(First published in the Baptist Times - Outside Edge - 18 February 2011)
In September 2009, after 25 years on Death Row, Romell Broom was taken for execution by the State of Ohio. The attempt failed. After two hours of repeatedly jabbing him to find a vein, the killing team asked for a reprieve and Romell was sent back to his cell. His possessions, including the guitar he had taught himself to play, were not returned to him and there was little to occupy his mind. He requested a penfriend, via a UK organisation called Human Writes, and was allocated the next volunteer on their list.
I wrote a brief introductory letter, in which I mentioned that I was a writer. He replied that he was trying to make sense of his life and wanted to write his story. How would he go about it? I sent some tips about scene-setting but wasn't surprised when the next letter contained just a few bare facts. He had said he had left school illiterate, and even now 'can't spell and am not very smart.'
Two weeks later, a bulky envelope arrived - 3,000 words beginning: 'It was just another one of those days in Cleveland, Ohio ....'
He began his story with an incident that would make him 'learn young how to stay alive': his friend was shot dead by another boy. Shortly after, Romell's father left home, after years of violent domestic rows. There were six younger children and no income. Unable to read or write or get a job - the local factory was laying workers off - at 15, Romell became the man of the house. When he brought money home, no one asked where it came from.
He describes his parents with sympathy, their fragmented family histories repeating themselves in the next generation, but there is shock and hurt behind the details: his father's three children by other women, his mother's little boy by another man, sold at one year old by his father for $100, and his sister left behind when the family moved to another State. Only four at the time, he recalls, 'I just could not understand how they could do that.'
He describes the poverty, overcrowding and violence of the neighbourhood, and the drink, drugs, prostitution and crime that went with the 'street life.' His role models were older boys who taught him to steal and the father and uncles he thought were in regular jobs but were running a brothel and after-hours drinking club. His father took him there from the age of 12, around the same age he first got in trouble with the police.
When his story reached the year he turned 18 and went to prison, Romell hit a patch of depression. Praying through it, he concluded, 'I was not taking responsibility for what I did, that's why I didn't want to write any more. But I want the truth now.'
The next instalment, when it arrived, made painful reading and ended: 'So now I had become a rapist.'
The past year has seen Romell achieve his aim of making some sense of the past. Looking back on the execution that wasn't, he says, 'God spared my life for a reason.' He wants people to know about life on Death Row. He has seen inmates taken for execution following careless legal representation and botched appeals, while others with similar crimes get life sentences, clemency or parole.
His last letter urges, 'Do everything in your power to put out the situation about the Death Penalty, and if that means putting my name to it please do! You can use my life.'
With all its horror, poignancy, and pain inflicted and received, it is a life created by God and I believe it's worth celebrating that Romell is - against the odds - alive.
Human Writes: www.humanwrites.org
