Survivor on Death Row

Survivor on Death Row

One Man’s Life

by

Romell Broom

with

Clare Nonhebel

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2012 Clare Nonhebel

"A horrifying story embracing all the evils of the death penalty. Bad forensics, dodgy DNA, awful lawyers, render this a must-read."

Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

The Romell Broom case is yet another example of why the United States should abolish the death penalty immediately. The inherent flaws of the capital punishment system are again exposed in all their horror as we are left to ponder how many other individuals will have to go through this nightmare.

Rick Halperin, former Chair, Amnesty International USA

SURVIVOR ON DEATH ROW

Romell Broom

with Clare Nonhebel

FOREWORD: Clare Nonhebel

When I first volunteered to write to Death Row prisoners, I knew very little about the death penalty in the United States. It had been abolished decades ago in Britain, and in many States in the USA, as a barbaric, morally indefensible practice which had clearly not solved the crime problem.

Some people had been proved innocent, after execution. Other Death Row prisoners had changed their lives and their thinking, as people often do, given time, but still had not been awarded parole or clemency or a life sentence instead of death.

It seemed shocking - and bizarre - that a civilized country could be corrupt or naïve enough to preach that murder is wrong and then advocate murdering prison inmates. The cycle of violence was further promoted by politicians cynically amassing votes by promising more executions - supposedly to end a culture of violence.

While being anti-death penalty, I still made various assumptions about Death Row. I thought it was a temporary holding cell for a few weeks or months prior to execution. I assumed everyone on it had received competent legal representation and a fair trial. And I took it for granted that every inmate was guilty of the crime.

Romell Broom’s case startled me out of those preconceptions. On Death Row for 27 years, he had already served a longer term than most life sentences. He had always protested his innocence, and his appeal for new lawyers had been granted in one court, only to be turned down in another.

Finally - on September 15, 2009 - he had been stripped of all his possessions, taken for execution, strapped down by four men, submitted to two hours of torturous attempts to inject him with lethal chemicals, then - when he unaccountably survived - sent back to a cell to await a further attempt to kill him. Amnesty International defines torture as an ‘extreme mental or physical assault on a person who has been rendered defenceless.’ What happened to Romell Broom fits that definition.

Reading around the subject, I found that many lawyers, justice workers and former Death Row prison governors and officials testified that ‘capital punishment is for those without capital,’ who cannot afford lawyers; that public defence was allocated a fraction of the financial resources allocated to public prosecutors; that crucial evidence was often not presented in court or went missing and seemingly no one - except the voiceless accused - made a fuss about it.

In addition to those who had been proved innocent after execution, many more were suspected to have been falsely accused and unjustly killed, but no one investigated further once the scapegoat was safely buried and out of the way.

One of the most persuasive pro-death penalty arguments is that it affords closure to grieving families of victims. Yet increasing numbers of murder victims’ families report that another violent death, perpetrated this time by the State, does not bring them closure or peace; it merely creates another grieving family and a new scar on society’s conscience. Most bereaved families are not thirsting for revenge but are quietly trying to come to terms with their share in the tragedy of violence.

The eldest of ten children, Romell Broom grew up in a family, culture and neighbourhood acquainted with poverty and violence. The innocence of childhood ended at a tender age. Family relationships were fractured, studded with despair and domestic violence, marital affairs, prostitution, psychiatric admissions, and reliance on drugs and alcohol.

Romell’s father and uncles ran a brothel and introduced him to it from childhood. Both parents periodically deserted the family. Romell’s mother would deliberately overdose, in order to get a break from responsibilities by being admitted to hospital, instructing her young son to watch her until she went unconscious, then at the crucial moment call the ambulance.

Unable to concentrate at school, with little hope of a future beyond the inner city ghetto, barely literate and with no job prospects, Romell learned from older boys on the street the only skill - stealing - that would equip him to survive and to provide, as the teenage ‘man of the family.’

The street life led him into juvenile crime, then eventually to arrest for the crime for which, he says, somebody else was suspected but could not be brought to justice, and his own DNA was deemed to ‘near-enough fit the profile’ according to testing at the time.

‘My defence was, I didn’t do it, and that doesn’t count as any defence. There was pressure on for a quick arrest. I had a prison record and no status in society. I was a throwaway.’

Now aged 56, having spent half his life in jail, Romell Broom looks back and reflects on his life from the perspective of a man who desires peace, who survived a brutal execution and who still sits on Death Row, his fate depending on the compassion or indifference of the judicial system in the Ohio State and US federal courts.

CHAPTER 1: Romell

September 2011

Two years ago, on September 15th 2009, I was taken for execution by the State of Ohio.

When the day came around to execute me, I did not want to live. My mother had died and my sister had been murdered, and I wanted to leave this life and be with them. When they started to try and execute me I wanted to be gone, and I felt I was already gone.

What brought me back to reality was that I felt pain in my arm. If you feel pain, you can’t be dead. So I looked at the people in the room to see what the problem was, and they told me they couldn’t find a vein. Someone was probing my arm with a needle to find a vein they could stick the injection in.

My veins are good; there is nothing wrong with them. So when they couldn’t find a vein to use, I was showing them - ‘Look, here is a vein.’ You could see it clearly; it stood out.

But every time someone touched me, the vein disappeared. It just went below the surface, right before my eyes. It kept happening. If I touched my arm, you could see the vein raised. But as soon as any one of the execution team touched me, to kill me, there was no vein.

One of the guys even brought in a machine, shaped like a block. He ran it over my arm and it lit up the veins below the surface of the skin: you could see them clearly. But still, when the needle went in, the vein just disappeared.

Overall, they made over 100 probes to try and find a vein, and 18 attempts at injecting me. They tried everywhere, all over my body. I tried to help them. But after a while I said, ‘You know, I don’t think this is happening. It’s not going to work.’ But they wouldn’t accept that. It just wasn’t a possibility.

At one point there were 15 people in the room, all intent on executing me. Some of them went out, but one guy in particular was really determined. He just kept on trying.

In the end, several of the guards were standing staring at me. I thought, ‘Why are they looking at me like that?’ Then I realized it was because the execution was not working. It hadn’t occurred to anybody that that might happen. It hadn’t occurred to me.

It was only later really, when I was put back in a cell, that it hit me. Two guards came in with a TV and plugged it in and left me. I was sitting there watching the TV and I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be seeing this. I was never meant to be here on this evening.’

And that got me thinking about why I had survived. I never thought much about God in my life. But that night my execution didn’t work, I thought, this has to be God. How else would I have survived?

The night before the execution, I was alone in the Death Watch cell and there was a Bible in the room. I didn’t want to read it because I had looked at it before - some other inmates had given me bits of it to read - and it didn’t mean anything to me. I just thought, ‘That’s not for me.’

But I found I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Everywhere I looked in the room, I could see it out of the corner of my eye. So eventually I picked it up and flicked through the pages at random, and everywhere I stopped and read, it said something to me about my present situation. I had thought it was all about past stuff, but this was about me, right now. So I thought there must be something in it after all and those guys were right.

So after the execution, I reckoned that if God saved my life, he wanted me to be alive, and I started asking him why. What did he want me to do with my life? And one thing that came to mind was to tell my story - to let people know how I came to be on Death Row and what the situation is with the death penalty, here in the State of Ohio, in the USA.

November 2009

As you know, my name is Romell Broom. I am on Death Row for the last 25 years. I am still fighting to prove my innocence. The reason I am still here is because of our Father and Lord Savior. God knows the truth about my situation and let me live to prove it. I have been in contact with some good people from around the world who are willing to help me. I am blessed.

I am 53 years old. I like art, I do some drawing, like music - I love music - and I play the guitar. The only person here in the States that really cares about me and what happens to me is my father. I do have brothers and sisters but only one of them cares. My father is 77 years and he never finished school so he needs the help of my brothers to look out for his bills and read his mail to him, and that makes things very hard for me to have a relationship with my father.

When I was to be executed I had to send all my property home. When I asked to get it back the State told me no, that I would have to re-order the things I need. I talked to my dad about two weeks ago and he can’t understand the reason he can’t send me back my things that I sent home, and that I have to re-order everything again.

If my mother was here I would not have this problem. She passed away nine years ago. So I am doing the best I can to stay positive. I do pray all the time. Sometimes I be praying and not know it until someone sees me and thinks I am talking to myself.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Yes, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death; I will fear no evil for you are with me, and goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

I got a story to tell, but I don’t know how to write it. Every day I think about my life and wonder - how did I get here? I would like to try to write because I have something to say about my life and because it would help me to work out for myself how my life ended up here, on Death Row.

I am the oldest of my family. I have three half-brothers, one half-sister, two sisters - one passed away 25 years ago - and three more brothers. I haven’t seen my half-brothers in about 41 years; they stay in another State. I saw two of my other brothers just before the execution. I had not seen them, or my sister, in 25 years.

They don’t get along with each other. I haven’t seen them again. Sometimes I think they just don’t care any more. I do talk to them on the phone sometimes.

When I was a kid the only thing a black kid could think about being was someone in the ‘hood that had money, and that was the pimps, from the night life. That is all that I saw. I watched football on TV and boxing - that was something I liked. But that was a different world. I did not know how to get there.

My mother was a good mother but she allowed us to do whatever we wanted to do. My father worked and did what I thought was a good job but he was a ladies’ man, and most weekends he would go out and do his thing with the ladies. My mother was always mad at him because of his night life.

I became a part of that life when I was very young. My troubles with the police began at 12.

I grew up in Ohio. My birthplace was in Muskegon, Michigan. My mother moved to Ohio with me when I was about five years old, when Dad got a job here, and all my brothers and sisters were born in Ohio.

How does a person begin to write a book? I always wanted to do something like that but I am not a good speller or very smart. Like the guitar it takes a lot of practice, but it will come if you keep at it.

I have only been playing guitar for six years, since I was 47, and I can play pretty good but I still can’t do all the things I would like to do. It’s like that with God too - there is so much to learn. I am still learning about God, and about the things that the guitar can do.

I love the Blues, that is my music, but I do like some Soul, old Soul and Rock’n’Roll. The late 60’s-70’s music is the best. I don’t have my guitar or music now. I had to send my guitar and my music home - everything I owned - because I was to die. I had a few books and my CD player and two CDs that I was allowed to take with me to the cell before they were going to execute me.

Afterwards, I asked the State, the staff, if I could get my things back. They said no, because it was sent out of the prison and once that happens nothing is allowed back in, because there may be something smuggled in. I would have to buy everything new, start over again. Prisoners get an allowance of $15 a month. That has to cover everything you need - stationery, clothing, toothpaste, everything.

One of my books is the Bible. Psalm 91 verses 14, 15, 16 goes like this: Because he has set his love upon me, with long life I will satisfy him, and show him my salvation. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him.

I believe that God will do that for me.

CHAPTER 2: Clare

November 2009

I applied to be a penfriend for Death Row inmates after seeing an advert in the Big Issue magazine bought from our local homeless vendor. Knowing how much letters mean to British prisoners without family support, I was impressed to hear that there were organisations the UK and other countries caring for prisoners in the USA who were not only isolated from society but labelled as ‘monsters’ and condemned to a brutal death.

The next prisoner on the waiting list for a penfriend was an unusual case: the Ohio Death Row inmate whose execution had failed. My husband recalled reading about it in the paper.

Apparently, the court would set a new date for the man’s execution as soon as possible. Whereas many of the men and women volunteers write to one or more inmates for years and have time to get to know them, I would probably no sooner make contact with this prisoner than I would have to deal with the horror of execution. But I reasoned that if this man’s name was the one that had come up on the list at the same time as mine then that was how it was meant to be. I would write to Romell Broom.

I wrote a brief introductory letter telling him a few details about myself, a middle-aged married woman, an author with hobbies of gardening, country walks and spending time with my husband, and invited Romell to tell me who he was.

He wrote back. A few years younger, he liked art, loved music, and believed that God had saved his life.

It took several letters back and forth for me to piece together an impression of his family. He mentioned brothers and sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters. My husband had a brother and two half-brothers, so I asked Romell whether his half-siblings had the same mother or the same father. But it was far more complicated.

His parents had both had children with other partners during the marriage. Some of those children lived with