A Tale of Two Prisoners

Five blocks from where Steven Hayes’s fate is being decided — whether the state will execute him for his part in the Petit family murders—another man told his own story about an 18-year brush with the death penalty. He lived to tell a tale about a dream of salvation and what can happen to ​“monsters” behind bars.

The former death row inmate, Juan Roberto Melendez Colon, spoke Wednesday night to a packed room at the Yale Law School at a forum on the death penalty. The forum had been planned months in advance but happened to coincide with the death penalty phase of the most sensational trial in New Haven in recent memory.

Melendez was sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of a Florida hairdresser, although he denied knowing the victim and no physical evidence linked him to the crime. He was exonerated in 2002 after his attorneys found evidence in the original trial record that another man had confessed to the murder.

“I spent 17 years, eight months and one day on death row,” Melendez said. “I was with the ‘worst of the worst’ in prison. And it was the ‘worst of the worst’—the ones the prosecutors call monsters—who taught me to read and write, and to speak English. If they hadn’t taught me, I wouldn’t have survived that place. I wouldn’t have been able to communicate with my lawyers.”

Melendez described becoming close friends with another prisoner, who one day “was snatched out of his cell, and I know what’s going to happen: they’re going to kill him, and I can’t stop it.” He said he still hears the buzz of the electric chair. He could tell when the lights flickered that his friend’s life was over.

He told a story of being close to committing suicide after ten years on death row.

“I got tired of it. I want out of there, and the only way out is to commit suicide. So I made the rope, I made a noose; I look at the rope, I look at my bunk, and I said, ‘I better lay down and think about this a little bit more,’” he said, smiling, evoking chuckles in the room. He recalled falling into a deep sleep; he dreamed about being home in Puerto Rico, which was paradise to him. “I’m swimming in the beautiful Caribbean Sea. The water’s warm. The sun is bright. The sky is blue. Then I saw four dolphins coming my way, and they were jumping like dolphins do. I’m having a ball in there. And then I saw a beautiful woman, waving and smiling at me and she seems so happy. She’s happy because I’m happy; that was my dear mother.”

After he awoke, he changed his mind about suicide. Every time he got depressed, he said, God sent him beautiful dreams. “And I was wise enough to grab them dreams as a sign of hope that one day I would be out of there, that I would be free.”

He said he suffered terribly in prison, but his mother suffered more. When he was finally back in Puerto Rico, he found her crying one morning in her room. “And I say, ‘Mama, what’s wrong?’ And she said, ‘Son, all the years, despite all the faith and hope I had in God and the Virgin of Guadelupe, all them years I was saving money to bring your dead body back to the island of Puerto Rico from Florida from that execution.’”

“No mother,” Melendez said, “should have to go through that pain.”

“I’m still a dreamer. I dream and pray to God every day that one day I will see the death penalty abolished. I dream that when a little kid come to me and say, ‘What’s the death penalty?’ I’ll say, ‘It’s a thing of the past.’ I can explain what it is and say, ‘Make sure it don’t come back.’ So, all together, black, white and brown, in harmony, we can get rid of the death penalty.”

Melendez was joined on the panel by Larry Cox (center in photo), executive director of Amnesty International USA, who said 90 percent of the executions globally are carried out by five nations: China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. One hundred thirty-nine countries no longer execute prisoners. “‘Death penalty’ is a euphemism,” he said. “We should say what it really is—killing prisoners, or exterminating human beings.”

During the Q&A after their presentations, Cox was asked what impact exonerations of death row inmates in recent years have had on the fight to end the death penalty.

“I think it’s been decisive,” Cox responded. If you want to point to the single factor that’s made more people rethink their positions, it’s the fact that so many people have been demonstrated to be innocent and yet have been placed on death row.”

Sine 1973, 138 death-row prisoners have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The third panelist Wednesday night was New Haven State Rep. Gary Holder-Winfield (pictured), who in his first term in 2009 successfully shepherded a death penalty abolition bill through the General Assembly, only to have it vetoed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Holder-Winfield said he plans to re-introduce the bill in the 2011 session. He added that if Democrat Dan Malloy is elected governor next month, ​“It will do a lot for our cause, because it will say to speak honestly about the death penalty is not political suicide.” Despite overwhelming public support for the death penalty during the Hayes trial, Malloy has continued to oppose the death penalty, while his opponent, Republican Tom Foley, is strongly in favor.