The Buddhist on Death Row

But the hope would inevitably evaporate. Awful thoughts beset him: terror about the result of the trial and fear of reprisals by guards. Jarvis viewed depression as a weakness—it was a word he’d never abide—but he fell into depression so deep and dark he felt he’d never emerge.

Melody passed along more advice from her teacher: “Remember, Jarvis. None of that is today. Come back to now. You can control your mind.”

You can control your mind. Those words triggered a memory of the time he’d heard them before.

“We will train your body and train your mind.”

That’s what Jarvis was told once he’d been inducted into the BGF.

There was boot camp—like physical training that included calisthenics, jogging around the yard, and martial arts. The soldiers spent hours marching. As they did, they repeated in marching cadence a drill instructor’s words. The instructor yelled, “Can’t stop,” and the recruits repeated, “Can’t stop!”

It continued:

“Can’t stop.”

“Won’t stop!”

“Never cop.”

“Never cop!”

“Never drop.”

“Never drop!”

“Who say?”

“We say!”

“Machine.”

“Machine!”

“Machine on the move.”

“Machine on the move!”

“Machine we never lose.”

“Machine we never lose!”

“Over the wall.”

“Over the wall!”

“Freedom call.”

“Freedom call!”

The voices of sixty black men yelling those words echoed throughout San Quentin—in the chow hall, on the north and south yards, and up in the warden’s office.

The training intensified. Jarvis practiced taking dictation in Swahili and English and learned how to fashion knives, zip guns, and explosives. His responsibilities included copying and delivering kites—coded messages—from one BGF member to another. He was charged with monitoring the tier and passing contraband between members.

The instructors also trained his mind. He was schooled in the history of the BGF, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. He studied BGF doctrine, its constitution, and its code of conduct.

Jarvis told Melody that the training had succeeded in politicizing him and giving him purpose he’d never had, but it also trained him to feel nothing. He’d been hard, but it made him harder.

Jarvis became lost in thought. When he spoke again, he said he realized that his training for the gang had actually begun at birth. Throughout his life, he’d been taught to take punishment and give it while silencing his conscience, concealing his fear, and suppressing his will. But now he was engaged in an utterly different type of mental training, and he was starting to feel its effects. He felt a chill travel through his body when he realized he was twenty-four years old, in prison, facing a murder charge that could result in his death. But he was in training again.

3

Scars

Besides writing for her job, Melody wrote essays about the criminal justice system for magazines and journals. On one visit she showed Jarvis a story she’d written about children visiting their parents in prison. He responded thoughtfully, and his reaction gave her an idea. She was continuing to flesh out the report about his life and asked if he’d help her by writing answers to questions she would provide.

Jarvis had never learned to read or write well, but when he was twelve or thirteen years old, a teacher at a program for juvenile offenders had him write a story and told him that he had a talent for writing. Other than in letters, he’d never written for or about himself. He was insecure about his limited vocabulary and poor grammar, but he agreed to try. He took Melody’s questions to his cell and answered them truthfully.

When she read his responses, Melody saw his talent, too.

She was in a women’s writers group in which she and friends did writing exercises, and she suggested that they do a couple of those exercises together. They agreed on a theme—“rain,” for instance, or “a conversation overheard.” She took off her watch and lay it on the small shelf between them in the booth. “All right,” she said. “Ten minutes. Go.”

She took his exercises to her writers group’s meetings, and she returned to San Quentin with the other group members’ feedback. Jarvis became a de facto member of the group, the only male and the only prisoner.

Jarvis began writing in his cell. He wrote with the Bic pen insert, which was, he told Melody, his most valuable possession. Not having a table or desk, he rolled up his mattress and stuffed it in a corner, then sat cross-legged on the floor, placed a sheet of paper on the stripped concrete slab that was his bed, and wrote feverishly for hours. Paper was at a premium; in order to get as many words on each page as possible, he developed a tiny, even script that looked almost like typing. Sometimes he wrote all night. He never imagined there was something he could be good at, a talent, and being inspired to do something constructive—being inspired at all—was a new feeling. Writing gave him a different kind of power than came from knives or guns—subtler but no less palpable.

“You meet a whole new person when you start writing about yourself,” he wrote Melody.

Writing opened him to strange feelings and memories he’d lost, including many he didn’t want to remember.

“I see how messed up I was, believe me,” he told her. “Some of my past experiences were like a horror movie.”

Writing not only made Jarvis remember more, it made him notice more. He felt the wind on his skin when it found its way to him through a broken window across the walkway from his cell. He heard the sorrowful cries of gulls, and he relished the soothing warmth of the sun on his face when he was on the yard for the all-too-brief three hours, three times a week he was allowed outside. He noticed light and shadows moving along his cell walls and floor. He eavesdropped on conversations among inmates and guards. He studied their accents and vernacular, and he recorded their dialogue.

Jarvis noticed sounds he’d lived with but never heard: the scrape of a food cart’s wheels along the corridor, the jangling rhythm of keys and handcuffs clanging off the belts of guards who passed his cell, the scurry of a mouse, and the babel of radio stations tuned to country, metal, and blues, wailing preachers and NPR.

That heightened awareness filtered into his meditation. He noticed his surroundings: feelings, noises, smells. But even more intensely, he felt a new world of sensation inside his body. He discovered the tightness in his belly, the alternating tautness and slack of his lungs, the stress that throbbed in his temples, the pulsing weight of anxiety in his chest.

When he described those sensations to Melody, she said he was discovering mindfulness, a form of meditation. “You become fully present in the moment. Experience it. When your mind wanders, return to your body, what you sense outside and inside you, and breathe.”

Jarvis’s self-imposed training began each day with two hours of meditation followed by exercise. He recorded his progress on a calendar he’d drawn. Four hundred sit-ups, five hundred push-ups, five hundred or more burpees, and again. Next he walked up and down the length of his cell 520 times, which was a mile. That or he ran in place until the guard came by with the food cart with breakfast: cardboardy pancakes or powdered scrambled eggs, a couple slices of bread, and a packet of instant coffee that he mixed with lukewarm water from the sink.

On weekends or other times court wasn’t in session, the morning routine was followed by writing letters and responses to more of Melody’s questions, games of chess with other cons on the tier (they yelled moves, which they tracked in their respective cells), and reading. The few cherished hours he was allowed outside, he went to the yard to breathe clean air.

One day, Jarvis was on the yard, watching a group of shirtless men lifting weights. Though it was a common sight, he’d never paid attention to it before. He’d never noticed how their bodies were marked with scars, the evidence of whips, belts, chains, knives, bullets, and fire. It reminded him of slaves’ scarred bodies, which he’d seen in old photographs in books, and of his own scars.

With sadness, he realized that all of those men had endured abuse and pain like his, and some had survived far worse. When he was alone with them on the yard, he cautiously asked them about their scars. Some shut him down, but others talked openly. One told him about how his father thrashed him with a steel rod. Another’s father used a tire iron.

Jarvis’s own scars had mostly faded, but one on his left forearm was prominent. Back when he was a teenager in a lockup for juvenile delinquents, counselors put lit cigarettes on boys’ arms and bet on which of them would let the cigarette burn the longest without pulling away. Losers were beaten.

Later, when Jarvis told Melody about his conversations on the yard, she encouraged him to write them down.

He huddled over a sheet of paper and scratched a line at a time. “Deep sadness came over me as I watched these powerful men lift hundreds of pounds of weights over their heads,” he wrote. “I looked around the yard and made the gruesome discovery that everyone else had the same deep gashes—behind their legs, on their backs, all over their ribs—evidence of the violence in our lives….

“The histories of all of us in San Quentin were so similar, it was as if we had the same parents.”

A few weeks later he gave Melody a half dozen pages and shifted uncomfortably while she read.

She marveled at his story. Beyond the solid writing, she saw it as a remarkable testament to how far he’d come since they’d met. Then he’d had no self-awareness, never mind the ability to see others. He cared about no one and nothing but himself. Now he recognized others’ suffering, responded with compassion, and connected others’ pain with his own.

Melody had a thought that made her smile. On his own and without knowing it, Jarvis had arrived at the heart of Buddhism.

Many prisoners find solace in religion, but Jarvis was disdainful of it after a lifetime of abuse in the name of God. He did have one positive memory of faith because of his first foster parents. When he was five years old and separated from his family, a social worker took him to live with Mamie and Dennis Procks, an elderly, childless couple who greeted his arrival with joy. They showed him around their freshly painted home on a quiet, tree-lined street where kids played and rode bikes. He was stunned when they showed him his room. When he lived with his mother, he shared a tiny room with his siblings and slept on a pee-stained mattress. At the Prockes’ he had his own room, a dresser stocked with clean clothes, a closet full of toys, and his own bed with ironed sheets.

Every night before bed, Mamie made him pray. When she had him pray for his mother, Jarvis asked why. Mamie said his mother loved him, and it was hard for her to be separated from him. She got Jarvis talking about Cynthia, what he missed about her. Mamie told him to pray for Cynthia because she’d been through hard times. He missed his mother and sometimes felt angry that she wasn’t around. He didn’t understand why she left or where she had gone. When he thought about it, he felt sorry for himself. But Mamie made him feel sorry for her.

Whereas the Procks embodied generosity and Christlike goodness, Jarvis’s subsequent foster parents proselytized about Jesus’s love and dragged him to church, meanwhile beating and starving him. Judges invoked Christ as they issued cruel sentences. One exhorted him, “Look to Jesus in your heart,” before sending him to a youth detention center “to get some discipline,” which apparently meant being burned, beaten, and forced to fight other kids.

Melody and Jarvis had discussed religion, and she knew that he had good reason to be wary of it. She’d felt the same way until her meditation teacher helped her face the hurt she’d suffered because of her violent parents and the loss of her sister. Learning from Buddhist stories didn’t require belief in the faith’s core tenets, such as reincarnation and karma, but the parables inspired her. Along with meditation, studying Buddhism helped her heal.

Jarvis appreciated that Melody wasn’t a blind follower, and he was intrigued when she said that Buddhist parables “make us think in new ways and break us out of the thought patterns that cause our suffering.”

She sent him a book about Buddhist philosophy. One night he picked it up and read about the Buddha’s previous life as a young prince named Siddhartha Gautama, who, walking in a forest, came across a tigress who was starving and couldn’t feed her cubs. The prince gave his body to the tigress to save her and the cubs from dying.

The story’s moral of compassion and generosity didn’t quite resonate with Jarvis. He thought, Now, that’s some stupid shit. He died to save some tigers?

As the trial continued, Melody encouraged Jarvis and the lawyers reassured him, saying the truth would come out, but whatever optimism and bravado he had was fading. He tried not to think about the worst of the possible outcomes of the trial, but he couldn’t keep them away. Forget about getting out and going home, having a normal life. Forget about being with Carlette or his other siblings and their families, watching their children grow up, having Sunday dinners with them, having his own family. The possibility of a murder conviction was sinking in, and so was the fact that he could die here. One of those nights spent awake, freaking out, scared, careening from hopelessness to panic to rage and back, he imagined himself being locked in the gas chamber. His temples pounded so hard he thought he’d pass out. Meditation helped him find moments of relative peace, but it wasn’t enough to pull him out of waking nightmares like that one. He fell deeper into depression, feeling he’d never get out. In the morning he wrote Melody and admitted that he sometimes contemplated suicide. “I won’t do it,” he wrote. “Don’t worry. But you couldn’t be in here and not think about it.”

Guards continued to provoke him. He knew they hoped he’d fight back so they’d have an excuse to beat him. Most of the time he was able to restrain himself, but sometimes they pushed him too far. Once he cursed at a pair of guards and was dragged to the end of the tier and thrown into what the prison called a “quiet cell.” Behind two steel doors, the section housed some of San Quentin’s most violent and insane prisoners and was like a lockdown ward in a mental hospital. Prisoners moaned, wept, howled, and screamed all night long. Jarvis felt like screaming along with them. Lying on his bunk, he held his hands over his ears and fought the urge to cry.

Meditation provided some relief from the horrors of the quiet cell. Jarvis also bided his time exercising maniacally and, when he could concentrate, writing letters and reading, until he was moved back to his previous Adjustment Center cell three months later.

Late that spring, the jury began deliberations. While waiting for a verdict, Jarvis was kept in a holding tank near the courtroom. One day when Melody visited, she gave him a pamphlet with a picture of an ancient man on the cover. He had a wizened face, a long, wispy mustache and beard, wild wiry eyebrows, and eyes that seemed to stare directly at him. The accompanying text offered free writings by the “lama” Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. Jarvis wrote to the address and requested them. In a note, he described himself as a prisoner who’d been accused of a murder he hadn’t committed. If he was convicted, he could be sentenced to death. He said he’d been meditating regularly but admitted that with the trial hanging over him and his having to watch out for threatening guards, he was struggling to continue.

That evening when Jarvis was back in his cell, he handed a guard the letter to be mailed, and he didn’t give it any more thought. At the time, he was trying not to think, especially about the pending verdict. He tried to remain positive—he was innocent, so of course he’d be exonerated—but he’d sat through damning testimony and tried to brace himself in case the news was bad.

The trial continued for two agonizing years. Finally Jarvis was told that the jury had reached its decision, and he was led from the holding cell to the courtroom.

He appeared stoic when he and his lawyers were told to rise, and the judge asked the foreman if the jury had reached a verdict. The foreman said they had.

They’d found him guilty.

Jarvis had rehearsed the moment in his mind, but it still didn’t seem possible.

The judge announced that the trial would next move to the sentencing phase, and Jarvis was taken back to his cell, where he lay down and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he spiraled downward into a black rage from which no amount of meditation, no teachings, no parable could lift him.

The penalty phase began and, as expected, the prosecution argued for Jarvis’s death. His lawyers used witnesses Melody had tracked down in their presentation, determined to convince the jurors to spare his life. They hoped that the testimony of those who knew Jarvis when he was young, the accounts of the violence and abandonment he’d endured as a child and teenager, would convince the jury that he shouldn’t be executed. It would also be the first time Jarvis would speak in court.

Prepared by the lawyers, he read a statement Melody had helped him compose. When he finished reading it, he answered lawyers’ questions about his years of incarceration. He was forthright except when asked about the Black Guerrilla Family. The BGF code of conduct didn’t expire, and Jarvis remained loyal and refused to speak about the gang. When he declined to debrief about the BGF, Judge Savitt ordered that his entire testimony be stricken from the record and that the jurors disregard what he had said.

After he testified, Jarvis was consumed with guilt over what he’d revealed about his mother’s neglect and abuse. He felt he’d betrayed her by telling family secrets. Though Melody reassured him that he’d done the right thing, he was still distraught.

Melody thought it might help him if he wrote Cynthia a letter. She knew, and Jarvis did, too, how writing could clarify one’s thinking. Though Cynthia was dead, Melody suggested that Jarvis write to her as if she were alive.

“Dear Mama,” he wrote, “[In court,] I did what I know you would have wanted me to do, which is held my head up as I told what I had been through. If I said anything that hurt you more than it hurt me, then I am sorry that your rest is still with pain.”

He listed ways she had hurt him, how she’d used him to “jack up the price for sex” by telling men “I gotta take care of my kids” and never thought about the fact that he and the other children heard her with men in the bedroom. He asked why she didn’t intervene when Otis [his mother’s boyfriend] hit him and his siblings.

Jarvis asked, “Did you love Otis more than us … even when he pimped you like a dog?”

Jarvis wrote about how he felt when she was high: “I used to watch you lying on the bed…. I always felt like you were Mama when you were asleep and a stranger when you were awake…. Mama, we all were scared of you. Nobody knows how you whipped us. Nobody knows the many things drugs made you do.”

But then he softened: “Sometimes my thoughts tell me that I should hate you too, but life showed you so much hate that when I look into your eyes in my memories of you, you were like a little girl needing someone—needing a father just like we all did.”

He concluded, “Mama, I have to confront these memories—they’re killing me…. I will hate everything that killed you. We share the same hurt, Mama, but I just can’t grow old hurting the way I do. I have to surrender to it—let it go, make sense of it all. Mama, I know you loved me and I swear I love you. Please forgive me and [don’t] hold me to blame [for what I said in court]. It’s not a secret when horror lives and exists in the mind. But shit, now I’m scared of you and this feeling of guilt is why I write to you for your forgiveness.”

He signed it “JJ—3:58 AM.”

His letter broke Melody’s heart. Jarvis was apologizing to his mother, but what he needed was an apology from her, something he would never get.

The penalty phase continued for three weeks. Besides Jarvis, relatives, former counselors, and foster parents spoke about his difficult early life, testimony meant to induce the jury’s sympathy. However, the prosecution argued that Jarvis’s life history didn’t excuse his criminality; it documented it.

Prosecutors once again emphasized Jarvis’s long record, his violence at LA County Jail, and his write-ups in San Quentin for fighting and other crimes for which he’d never been charged or convicted. Unlike in the guilt phase, they were allowed to raise unsubstantiated accusations; the innocent-until-proven-guilty presumption had ended when he’d been convicted. They portrayed him as coldhearted and unremorseful, but it was still shocking when the jury sentenced him to death.

The final stage of the trial came next. Judges in death penalty cases can affirm or modify juries’ recommendations based on their own evaluation of the evidence.

Jarvis’s legal team believed that his life would be spared, especially since the lives of the other convicted defendants—the man who stabbed the guard and the one who ordered the killing—had been; they’d been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Judge Savitt spent a month completing a review before summoning Jarvis to court to hear her decision in July 1990.

Michael Satris, a renowned criminal lawyer, made the final plea. He stood and spoke with somber eloquence as he implored Judge Savitt to try to “live the experience of Jarvis Masters … to walk the life that Jarvis did: be shaken in the womb by the violence that literally was awaiting his birth, and to be born in that brutality, and be abandoned, and be rejected, and be in the ghetto, and feel that pain, and feel that shame.”

He asked the judge to consider Jarvis’s life from there, after being removed from his mother’s custody and separated from his sisters, who were the only consistent family he’d had, “to be isolated, and cry those tears.”

Satris described Jarvis’s entry into foster care; after the Procks, it was a “world of violence and crime,” which in turn led to one cruel institution after another.

And then to San Quentin and solitary confinement. “We know what the conditions of that confinement can do to a person.

“What’s remarkable,” Satris continued, “is the way that he has been able to break through that violence even with the limited resources and opportunity he’s had. And he has broken through. And there is the evidence which supports the long-standing program of maturation, rehabilitation, development, whatever you want to call it, that has allowed Mr. Masters to break through that. And how strong, how invincible is the human spirit that any of us, our children, that we can have such confidence that we would have been able to withstand the conditions, the effects of Mr. Masters’s upbringing on him any better than he has been able to do?”

Satris closed by imploring the judge to “reach as deep” into herself as she could to modify the jury’s sentence and spare Jarvis’s life.

Next, the prosecution argued that the evidence of mitigation was outweighed by the “evidence for aggravation.” Once again the prosecution listed the armed robberies for which Jarvis had been convicted and claimed that he’d participated in the violent crimes they’d raised earlier, and then its presentation ended. It was Judge Savitt’s turn.

The judge began by admitting that there had been “fleeting” moments during the trial when she had asked herself why she had taken on the case in the first place. She also stated her opposition to the death penalty but said she was charged with applying the law whether she agreed with it or not. “It’s my duty.”