SO I started hanging around these bikers and naturally I learned how to cuss, I learned how to steal, I learned how to sell drugs, and I learned how to do them.  TO put it plainly, I wasn't nothing but a fowl mouth little punk.   It wasn't long before I began taking these drugs to school to sell them.  And the other kids thought I was cool and looked up to me as some kind of leader.  But I wasn't being cool, I was being a fool.  Because if I knew then what I know now, I'd of stayed in school, gotten an education and made something of myself.

It wasn't long before I got kicked out of school and at the time I thought it was the happiest time of my life.  So I just went back to the old motorcycle gang, wheeling, stealing and doing drugs.  I earned the nickname Hustler for my fast and easy way to earning money.  But little did I know or care that the state of Tennessee had a cell waiting for me, and it was on Tennessee's death row. 

For the last twenty years of my life, I've been in prisons, and I've spent the past 13 years on Tennessee's death row.  At one time I slept about twenty feet from the electric chair, called Old Sparky.  There wasn't a day that went by that I didn't think about death and dying in that electric chair and I thought about what got me there.  It was not going to school, getting a good education, drugs, alcohol and being a gang member, and choosing the wrong kind of friends

CHOICES.....We make choices everyday...from the time we get up in the morning until the time we go to bed at night. 

You're too smart to get caught at what you're doing.  Perhaps you aren't doing anything but hanging around with the wrong kind of people and you think there's no harm in doing that. Well, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong....dead wrong.  I'll tell you how easily something like that can happen to you.....and to your whole family. No one else is to blame anyone for your mistakes. 

You and you alone made those choices. It doesn't matter if you think you deserve all the good things in life. So you're family wasn't like the Waltons, or Little House on the prairie.  So you didn't wear designer clothes to school....or have a lot of spending money....perhaps you were abused as a child, mentally and physically.  Perhaps you feel that you have the right to take what you want in life, no matter what you have to do to get it....even committing a violent act against someone else. You don't....

You can't blame anyone for the choices you alone have made. You can overcome your past. Don't blame society because you started doing drugs....even if you did see you're parents drinking and doing drugs. You don't have to follow in their footsteps.  

            In this book you will hear some of the guys who are in prison, some who are on death row, who have done drugs, alcohol, been in gangs, committed robberies, killed and on and on.  They will tell you about prison life and what it feels like to wait to die.  To sit in a cell 24 hours a day and see the electric chair...knowing that one day they will be placed in it and will undergo the most horrible pain imaginable.  All because they made the wrong choices in life.   

Click on photo to enlarge.  These are the men in the video on Tennessee's death row.

                         Gerald Laney                Richard Simon                                      

 

         

Billy Groseclose       Gerald Laney & Guards

 

    

Don Johnson           Shirley Dicks & Don

a If I could advise troubled teens who might be headed down a dark cold path, I would tell them to stop, listen and set and obey limits in life.  Never allow a first time to do something wrong or breaking the law.  Once a line has been crossed, it becomes hard to go back to the other side of what is right.  I know that now as I recount the events that led to my being on death row.  The second time you choose the path you know to be wrong, you lose fear of what is right or wrong.  We should fear the loss of freedom.  A child should fear the displeasure of their parents.  Be careful where you walk, the path you play on might be the exact same path that leads to pain, tears and grief.  Don't ever think your actions affect only you.  Whatever you do, will always affect you and others.   

.  The mistakes you make today you'll be paying for the rest of your life cause drugs and prison are no kind of life for anyone.  I don't care what movies you've seen on TV, this has to be the saddest kind of life to live. You have to depend on everyone for everything; locked up in a cell twenty-three hours a day, and folks tell you what to do and when to do it.  It's just a sad thing and if anybody out there is breaking the law, I wish you would slow down.  The prison system doesn't care for you like your parents do.  In prison it's every man for himself, and I'd hate to see a young child come in here and have to grow up overnight.  It's an environment where only the strong survive.  Talk to your parents when you have a problem, or someone.  Prison is easy to get to, but hard to get out of. 

I'd hate to see you come here and be another number, and that's all you'd be, just another number.  I couldn't help you, I couldn't do anything for you.  I'd just look at you like another enemy.  Someone who's going to try to steal something from me, someone I can't trust.  So please listen to me.  If you’re out there doing wrong, don't waste your life like I wasted mine.