipped away. Names of teammates were forgotten. He couldn’t rattle off the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. He was lethargic and couldn’t shake his depression. His mind was disintegrating. He was sleeping sixteen hours a day and eating half the food they brought him.

On March 14, 2001, two events almost pushed him over the edge. The first was a letter from his mother. It was three pages long, in the handwriting that he treasured, and after he read the first page, he quit. He could not finish reading a letter. He wanted to and he knew that he should, but his eyes would not focus and his mind would not process her words. Two hours later, he received the news that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had affirmed his conviction. He wept for a long time, then stretched out on his bunk and stared at the ceiling in a semi-catatonic fog. He didn’t move for hours. He refused lunch.

In the last game of his junior year, in the play-offs against Marshall, his left hand had been stepped on by a three-hundred-pound offensive tackle. Three fingers were crushed and broken. The pain was instant and so intense that he almost passed out. A trainer taped the fingers together, and on the next series Donté was back in the game. For almost the entire second half, he played like a wild man. The pain made him crazy. Between plays, he stood stoically and watched the offensive huddle, never once shaking his hand, never touching it, in no way acknowledging the pain that made his eyes water. From somewhere, he found the iron will and the incredible toughness to finish the game.

Though he’d forgotten that score too, he vowed to reach down again, reach into the depths of his gut and the subconscious layers of a brain that was failing him, and find the will to stop his slide into insanity. He managed to pull himself off the bed. He fell to the floor and did twenty push-ups. Then he did sit-ups until his abdomen ached. He ran in place until he could no longer lift his feet. Squats, leg lifts, more pushups and sit-ups. When he was covered in sweat, he sat down and made a schedule. At five each morning, he would begin a precise series of exercises and work nonstop for sixty minutes. At 6:30 a.m., he would write two letters. At 7:00 a.m., he would memorize a new verse of scripture. And so on. His goal was a thousand push-ups and sit-ups a day. He would write ten letters, and not just to his family and close friends. He would find some new pen pals. He would read at least one book a day. He would cut his sleep in half. He would begin a journal.

These goals were printed neatly, labeled “The Routine,” and stuck to the wall beside his metal mirror. Donté found the enthusiasm to stick to his regimen. He attacked it each morning. After a month, he was doing twelve hundred push-ups and sit-ups a day, and the hard muscles felt good. The exercise brought the blood back to his brain. The reading and writing opened new worlds. A young girl in New Zealand wrote him a letter, and he shot one right back. Her name was Millie. She was fifteen years old, and her parents approved the correspondence, but they monitored his letters. When she sent a small photo of herself, Donté fell in love. He was soon doing two thousand push-ups and sit-ups, spurred on by the dream of one day meeting Millie. His journal was filled with graphic, erotic scenes of the couple as they traveled the world. She wrote him once a month, and for every letter she mailed, she got at least three in return.

Roberta Drumm made the decision not to tell Donté his father was dying of heart disease. And when, during one of her many routine visits, she told him his father was dead, Donté’s fragile world began to crack again. The knowledge that his father had died before he could walk out of prison fully exonerated proved too much. He allowed himself to break his rigid routine. He skipped a day, then a second. He couldn’t stop crying and trembling.

Then Millie dropped him. Her letters arrived around the fifteenth of each month, every month for over two years, plus cards for his birthday and Christmas. For a reason Donté would never know, they stopped. He sent her letter after letter and received nothing in return. He accused the prison guards of tampering with his mail and even convinced Robbie to make some threats. Gradually, though, he accepted the fact that she was gone. He fell into a dark and long depression, with no interest in The Routine. He began a hunger strike, didn’t eat for ten days, but gave it up when no one seemed to care. He went weeks with no exercise, no reading, no journal entries, and letters only to his mother and Robbie. Before long, he’d forgotten the old football scores again and could only recall a few of the more famous scripture verses. He would stare at the ceiling for hours, mumbling over and over, “Jesus, I’m losing my mind.”

———

The Visitors’ Room at Polunsky is a large, open area with plenty of tables and chairs and vending machines along the walls. In the center, there is a long row of booths, all divided by glass. The inmates sit on one side, their visitors on the other, and all conversations are by phone. Behind the inmates, guards are always looming, watching. To one side, there are three booths used for attorney visits. They, too, are divided by glass, and all consultations are by phone.

In the early years, Donté was thrilled at the sight of Robbie Flak sitting at the narrow counter on the other side of the glass. Robbie was his lawyer, his friend, his fierce defender, and Robbie was the man who would right this incredible wrong. Robbie was fighting hard and loud and threatening hellfire for those who were mistreating his client. So many of the condemned had bad lawyers on the outside or no lawyers at all. Their appeals had run, the system was finished with them. No one out there was advocating on their behalf. But Donté had Mr. Robbie Flak, and he knew at some moment in each day his lawyer was thinking about him and scheming a new way to get him out.

But after eight years on death row, Donté had lost hope. He had not lost faith in Robbie; he’d simply realized that the Texas systems were much more powerful than one lawyer. Absent a miracle, this wrong would run its course. Robbie had explained that they would file motions until the very end, but he was also realistic.

They spoke through the phone, each happy to see the other. Robbie brought greetings from the entire Drumm family. He’d visited their home the night before, and gave all the details. Donté listened with a smile, but said little. His conversational skills had deteriorated along with everything else. Physically, he was a skinny, stooped, aging man of twenty-seven. Mentally, he was a mess. He could not keep up with time, never knew if it was night or day, often skipped meals, showers, and his daily hour of recreation. He refused to say a word to the guards and often had trouble following their most basic commands. They were somewhat sympathetic because they knew he was not a threat. He sometimes slept eighteen to twenty hours a day and when he wasn’t asleep, he was unable to do anything. He had not exercised in years. He never read and managed to write a letter or two each week, but only to his family and Robbie. The letters were short, often incoherent, and filled with misspelled words and glaring grammatical errors. The writing was so sloppy that it was disheartening. A letter from Donté was not a pleasant envelope to open.

Dr. Kristi Hinze had read and analyzed hundreds of letters he’d written during his eight years on death row. She had already formed the opinion that the solitary confinement had driven him far from reality. He was depressed, lethargic, delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic, and suicidal. He was hearing voices, those of his late father and his high school football coach. In layman’s terms, his brain had shut down. He was insane.