Jarvis Jay Masters has spent three-plus a long time on dying row for a criminal offense many assume he didn’t commit. Rebecca Solnit celebrated his 56th birthday with Masters as he seeks freedom by meditation till the day his conviction is overturned.

Jarvis Jay Masters. Photograph courtesy David Sheff.

Bolted to the wall is a field painted a glistening crimson, and on it stenciled in white are the letters TRAUMA. Inside there should be tools for bodily traumas as a result of this isn’t a spot that’s well-equipped for addressing emotional traumas, although it is stuffed with them.

There’s a giant black lock on the trauma field, and I’m wondering if the guards carrying utility belts with handcuffs and weapons have the important thing to unlock TRAUMA, or whether it is with the guard on the entry sales space, behind the thick plexiglass. How do you unlock trauma? Who holds the keys to freedom? One of many guards has an insulated lunchbox sitting on the TRAUMA field, from which he removes a doughnut; the opposite one has a small ziplock bag of what appears to be like like Oreo cookies.

To the correct of the TRAUMA field is a collection of cages by which there are individuals visiting face-to-face however locked in these cages. To the left, individuals go to by thick home windows, generally utilizing a cellphone receiver to speak with the particular person they’re going through. Two Latino males and a lady crowd round a window in order that I can’t see who they’re speaking to; a lady along with her hair in tiny braids speaks to a giant, good-looking man on the opposite aspect of the glass, and one other girl with lengthy crimson hair props her tiny daughter on the shelf the place a person is making an attempt to attach along with her from the opposite aspect. Generally the kid responds; generally she appears to be like away. I wave and smile, however she’s having none of it from me and never a lot of it from the person who may be her father.

He’s managed to make, in some methods, a great life inside probably the most horrific limits conceivable.

It’s visiting day at San Quentin State Jail: February 24, 2018. It’s additionally Jarvis Masters’s fifty-sixth birthday, and I’m ready to see him. These are some belongings you may need to find out about Jarvis Masters: Pema Chödrön drops by to see him when she’s within the Bay Space. He took the precepts with Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche in 1989. He has a severe meditation observe and a energetic humorousness. And he’s on dying row in San Quentin for a criminal offense he didn’t commit.

Jarvis has been ready for greater than three a long time for an opportunity to have the shoddy proof and corrupted trial that convicted him reviewed and his conviction overturned. Throughout that point, he’s written a couple of books, transformed to Buddhism, spent plenty of time meditating, and constructed a remarkably huge and thriving social life past the jail partitions, a lot of it with fellow Buddhists.

I love the methods he’s managed to make, in some methods, a great life inside probably the most horrific limits conceivable. Although our earlier visits had been in cages, immediately I’ve to speak to him by thick glass as a result of he’s being punished for protesting his personal scenario and that of the boys round him. He’s waited a long time for an opportunity to problem the decision and introduce new proof, throughout which period he’s lived with a dying sentence hanging over him.

Right here in California, we aren’t positive whether or not we need to have state-sanctioned murders or not, so we hold sentencing individuals to dying however have held few executions for the reason that dying penalty was reinstated. There are actually greater than seven hundred individuals on dying row, way over in every other state. The final execution was in 2006, of a person sentenced in 1981.

It’s merciless and weird punishment to maintain somebody ready, not understanding if and when a state-inflicted dying will occur. When Jarvis went on a starvation strike, he was pondering of all of the condemned males there with him who die of pure causes or go mad within the bleak situations underneath which they reside. It’s a sophisticated scenario—many prisoners concern that if the dying penalty is overturned, they are going to be given life with out parole and lose their entry to the appeals course of and to authorized illustration. They’re, in a means, prisoners of forms. On election day in 2016, Californians voted to move Proposition 66, a measure designed to hurry up the dying penalty. However there’s a stalemate about what medication may be legally used for executions. In a means, the prisoners are locked in a field labeled TRAUMA, and who holds the important thing stays to be seen.

Rebecca Solnit (proper) visits Jarvis Jay Masters on dying row in San Quentin State Jail. Photograph courtesy of Rebecca Solnit.

Jarvis and I discuss his case, and his starvation strike, and the authorized scenario, and the deep struggling he sees throughout him. Then we discuss writing, and his books, after which my books, after which the trauma of these subjected to violence on the road, within the residence, and in jail. Someway two hours move, after which the guards take him away as I swiftly sing a couple of traces of “Blissful Birthday.” And so he enters his fifty-sixth 12 months of a life spent largely on this jail.

Jarvis was a Black baby in Southern California who lived by the worst of what poverty and the state foster care system and juvenile justice system needed to supply. He was imprisoned as a baby for operating away from abusive properties, after which at eighteen he held a gun in a theft organized by his uncle’s pal and at nineteen went to San Quentin.

There he might need served out his time, however he was accused of sharpening the weapon with which a jail guard was murdered in the summertime of 1985, when he was twenty-three. There are layers of causes to query the costs, together with the obvious bodily impossibility of his having transported a weapon from the place he was locked as much as the place the assassin stabbed the guard. The trial was a farce, with shoddy proof, lacking proof, witnesses who had been bribed, and others who modified their story. Another person has confessed to sharpening the weapon. The assassin and the prisoner who ordered the homicide didn’t obtain the dying penalty. The assassin has testified that Jarvis is harmless.

Pema Chödrön says, “I consider in Jarvis Masters’s innocence. This isn’t merely due to my love for him, however my certainty is predicated on having heard a lot of the proof.”

There’s a group of Buddhists who hope to construct an even bigger motion to free him. They’re drawing consideration to his case by elevating his profile with letters to California’s governor, legal professional basic, and a key state senator, and urgent for a good listening to quickly. On January 26, there was a worldwide day of meditation with and for Jarvis. You’ll be able to be taught extra at freejarvis.org.