Nicolas Bourcier, Le Monde, 4 August 2007
Translation provided by Kenneth Foster Jr. Campaign
DR for death row. Two initials marked on Kenneth Foster’s white pants. Two indelible letters to underline, as if it were necessary,that the countdown has started. Since May this young death row prisoner, 30-year old, knows the Texas authorities have set his execution date for August 30th, a Thursday, around 6pm. A date and a time programmed 10 years ago, almost to the day, when he was sentenced to death by a court in San Antonio not for having killed someone but for not having ever, according to the jury, premeditated or anticipated a crime and having ran away in a car with the murderer. Kenneth Foster is here, he stands in one of the visiting cages at the Polunsky Unit, home of Texas death row, made of steel and concrete, lost somewhere on a country road in Livingston, a small ordinary town north of Houston. The guard locks the door and mechanically unlocks the cuffs behind his back.
He sits down. He sets his watch down in front of the safety glass partition as to better control time, the forty-five minutes granted for the interview. He smiles. “Hello” he says while picking up the phone. “How are you?” Apparently calm, Kenneth Foster does not demonstrate any signs of weakness, no attempt to dominate his fear. Tall guy with immediate charm, he speaks well, aptly uses the flow of words such as the rap musician he would have liked to become before his arrest.
He keeps the hard times to himself, as to protect himself, within the four walls of his tiny cell, of the fatal instant and from the intrusion by the department of corrections, which take a prisoner to his death in Huntsville, a near-by town where Texas executes its death row prisoners by lethal injection. Yesterday it was Lonnie Earl Johnson’s turn, a companion, “a friend” whom he had known for nine years. “Those moments are hard, they strike the spirit, challenge the intellect and the emotions… One keeps looking at one’s watch.”
He says he does not have any “hatred or anger, only rage but the positive kind that feeds energy, the fuel”. The system? “I know it is unfair, I know the underlying dose of racism in the United States. But it is up to us to be intelligent, at least as much as those who lead us.” Not once does he accuse those who sentenced him based on the color of his skin. He will not mention the victim’s father, Michael Lahood, a white attorney in San Antonio. Kenneth Foster does not raise the hopeless injustice of being born on the wrong side of the social fence. He simply sticks to the facts, recalls that he never killed anyone and that he was incapable of predicting that Mauriceo Brown, one of the three men he went out with that night of August 1996, was going to kill a certain Michael Lahood Jr.
On two occasions that night, he attempted to stop this night trip and to leave the small group he hardly knew and that had just committed two pathetic robberies, stealing $300 from passers-by picked at random. When the shot was fired, he said he did not understand what was going on, he saw nothing, only the pale and panting face of Mauriceo Brown who had come out of the car a few seconds ago to follow a girl in a private property. Kenneth Foster got scared. In one move, he put his foot down on the throttle. He was 19 years old and had just borrowed his grandfather’s car, the only member of his family who cared for him.
Then came the trial, those “never ending lines of errors”, this first court-appointed attorney “who was obviously a beginner”, the magistrate who refused to try him separately from the murderer, the testimony of a confused Julius Steen, the third man who will change his deposition on two occasions years later, to affirm that he had not played any direct or indirect part in the death of young Lahood.
Kenneth Foster was tried under the law of parties, which allows the sentencing of secondary participants to a crime. A law passed by half a dozen states in the 70’s, but that only Texas uses for capital punishment. In total, experts estimate that this law has been a determining factor in the execution of twenty death row prisoners.
The death row prisoner nods gently, takes a breath. Five times during his appeals he asked to be re-tried, five times his request was denied. Those years of procedure have only brought him technically closer to death, one court order after another. “Once started, this machinery is very hard to stop” he explains, almost in a professional manner.
Also sentenced to death, Mauriceo Brown was executed on July 17th, 2006. Kenneth Foster says it hit him, but hardly makes a comment: “I was never very close to him, not even here in prison.”
Kenneth Foster still hopes the nine Judges of the CCA in Austin will review his sentence in the next few days, or that the Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Perry, who has never granted clemency, will grant him a new trial. He says: “Yes Texas is the state where the largest number of prisoners are executed in this country, nineteen since the beginning of the year.” And states: “I do no want prayers or candles. I want people to fight and stand up for me, to show these politicians that some people think differently.”
Kenneth Foster looks at his watch and signals we have little time left. “It’s getting close” he whispers in the phone. On his fingers, he counts the number of scheduled executions before his: four out of the 390 death row prisoners confined within these walls. “I have to be vigilant and precise with the numbers. Each decision by the authorities is important for me.”
He says he gets information from his attorneys, his loved ones who visit him regularly, from the radio mostly the public channel NPR. “Can you imagine, we don’t even have a television…” An additional punishment by the system, according to him, a daily sanction which comes on top of the “privilege” to make one five-minute phone call every ninety days. He adds, while picking up his watch: “Each death sentence is a regression, a defeat for society. In any case it will never be a solution no matter what the crime, as unforgivable as it may be.” He stands up. His 13-year old daughter is due to visit him later this week. He puts the phone down and smiles one last time.