Dear Reader

Dear reader,

It’s not only possible but likely that by the time you read this I will be a corpse.

If that is the case you now gaze upon the likeness of a man murdered by the state of Texas. As I pen this I wait for a panel of men to decide my fate, I've been sitting inside this cell for more than 7 years, waiting and I can feel the time passing me by. It is strange to think about what’s going to happen to me in the near future. My appeals are gone and despite the fact I've never murdered anyone I'm going to be strapped down and pumped full of poison.

I know I know go ahead roll your eyes... everyone innocent aren't they?

But I'll say it again I’ve never killed anyone but you don't have to kill anyone in the state of Texas I have come to learn.

I have trouble wrapping my head around the whole situation, about what's happening here. I mean.. I have a co-defendant, Marcus. Now I want you to listen to this and really think about it, seriously cause if I'm dead when you read this I lost... anyways... I was convicted of killing two people a friend of mine and his girlfriend. Marcus was arrested months before I was. I had been questioned, because I survived the murder but the police didn't arrest me after questioning.  I was arrested months later in California.

Despite that I went to trial before Marcus, even though all the forensics, all the evidence was tied to him. Marcus came from a well-to-do family and I came from nothing.

I was found guilty and sentenced to death without my attorneys even trying to help.

Marcus didn't have to go to trial.  3 months after I was sentenced he confessed to killing both victims, both Ron and Beth.

He was sentenced to life in prison. He never mentioned me in court.

Not once does he say anything about me, and then he confesses to a different murder, and given life for that one too, and here I am, waiting to die for a murder another man confessed to.

Waiting to die and there's nothing I can do about it.

Never in my wildest thoughts did I imagine I'd end up in a situation like this its like something out of a horror novel only the villain in my story is the state, and there is no hero who can come in and stop it. The law says its alright for them to come and kill me, because for some reason he decided to let me survive when he killed my friends in front of me.

I don't understand.

I don't understand how this can be happening and it terrifies me like you wouldn't believe that they can take this thing so precious, a life, my life, without any regard what so ever  and so clinically... 

I'll just go to sleep and never wake up I think that the manner of my death terrifies me almost as much as the fact of it.  Strapped down, unable to do nothing but watch, my family afraid crying on one side, a bunch of strangers gleeful and praying for my life to end on the other, all the years waiting for it to happen... I think it would be better if they just shot me in the head when I wasn't looking.

This process is so barbaric, and we call ourselves civilized.

How can a civilized people devise a whole legal process that allows them to torture and kill people?  Spend millions of dollars doing it? And for what?  I've never killed anyone, how does my death make the world a safer place?

How does even the guiltys death prevent crime?

Yet, while they are killing me, my co-defendant, who confessed to the murders, gets live.

Real murderers got to live.

It doesn't make any sense.

That my life is so being taken on the whim of a politician.

You see in all these movies, read in all these books, someone running from the most horrible thing that can happen to them.

You see them fight struggle to preserve their life.

Running, hiding.

We're shown all over the fear, the terror, of the knife, of the gun, of the man with the axe... how do I run from a politician with an agenda?

From a pen and a piece of paper? 

Where can I hide?

How can I fight back when all the power is taken from my hands, my life is put into some one's whose not paid enough to care?

Can you ever begin to imagine how this feels?

I have spent the last several years looking back over my life, so little of it I've had. I was locked up shortly after my 21st birthday. This is the first time I've ever been to prison and I suppose my last.

I have never really asked much out of life. All I've wanted was to live, to experience things as much as I could; to rest my fingertips on the pulse of the world and follow its beat wherever it leads me, maybe one day find its heart.

I have spent all my "adult years", from my late teens, living on the street, hitchhiking from here to there.  Looking back, I can't really say I have too many regrets, at least, not anything serious.

 Up until this deal here, I got to spend my life as I chose, and that's something a lot of people can't say.  Never once have I had to pay rent, have something tying me to a single place.

Of course, I missed a lot of things most people enjoy, but hey, oh well, right?

But now that's gone now, all that freedom, and I'm dying.

I wish I had the time and energy to tell you exactly what my life was, so that maybe someone would miss it when it's gone.

By the time you read this, hopefully I'll still be alive.

Its doubtful but stranger things have happened.

 But if I am gone, I want you to question it.

Question how an innocent man can be put to death while the murderer lives, is allow to live the people killing me. Believe me, I'm not the first I won't be the last.

But before you leave, look at my portrait here one last time, and ask why? How?

Love and Revolution

Steven Woods