In “Crimson Letters,” North Carolina Inmates Describe a Bleak Life on Death Row

“I’d much rather have a quick gunshot to the head or the heart than endure this type of agony. It’s excessive. I committed a crime. I deserve to be punished. Well then take me and blow my brains out right away, but don’t do me like this! 24 years of torment?! I didn’t torment any of my victims like this. This is the type of shit that will make a mind unravel. It breaks you. … This shit will make you lose your sanity until you are falling apart. I don’t want to get out of bed sometimes. It’s a shame when the only relief you can hope for is death.” — Michael Braxton

In 1996, Michael Braxton was sentenced to die for killing another inmate at the Caledonia Correctional Center in Halifax, where he was already serving a life sentence for killing a man during a robbery in Raleigh. 

According to court documents, he was running an illegal canteen-and-cards operation at Caledonia. A man named Dwayne Maurice Caldwell owed him $17. Though other inmates pooled their money to pay off Caldwell’s debt, Braxton gave them their money back, telling them, “It was a principle thing.” He then stabbed Caldwell 18 to 20 times in the shower. 

It’s not the kind of story that elicits sympathy, and it contrasts with the poetry of his words, which have been compiled by Tessie Castillo as part of her new book, Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row. So, too, are the words of his fellow Death Row residents Lyle May, Terry Robinson, and George Wilkerson, who likewise were convicted of horrific crimes. 

In 1999, May was given two death sentences for the stabbing and beating murders of a 24-year-old woman and her four-year-old son. That same year, Robinson was sentenced for fatally shooting a Pizza Inn manager during an attempted robbery. And in 2006, Wilkerson was given two life sentences for shooting and killing an 18- and 19-year-old. 

Castillo started working on the book when she was an advocacy and communications coordinator with the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, a nonprofit that seeks to reduce opioid overdose deaths. In that role, in 2013 she pushed the General Assembly to pass a Good Samaritan law, which allows a person experiencing or witnessing an overdose to call 911 for help without fear of criminal repercussions. 

She quit her job in 2018 to work on the book full-time. Its title, she says, reflects the color of the jumpsuits the inmates wear.

Despite their crimes, she says, her time with them convinced her of the need to share their humanity with the world. 

“The true genius of prison as punishment is not to lock men in cages or condemn them to die,” Castillo writes in the prologue, “but to starve them of love.”

“My stepdad left when I was 9, telling me I had to be the man of the house. It was a brutal environment. People had to know they couldn’t fuck with me. That’s where my focus had to be. But I didn’t do a good job. I was not a good big brother or ‘man of the house.’ I was afraid. I was a kid. I was conflicted. My spirit is gentle, yet I had to compete and contend with killers.” —Paul Brown (who began but left the Crimson Letters project)

Released in January, Crimson Letters comes at a critical moment in the history of capital punishment in North Carolina. 

The state hasn’t executed anyone in almost 14 years, not since Samuel Flippen was given a lethal injection on August 18, 2006, and it’s unlikely the machinery of death will restart anytime soon. Juries are doling out the death penalty less and less. In 2019, three inmates were adding to Death Row; the two years before that, none were. 

It’s clear that race has always been a factor in deciding who lives and who dies in North Carolina. 

In his 2019 book Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina, UNC-Chapel Hill history professor Seth Kotch argues that from the beginning, “lynching and the death penalty were in fact closely related,” with “racial subjugation as a principal goal of the criminal justice system.”

Right now, 143 people—140 men and three women—are sentenced to die in North Carolina. More than half of them are black, though blacks account for just 13 percent of the state’s population. Only 53 are white. 

That fact is at the heart of an appeal the state Supreme Court heard in August. Attorneys for six condemned inmates—five men and one woman—argued that racial bias marred their trials and resulted in their death sentences. 

Their case stems from the Racial Justice Act, which the General Assembly passed in 2009. It required a review of potential racial discrimination in death penalty trials. Four of those inmates—Tilmon Golphin, Christina Walters, Marcus Robinson, and Quintel Augustine—were resentenced to life without parole. 

But after Republicans gained a supermajority in 2012, they repealed the RJA, and the four were sent back to Death Row. The other two prisoners, Andrew Ramseur and Rayford Burke, filed RJA claims before the law was repealed, but those claims weren’t heard until after, and their appeals were dismissed because the RJA no longer existed. 

The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided whether the first four are entitled to life sentences, or whether Ramseur and Burke have the right to have their claims heard. (Last February, a group of former prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement officials filed an amicus brief asking the court to go a step further and throw out the death penalty altogether.) If the court rules in their favor, it could have far-reaching implications for the future of the death penalty in the state. 

“The day I walked onto Death Row, I felt like an alien. My mind was a haze of confusion and disbelief. I wore sadness on my shoulders and disaster behind my eyes. Condemnation thudded in my chest. With leaden steps, I walked into a warped capsule that was desolate, though filled with men—men with empty gazes and dejected postures, like forgotten relics tarnished by the cruelties of incarceration. I have never seen a walking dead man before; I was now cast amongst them. I dragged what was left of my mother’s son and my state-issued property into a dim six by ten foot single cell, collapsed onto the folds of a mattress, and cried. As sleep reached up to cradle me, I prayed that I would not wake up.” —Terry Robinson

In late 2013, Central Prison opened Death Row to community volunteers for the first time. Castillo started a journaling class that gained 24 participants. 

“Others came in and taught yoga, art, toastmasters, chess, and restorative justice,” Castillo recalls. “They even put on plays for the Vera Institute. Death Row was a lively place for a while. But that was shut down after a couple of years. A new warden came in who is real old-school and about punishment. All the classes are gone now.”

Castillo’s time as a volunteer was short-lived. Six months into the program, she writes in Crimson Letters, she was bothered by newspaper accounts of a newly condemned man’s trial and the public cries of what she describes as an “off with his head” mentality. Though the prison psychologist had warned her to keep her activities on Death Row a secret, Castillo says, she decided to speak out. Someone had to pull back the veil. 

“I had spent enough time with convicted men to understand the term ‘monster’ reflects more on the accuser than the accused,” she explains in the book. “Most people, even the rule-breakers, are not dangerous, immoral, or unredeemable. Everyone is broken, but for some, the brokenness is easier to hide.”

In May 2014, she wrote an op-ed for The News & Observer: “I have been meeting twice a month with about 15 men on Death Row, and the experience has been both edifying and moving. I don’t see heartless killers, though they might have killed in a moment of heartlessness. I see anger problems, stubbornness, lack of self-control, immaturity and miseducation. I see those qualities in people outside of prison, too. I see them in myself sometimes. But in these men I also see pain, regret, a capacity for kindness and self-reflection—and a desire to be seen for what they are, flawed and very human.”

She appealed her dismissal, writing that, with her journaling class gone, her students “lost something that broke the relentless monotony of prison life.” 

Her pleas came to no avail. But she didn’t give up. 

She began writing the men. What was initially a “flurry of responses” turned into a “steady correspondence” of letters about prison, family, books, spirituality, personal growth, and coming to terms with their sentences. 

Sometimes they were cheerful, she writes. Other times, they were “half-mad from emasculation and grief.”

“Having no deep relationships deprives us of the richness of humanity has to offer, to love with all our hearts, to laugh till we cry, to grieve till we feel almost dead. Life isn’t meant to be bland comfortable and safe and painless.” —George Wilkerson

A condemned person’s capacity for kindness and reflection was best exemplified by former drill sergeant Earl Richmond Jr., who was executed in 2005 for the 1991 murders of four people while addicted to drugs and alcohol.  

Known as “E,” his fellow Death Row prisoners later described him as a peacemaker who talked others out of fighting. He was universally respected by guards and prisoners alike. Two guards who worked on Death Row transferred to other prison blocks after his execution; it was too painful.  

The day the state killed Richmond, he refused a last meal, medication, or self-pity.

“My victims got no last meal,” Richmond wrote in a letter he read the night before his death to 78 fellow prisoners.

Lyle May was one of them.

In 2003, North Carolina put seven inmates to death, making it the deadliest year at Central Prison since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1984 after a 23-year hiatus. 

May began cutting his legs and arms with razors. 

“Self-mutilation is something I dealt with since childhood, never really understanding why I did it, but turning to it in dark moments like the worst kind of drug,” May writes in Crimson Letters. “On Death Row the behavior continued as a way to pierce the mind-numbing horror of executions.”

He stopped, he writes, when Richmond began training him in calisthenics. Exercise became an alternative to prison-prescribed drugs and self-abuse. Under Richmond’s tutelage, May’s self-esteem improved. He began taking classes offered by UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2007, he transferred his studies to Ohio University’s Independent Studies Program, where he earned an associate of arts degree in 2013. In 2017, he was accepted into the university’s bachelor of specialized studies program. Along the way, he’s spoken to college classes via telephone and contributed articles to criminal justice websites and essays to Scalawag, a Southern social justice magazine.

“Though E freely admitted his guilt and remorse for his crimes,” May writes, “he used it as a catalyst for change instead of a scourge, living the remainder of his life as we all should have from the beginning.”

When Richmond’s execution date was set for May 6, 2005, there was talk among prisoners of disrupting his sentence. 

Richmond put a stop to the threat of violence.

“I know y’all love me,” Richmond told the prisoners. “I know this hurts. It hurts me too, but love and respect me enough to keep calm. Help one another through this like we have done for other executions. Because we’re family, and that’s what family does.”  

Contact staff writer Thomasi McDonald at [email protected]. Correction: Due to an editing error, this story originally misattributed a passage written by Terry Robinson to Michael Braxton. 

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