A look at the hard life inside San Quentin’s Death Row

[Draggingtree]

A look at the hard life inside San Quentin’s Death Row

By Evan Sernoffsky

Updated 4:25 pm, Wednesday, December 30, 2015

 

It’s both a lonely and crowded world inside the country’s largest Death Row, where hundreds of condemned inmates, stripped of nearly every freedom, wait around to die.

 

But for the more than 700 of the most notorious killers warehoused alone in cells in San Quentin State Prison, death likely won’t come at the end of a needle in the facility’s lethal-injection chamber.

 

That’s because nearly a decade ago, a federal judge placed a moratorium on capital punishment in California — bringing to a halt all executions.

 

For the first time since the death penalty was put on pause in the state, reporters on Tuesday got an in-depth look at the cold concrete corridors, locked cells and shackled inmates on California’s ever-growing Death Row.

 

“I don’t think I’ll ever live long enough to get out of here,” said 67-year-old Douglas Clark, who’s been in San Quentin since 1983. “But you get by. I’ve always been a very Zen person.”

http://www.chron.com/crime/article/A-look-at-the-hard-life-inside-San-Quentin-s-6727171.php