Lyle C. May earned an Associate in Arts - Social Science Emphasis degree in 2013 and is enrolled in the Bachelor of Specialized Studies program at Ohio University. He was tried and sentenced to death in 1999 at the age of 21 for the 1997 murders of Valerie Sue Riddle and Kelly Mark Laird. These charges are currently under appeal. For more information on the death penalty and the experiences of those living on death row, go to BeyondSteelDoors.com and the Life Lines Collective on Facebook. For information on the state of Ohio resuming executions in 2017, go to Ohioans to Stop Executions at www.otse.org.
When I met Eddie he was playing a card game my mother taught me. "You play cribbage?" He shuffled the cards and dealt, motioning for me to sit, then placed our pegs into the rectangular board. I grinned a bit and relaxed as the rules of the game came back with memories of childhood. For a moment, death row faded into the background.
Central Prison's death row is isolated from the general population. The red doors and matching jumpsuits we are forced to wear set the 147 of us irrevocably apart. In 2002, three years into my sentence, Eddie and I became friends. We were both convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the '90s, an era when the “war on crime” meant a heavy-handed use of mandatory minimums and capital punishment. Though every empty cell echoed death, we drew strength from one another.
In early 2003, a man named Alan Gell was exonerated from death row. Afterwards, ten other death row prisoners in North Carolina were slated to have their death sentences overturned. We were buoyant with the hope that the legislature would act on this dysfunction, but instead, seven executions were scheduled and carried out in 2003. Eddie was one of the seven.
The day before they took my friend to death watch for the final 72 hours of his life, we were sitting in his cell smoking cigarettes and not saying much. Smoke streamed through the rectangle of sunlight, thick and poisonous with the things we avoided in idle conversation. After a moment Eddie spoke. "Can I tell you something?" He stared at the floor, his mind seeing into the next world. "I'm scared. I don't want to die." When he looked up I couldn't meet his gaze. "Why does it have to be this way?" It was my turn to stare at the floor as my friend admitted his sorrow for killing someone while drunk. There was nothing I could say to alleviate my friend's fears because they mirrored my own. I simply listened as Eddie talked, hoping it was enough.
It took three more years and 15 executions before a de facto moratorium was imposed on North Carolina's death penalty. It’s been a decade since the last execution and we continue to be warehoused in isolation. During my nearly 20 years at Central Prison I've learned a great deal about crime and punishment and what it means to live on death row. Some of this understanding came from my education at Ohio University, but much of it is revealed in the strength of my friends and the bonds we have formed.
The last execution in the state of Ohio was on January 16, 2014. Although executions were scheduled to resume this month, Governor Kasich has postponed the first two dates for a short time due to a court order. 28 executions are now scheduled in Ohio from February 2017 to September 2020.
