Live From Death Row
May 22 2000
Martin Draughon can't surf the Internet, or even click a mouse. A condemned murderer, he lives in a 60-square-foot cell on Texas' death row, where Internet connections and computers are banned. Yet the 36-year-old Draughon, with the help of a death-penalty opponent in Denmark, has a Web site. After reading about Draughon in a Danish newspaper, Niels Graverholt created a site for him in 1996.
Currently, hundreds on death row and other prisoners boast their own Web addresses, which, due to widespread prohibitions on Internet usage in prison, are set up by supporters outside prison walls. Many prisoners use their sites to advertise for pen pals, rail against capital punishment, publish poems or proclaim their innocence. Others use their sites to solicit money - ostensibly for their legal defense funds - from both U.S. and European supporters. More than a dozen sites defend the nation's best-known prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who resides on Pennsylvania's death row. And some 200 Web sites are the product of a Canadian antideath penalty group, which has volunteered to create sites for every condemned inmate in the United States.
What distinguishes Draughon's site from others is its purpose: He conducts an ongoing, public conversation with people around the globe. Visitors read his dispatches from death row and exchange e-mail with him about everything from prison food to the death penalty to his morality. For Draughon, the site has created, in the most unlikely of places, an active virtual community of which he is the center.
Anyone who visits Draughon's site can send him e-mail, but the response takes a while. Graverholt devotes several hours a week to facilitating Draughon's correspondence. Graverholt prints out e-mail sent to the site and mails them to Texas. Draughon types a reply and mails it to Graverholt, who posts it on the site.
"Death row is not the most inspiring place," Graverholt states on the site, "so please be patient when you wait for an answer. Normally it takes several weeks." The result is a sort of slow-moving chat room, where visitors to Draughon's Web site can read his exchanges with both critics and fans. "Hi Martin! I just stumbled on your site while looking for an article on the death penalty for my sociology class," a visitor wrote in March. "I think the death penalty is a horrible, cruel act that doesn't solve a damn thing."
For Draughon, such sympathetic letters provide a much-needed morale boost. "At times ... I'll be wallowing in hopelessness, fear, anger or apathy," the prisoner typed in a letter to The Standard. "And then I'll ... get some letter from some 28-year-old mother of three in Ohio or Illinois or Mississippi, or some college student somewhere, informing me of how much I have touched them and opened their eyes ... and I'll be recharged again for a while. It'll put a spark of hope back into me."
In one of Draughon's many dispatches about life inside the Terrell Unit, where Texas' 451 condemned men reside, Draughon describes his fellow inmates singing "Happy Birthday" to him from behind steel cell doors. Most of Draughon's other writings focus on the frustrating minutiae of prison life, including his unhappiness at being served beans for breakfast, and his embarrassment at getting strip-searched in front of a female guard.
These complaints earn Draughon little compassion from some readers. A visitor from Canada recently wrote: "The whole world is out here. Today I ate at McDonald's, I saw pretty women, even got laid last night. But you are never going to see a McDonald's again, and will only get laid in your imagination. All of the suffering is because of your ACTIONS."
A jury convicted Draughon of fatally shooting a bystander in 1986 while robbing a Long John Silver's fast-food chain restaurant in Houston. Draughon insists the shooting was unintentional and that he does not belong on death row. On the site, he argues that he should have been convicted of manslaughter - not capital murder.
But Draughon previously had committed crimes, which he kept secret until October 1999 when a site visitor revealed the prisoner's rap sheet. In fact, the shooting had concluded a nine-day crime spree, during which Draughon committed two other robberies and sodomized a woman with a broomstick. This revelation rocked Draughon's most ardent supporters, including Graverholt.
"When I received the mail above ... I became very upset, disappointed and sad," Graverholt wrote on the site. "Not so much because of the terrible sexual assault as because Draughon had kept it secret for me and for the readers of this Web site." Draughon responded by writing a lengthy essay detailing all of these crimes. He also encouraged readers to go to the Texas prison system's site, which includes his mug shot and a description of his offenses.
Draughon's Web site attracts 150 visitors a day, receives three or four e-mail messages each week, and gives Draughon strength, he says, to continue his court appeals. Very few prisoners condemned to death row leave prison alive, but Draughon will certainly be among the first to leave behind an Internet chronicle of his final years, as well as his own international community of friends and detractors.
"Being a part of this Internet age ... is truly amazing," Draughon wrote. "If nothing else, this is my way to leave something positive and good behind so that I won't be remembered for only the bad that put me here. ... It is a redemption of a sort. My words are preserved for ... well, I guess, forever."
Jennifer Gonnerman is a staff writer at the Village Voice.