Speaker 1: Dear Governor is a production of I Heart Media and
Speaker 1: three Months Media. If you are moved by Jarvis Master's
Speaker 1: story and would like to support his cause, visit free
Speaker 1: Jarvis dot org slash podcast to sign your name to
Speaker 1: an open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Dear Governor Newsom,
Speaker 1: Dear Mr Governor Newsom. This is an open letter to
Speaker 1: Governor Gavin Newsom, Dear Governor Newson. The year the Compact
Speaker 1: diss was introduced, The year New Coke was launched, The
Speaker 1: year the UNI bomber killed his first victim, and too
Speaker 1: much less fanfare or infamy. The year Jarvis J. Masters
Speaker 1: was charged with conspiracy to commit murder of a corrections officer.
Speaker 1: This story ran in the Los Angeles Times December three
Speaker 1: of nineteen. Three inmates have been charged in the death
Speaker 1: of a San Quentin prison guard who was killed with
Speaker 1: a makeshift spear last summer. The Marine County District Attorney's
Speaker 1: Office said. A spokesman said Andre Johnson twenty one, Jarvis J.
Speaker 1: Masters twenty three, and Lawrence Woodard thirty nine have been
Speaker 1: charged for conspiracy and murder with special circumstances in the
Speaker 1: death of Sergeant Howell Dean Birchfield. We're all convicted for
Speaker 1: conspiracy to commit murder. Johnson was committed for sugety of
Speaker 1: conspiracy commit murder and the factual murder of original guard
Speaker 1: where was convicted of conspiracy commit murder, but as the
Speaker 1: leader of planning the murder, which wrote special circumstances to
Speaker 1: him because he planned it, it was his orders, so
Speaker 1: he was convicted of that. When I was convicted of
Speaker 1: conspiracy and of sear bringing the weapon, and they never
Speaker 1: kept that weapon because they never found Jervis Masters, Andre Johnson,
Speaker 1: and Lawrence would were tried simultaneously before two separate juries,
Speaker 1: one for Masters and Wordard and the other for Johnson.
Speaker 1: Were you seated by your attorneys? You? I have two
Speaker 1: of them. I had Jeffrey wrote Wine on the right
Speaker 1: and Michael Satus on the other side, and we became
Speaker 1: very very close. They understood my predicament and honestly were
Speaker 1: kind of stuff I was into where how stuck I
Speaker 1: am in this situation? And they said that the only
Speaker 1: way we can get you off of this man is
Speaker 1: that you have to tell your truth, and your truth
Speaker 1: is going to get a lot of people in trouble.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I said no, I seem like the
Speaker 1: gas chamber is a lot further away than exercise, are
Speaker 1: you know? So I said, no, that's not me. You
Speaker 1: can't go snitch. You know, people that they committed murder.
Speaker 1: They'll kill you right there on that entercise, right there,
Speaker 1: you're dead. In prison vernacular, snitches rats informants refer to
Speaker 1: inmates who cooperate with prison personnel by furnishing damaging information
Speaker 1: about other inmates, often in exchange for lighter sentences or
Speaker 1: some sort of payback monetary or otherwise allow One pair
Speaker 1: of notorious snitches in Orange County, California, who were rewarded
Speaker 1: with almost limitless taco bell runs for their information, I
Speaker 1: asked former San Quentin Warden Daniel Vasquez, what would have
Speaker 1: happened if Jarvis were to cooperate with the police and
Speaker 1: snitch on his fellow inmates. They would they would retaliate
Speaker 1: against you and your family. They would kill you if
Speaker 1: they got that opportunity, or or killed your some of
Speaker 1: your family as well. Attorney, they will be there being
Speaker 1: threatened by the game members. They were being threatened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were being threatened, you know. They reported it. They
Speaker 1: went into the back room and reported it. I don't
Speaker 1: know they did, but they did Mum saying that they
Speaker 1: couldn't represent me because they feel threatened, and that they
Speaker 1: will to represent me in an individual case without being
Speaker 1: connected to nobody. It's me by myself and they wouldn't
Speaker 1: do that. I asked Michael Satris, one of Jarvis's attorneys
Speaker 1: during the murder trial, if he remembered threats made to
Speaker 1: the defense team. We had a whole hearing and everything
Speaker 1: about that where I think somebody was tape recording woods
Speaker 1: and would had made some threats to us. They would
Speaker 1: been sealed the hearing with it because I think we
Speaker 1: made a motion to withdraw or something because hey, we're
Speaker 1: in a conflict now. Yeah, remembers that, Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: there was all motion around that where all the evidence
Speaker 1: of the threat and everything that the tape recording thing was.
Speaker 1: It was a matter of record. And then we because
Speaker 1: it had to do with the attorney client relationship that
Speaker 1: nobody else had an interest in, we had a sealed
Speaker 1: hearing where we talked about it with the judge. I
Speaker 1: think I start finding out Alice in trouble when I
Speaker 1: knew I felt trapped. I knew that I knew that
Speaker 1: I needed to tell the story about me. If I
Speaker 1: didn't tell a story about me, and if I did
Speaker 1: show a story about me, it was definitely gonna implicrate there.
Speaker 1: So I'm thinking, Okay, if this goes any further, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna be able to get out of this, you know,
Speaker 1: because if I try to get out of it, then
Speaker 1: if ilicate is going to implicate other people. And I'm saying,
Speaker 1: oh my god, yeah, this is this is not good here.
Speaker 1: You know this is not good. And I still thought
Speaker 1: up until I saw the d A making his case,
Speaker 1: he was finding things out that I never knew existed.
Speaker 1: And I'm looking at everybody saying, you know what's going
Speaker 1: on here? And people were saying, man, this is none
Speaker 1: of your business. You know, this is none they you know,
Speaker 1: it's not you. They just trying to keep you here
Speaker 1: to snitch on other people. That's the only reason why
Speaker 1: they got you here, manage, because they got to use
Speaker 1: you to fetch all other people. So don't you worry
Speaker 1: about it. I always thought I was thinking out. I
Speaker 1: really did. One major misconception about the death penalty is
Speaker 1: that it's a cost effective measure to get rid of
Speaker 1: the worst of the worst, Kill him quick and be
Speaker 1: through with it. Why waste our precious tax dollars to
Speaker 1: permit violent criminals to live out their natural lives in
Speaker 1: prison when the average execution costs less than a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: But the truth of the matter is that it's far
Speaker 1: less expensive to imprison people for life without parole and
Speaker 1: execute them. The arduous legal process costs more tax dollars,
Speaker 1: to the tune of seven hundred thousand to a million
Speaker 1: dollars to execute someone. The reason for this disparity is
Speaker 1: due to a bunch of factors. The state often pays
Speaker 1: expenses for both the prosecution and defense. Then there's the
Speaker 1: exorbitant costs associated with pre trial and trial of capital cases,
Speaker 1: more investigative costs, the cost of court personnel for protracted cases.
Speaker 1: It's even more expensive to house capital defendants as they
Speaker 1: await their final goodbye. According to one study in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, the average cost of keeping a death row
Speaker 1: inmate in prison during this lengthy process was forty seven
Speaker 1: thousand dollars per year, and as much as ninety dollars
Speaker 1: To put that in perspective. Jarvis was sentenced to death
Speaker 1: on July three, that equates to millions of California tax
Speaker 1: dollars for just one of the more than seven thirty
Speaker 1: inmates on death row. Now, though Jarvis is a bit
Speaker 1: of an anomaly and that the average stay on death
Speaker 1: row prior to execution or exoneration is a mere fifteen years,
Speaker 1: but the math adds up to billions up next. Stanford
Speaker 1: Law professor Larry Marshall on the litany of failings in
Speaker 1: our capital punishment system, above and beyond the excessive costs.
Speaker 1: Stanford Law professor and informal advisor for Jervis's next appeal,
Speaker 1: Larry Marshall on our country's broken capital punishment system. The
Speaker 1: issue of arbitrary nous, the issue of, beyond the racial part,
Speaker 1: who gets death and who doesn't is, as was called
Speaker 1: by the Supreme Court back in the seventies, a strike
Speaker 1: of lightning. And it seems terribly, terribly unsustainable to say
Speaker 1: that we are going to have that randomness in deciding
Speaker 1: who will live and who will die. Jail house informants,
Speaker 1: how many cases do we need to see? How many
Speaker 1: scandals do we need to see? Until it's recognized that
Speaker 1: this is not a trustworthy form of evidence. These are
Speaker 1: people who are selling their testimony to the highest bidder,
Speaker 1: and sort of the issue that has become the dominant
Speaker 1: one in conversation about the death penalty arises. And I
Speaker 1: left it for last in my list intentionally because I
Speaker 1: don't want to make it sound like it's the only
Speaker 1: problem with the death penalty. But it's a huge, significant problem,
Speaker 1: and that is the problem of innocence. That we have
Speaker 1: come to learn in the past couple of decades that
Speaker 1: the confidence that we used to have in our criminal
Speaker 1: justice system is unfounded. That as hard as we try,
Speaker 1: and this goes for capital punishment, non capital punishment, as
Speaker 1: hard as we try, profound errors are inevitable. That eyewitnesses,
Speaker 1: who we used to think were the gold standard of evidence,
Speaker 1: make terrible mistakes. Innocent mistakes, good faith mistakes, but they
Speaker 1: make mistakes. And we know this because we can study
Speaker 1: that in laboratories, and we know that that's particularly true
Speaker 1: when you're talking about cross racial identification. We know that
Speaker 1: what we used to think was the case, which was
Speaker 1: that if somebody confess a crime, they must have done it,
Speaker 1: we now know from case after case after case that
Speaker 1: that simply is not true. That people scores hundreds of
Speaker 1: people have confessed to terrible crimes that we now know
Speaker 1: they did not commit. Why did they confess, Well, often
Speaker 1: it's because they were subject to deep emotional uh psychological
Speaker 1: interrogation that led them to do that, perhaps because they
Speaker 1: thought they were going to be framed and the only
Speaker 1: way to avoid the harsher penalty would be to confess
Speaker 1: to the to to confess and hopefully get a deal
Speaker 1: through that. Some people, as I said, have mental illness
Speaker 1: that leads them to confess. But the idea that you
Speaker 1: wouldn't say you did it unless you did it has
Speaker 1: now been discarded. There's no it's false. I know that
Speaker 1: that was the last case they heard on the pilly
Speaker 1: faced portion of it, and they gave me the death killty.
Speaker 1: Everybody thought I wasn't gonna get the death pilty because
Speaker 1: those guys didn't get it. How in the world can
Speaker 1: Jarvis get it? And he told you to was a
Speaker 1: sharper new weapon. Why do you think you got it?
Speaker 1: There's a legal explanation for it, and there's my explanation
Speaker 1: for it. I think illegal explanation holds work around. Though.
Speaker 1: My old thing was that I didn't defend myself. I
Speaker 1: did not defend myself. I did not say where I
Speaker 1: was two weeks before that happened. I did not explain
Speaker 1: my activities, and I didn't do any of that, and
Speaker 1: I tied my best. Nothing that my attorney to do it.
Speaker 1: It was not my case, it was it was their case.
Speaker 1: It was not my case. I didn't have to not
Speaker 1: to worry about that's their stuff. Why would I worry
Speaker 1: about this? This don't happen them to do with me.
Speaker 1: These guys are in trouble, not me. How was my anitude? Uh?
Speaker 1: Now their explanation is this that this jury became a
Speaker 1: professional jury. They use the word professional jury because when
Speaker 1: you first get jewels and they get elected, they fresh,
Speaker 1: they knew they are being guided by instructions. They're asked
Speaker 1: to listen to the evidence, and the evidence is how
Speaker 1: they come to some conclusion. But you educate them, you
Speaker 1: tell them the case, you explain what's going on, and
Speaker 1: how long they're gonna be there. I mean, they just
Speaker 1: so new. I mean they come from their jobs to
Speaker 1: be here instead in a murder trial. Okay, when they
Speaker 1: came down the woodard being sentenced, they didn't know how
Speaker 1: to do it. They argue, amongst themselves. They got into
Speaker 1: these personal conflicts. They never was gonna give him the
Speaker 1: death pend. They was a hung jury once twice, I
Speaker 1: think was two hung juries. They just didn't get along
Speaker 1: and they were not you know, it became more out
Speaker 1: of you know, you disrespected me and you wanted me
Speaker 1: to vote this way. I'm not vote. You know. It
Speaker 1: was one of those things. So when it came to me,
Speaker 1: they all said, okay, and this is really how it
Speaker 1: happened to let's get along, let's stop fighting, and it
Speaker 1: would go faster blah blah blah. So now they became professionals.
Speaker 1: They learned how to vote to execute somebody. They did
Speaker 1: it the right way. They didn't fight, They listened. They
Speaker 1: were more listening to each other. They were expecting each
Speaker 1: other's opinions, and by the time they took the vote,
Speaker 1: they all were on the same page. They became professionals.
Speaker 1: They learned how to kill somebody, and that's not the
Speaker 1: kind of jury you want. Yeah, that's what happened before
Speaker 1: the penalty page. Do you remember the moment when you
Speaker 1: heard the jury come back and say guilty, Yeah, I did,
Speaker 1: I did, I did. I remember all the guards there
Speaker 1: was something about you can hear this chuckle. I finding, yes,
Speaker 1: we got him. They were keeping themselves composed, but you know,
Speaker 1: they all you can hear this constant chuckle of their
Speaker 1: keys and belts and leather stuff. They all moved at
Speaker 1: the same time, all over the courtroom, you know. So
Speaker 1: it became real. It became real. It became real earlier that.
Speaker 1: But then it was like, okay, all right, Jay just
Speaker 1: found me guilty. Then when they went to the sentence phase,
Speaker 1: you came back and do you remember what they said?
Speaker 1: Did the jury stand up and the foreman tell you
Speaker 1: what you were sentenced to? Yeah, they say, we recommend
Speaker 1: death something like that. This is gonna be crazy here. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was really messed up after that. I was really
Speaker 1: that was really messed up. I probably didn't show it,
Speaker 1: but um well they asked me to, and I looked
Speaker 1: in at magazine. I've seen that that book they had
Speaker 1: for Free Life and Relationship to Death. And then he
Speaker 1: really get this book, man, you know, and that's that's
Speaker 1: started a whole another chapter of my life. Prior to
Speaker 1: being implicated in the capital crime, Jarvis remembers watching condemned
Speaker 1: prisoners walked by his cell and wondering what it would
Speaker 1: be like to walk in those ill fitted shoes for years.
Speaker 1: You know, I I was not on Death Row, but
Speaker 1: I was a saying Quentin, and I watched Death Row
Speaker 1: walk by myself many times because they were on the
Speaker 1: fifth tier and I was down on the fourth tier,
Speaker 1: and so they were around me. And then I end
Speaker 1: up getting it and it was just like, this is
Speaker 1: not real. You know. You know how many times I
Speaker 1: walked across Death Row and I looked that people and
Speaker 1: they just looked like they were cattle or something. And
Speaker 1: I felt really bad because they were on death Road,
Speaker 1: and they always wanted to know what that feel like
Speaker 1: at night. The only thing that made the kind of
Speaker 1: light was that they have to go nowhere. You know.
Speaker 1: I was in the same sale uh new people all
Speaker 1: up and down the chier. You know, I had been
Speaker 1: there a couple of years, so they didn't take me
Speaker 1: to this new unit or anything like that. You know,
Speaker 1: it kept me right where I was, So I just
Speaker 1: came back with a new sentence. Sentenced to death. Jarvis
Speaker 1: began writing about life on death Row early into a sentence.
Speaker 1: One person who he credits for teaching him and motivating
Speaker 1: him to write about his ordeal. Is Buddhist writer and teacher.
Speaker 1: Susan Moon is someone I've been known for a long time,
Speaker 1: and she's a writer, and she's the editor of Turning
Speaker 1: Will that I got published in so many times when
Speaker 1: she visited me, I used to always learned from her plan.
Speaker 1: When I finally got that Bird has My Wings gun,
Speaker 1: she helped from the first page to the end. It
Speaker 1: was with Susan's guidance in that Jarvis won the prestigious
Speaker 1: Pen Literary Award for his unnerving poem entitled Recipe for
Speaker 1: Prison and Pruno. Pruno, incidentally, is homemade fruit based fermented
Speaker 1: prison alcohol, also referred to as hooch rescue for pruno.
Speaker 1: Suthan Moose says, you know what, General, sucust do something.
Speaker 1: Let me write something and you write something that goes
Speaker 1: in between, and see what it sounds like. And I said,
Speaker 1: all right, let's do it. So when I went back
Speaker 1: to myself a few days later, I had got the
Speaker 1: order the transcripts that issued my death one, and I
Speaker 1: was looking at this and I was saying, wow, you
Speaker 1: know these people got every sentence serious as hell. I said, wow,
Speaker 1: this is right. You know you will be put onto this.
Speaker 1: You will remain as saying Quentin until you put the death.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, and this is James Cagney type movie stuff,
Speaker 1: you know. So I looked at it and looked at it,
Speaker 1: and at the same time, I had a big old
Speaker 1: batch of puno under the bed. You know, it was
Speaker 1: ready to So I looked at both them and I said,
Speaker 1: you know what I will see if I can write
Speaker 1: the same thing. Susan showed me how to do it right.
Speaker 1: So I took one. I took the transcripts off the
Speaker 1: court order, my def sence court order, and I knew
Speaker 1: how to make prono. So I wrote prono and I
Speaker 1: had the transcripts and I said, okay, this is how
Speaker 1: you make prono. And this is what you got now,
Speaker 1: this is how to see what students. You remember what
Speaker 1: Susan Moon did, right, thisn't that? And you give and
Speaker 1: I started reading. I said, well this is pretty good.
Speaker 1: I did this and I did that. I said, oh man,
Speaker 1: this is starting to scare me. Now. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: getting ready to get executed and I need a drink in.
Speaker 1: Actor and social rights activist Danny Glover read Jarvis's award
Speaker 1: winning poem and it can mention called doing time organized
Speaker 1: to celebrate prison writers. Here he is intertwined with Jarvis's
Speaker 1: own recitation of recipe for prison Pruno recipe for prison
Speaker 1: pun ten peel auntists Jarvis masters. It is the judgment
Speaker 1: and sentence of this court one eight hour bowl of
Speaker 1: food contail that the charge information was true, squeezed fruit
Speaker 1: into a small plastic bag, and the jury, having previously
Speaker 1: on said days and put the juice along with this
Speaker 1: mesh inside, found that the company showed be death at
Speaker 1: sixteen ounces of water and seal the bag typing at
Speaker 1: this court, having on August twenty placed the bag in
Speaker 1: your sink, then find your motion for a new trial,
Speaker 1: and heated with hot running water for fifteen minutes. It
Speaker 1: is the order of this court that you've suffered death.
Speaker 1: Wrapped howels around the bag to keep it warm for
Speaker 1: fermentation sand penalty to be inflicted within the walls of
Speaker 1: San Quentin. Stashed the bag in your cell undisturbed for
Speaker 1: forty eight hours, at which place you shall be put
Speaker 1: to death when the time elapsed in the manner described
Speaker 1: by law. At forty to sixty cubes of white sugar.
Speaker 1: The day lated to be fixed by the court and
Speaker 1: warrant of execution six TEA schools of catch up. You
Speaker 1: are recommended to the custody of the Warden of San Quentin,
Speaker 1: and he taken for thirty minutes to be held by him,
Speaker 1: pending finally secured the bag has done before determination of
Speaker 1: your appeal and stashed the bag undisturbed for seventy two hours,
Speaker 1: repeat daily for fifteen minutes. It witnessed there after seventy
Speaker 1: two hours, I have here on set my hand as
Speaker 1: judge of the Superior Court, with the spoils skim off
Speaker 1: the mash, and I have caused the seal of this
Speaker 1: court to be a fixed there to pour the remaining
Speaker 1: portion into eight god mercy have learned. So California State Prison,
Speaker 1: same king. Would Danny be saying one verse of it
Speaker 1: and I'll be saying the other? Huh? I would love
Speaker 1: Danny to be making a prono, but logically it doesn't fit.
Speaker 1: But I was just cracking a joke to seeing Danny,
Speaker 1: you know, making prono and the Selle Danny Glover that
Speaker 1: is very you had sixty seconds remaining so annoying. We
Speaker 1: start talking and it gets all interrupted constantly all the time.
Speaker 1: I do not like that lady. Yeah, and she's been
Speaker 1: on my nerves. As we were wrapping the production of
Speaker 1: this episode, I received an email notification from the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court of California regarding Jarvis's habeas corpus appeal, and it
Speaker 1: read notice of forthcoming opinion to be filed in three days.
Speaker 1: So the untenable weight is over. I asked Jarvis how
Speaker 1: he is feeling about the outcome. The greatest fear I
Speaker 1: could ever imagine, walking out of here after all these years,
Speaker 1: looking looking for where I belong in this big old place.
Speaker 1: Will the court reaffirm Jervis's death sentence, exhausting his final
Speaker 1: state appeal. Next week we'll bring you the news and
Speaker 1: what that will mean for the future of Jarvis's life.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written and produced by Donna Fazzari and myself,
Speaker 1: Corny Cole. Our theme song sentenced as compliments of the
Speaker 1: band stick Figure from the album Set in Stone. Stu
Speaker 1: sternboch Is composed the original music. Nate Defort did the
Speaker 1: sound design. Visit free Jarvis dot org to find out
Speaker 1: more about Jarvis's case and to sign your name to
Speaker 1: our dear Governor newsom petition and if you have questions
Speaker 1: for Jarvis, please leave a message on our hotline at
Speaker 1: two zero one nine zero three thirty five seventy five.
Speaker 1: That's two zero one nine zero three thirty five seventy five.
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