Prisoner longs to hurry death

Saturday, 8 June 2002

By Rhonda Bodfield
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/20608DEATHROW.html

I used to mess with the rats. I never could figure out how they got in. At night they would crawl on you. ... I used to talk to the rats at first. After four months, they talked back.

Death row inmate Robert Comer in a 1987 letter to a friend

Here we're dealing with a human being who either won't behave in prison or he is a predator and you can't leave him in the general population. What else are we going to do with him? Where he is is a function of who and what he is.
Terry Stewart
Department of Corrections director

Robert Comer has been called the most dangerous man in the Arizona prison system.

His death row cell in Florence is 7 feet by 11.5 feet. An expert psychiatrist concludes it is one of the most physically isolating places he's seen.

Comer, 45, who murdered a man in 1987, wants to drop his appeals and die as soon as possible.

His attorneys say he's not qualified to make that decision. The lawyers convinced the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that prison conditions may be part of the reason he's now embracing death after years of fighting it. That panel ordered the U.S. District Court in Phoenix to determine his mental competency and then to answer whether he's making a voluntary decision or whether conditions are so harsh that he feels he has no choice. The ruling is expected later this month.

The question, really, is whether the human brain is wired to survive intact in the absence of nearly all stimulation and personal interaction.

While the case hinges on Comer alone, it could affect the fate of others. If the state loses, it may be forced to change how it deals with difficult inmates or risk similar court battles. Meanwhile, prisoner-rights advocates are contemplating a legal challenge to the way Arizona runs its "supermax" prisons.

Supermax prisons operate on the theory that locating problem inmates in one highly controlled facility makes the rest of the system more manageable.

Arizona's two supermax facilities can house 1,700 prisoners, 127 of them death row inmates. They're there for the duration, as are prison gang members, juveniles tried as adults and mentally ill prisoners with behavioral disorders.

Then there are the temporary boarders: Those who continually act out are sent there for at least six months but can go back to the general prison population if they behave.

Comer is in a particularly sterile place. It doesn't help that he's had about 40 violations since entering prison in Arizona in 1988, some for setting his cell on fire. He's known for his knack for manufacturing crude knives.

His cell has no bars and no view of the outside world. Instead, he looks out at a concrete wall through a metal grid punctuated by half-inch holes. Over that - because he has thrown liquid at officers and assaulted an inmate walking past his cell with a sharpened metal tip on a tightly rolled paper pole - is a layer of transparent Plexiglass through which he has to yell to be heard. It muffles sounds coming in, like earplugs.

Correctional officers in the unit wear visors and body armor. Inmates can't see each other, because they all face the same way. Comer has no furniture but a bed and toilet. His desk was taken away because he cut a 22-inch piece of metal off of it last year with a lighter wheel. It wasn't until the past few months that he's had a radio and a television.

With few exceptions, this is where he lives every hour. Every week, he is allowed three showers, one five-minute phone call and three hours in a stark, only modestly larger recreation cell, with no athletic equipment and a metal mesh ceiling. On the rare occasions when he leaves his pod, he is transported shackled, face down on a gurney.

In its decision, the 9th Circuit noted Comer's habit of pacing morning to night, 12 to 20 hours at a time, to keep from becoming, in his words, "a veggie." He has calculated that 300 laps is a mile. He does 30 to 50 miles a day. He punched a wall a year ago because he wanted "to feel something somewhere other than inside my head."

Death row "volunteers," as such prisoners as Comer are called, are nothing new. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was only the latest and most celebrated. Defense attorneys are often in the uncomfortable position of arguing that the state should not assist in government-sanctioned suicide, even in the face of criticism that they are using their clients to advance their own anti-death-penalty views.

Three groups of attorneys are involved in Comer's case, including his original attorneys Pete Eckerstrom and Julie Hall, of Tucson. Comer has appointed a new counsel who is siding with state attorneys who say he should be allowed to make the decision.

Of the 38 states that have reinstated the death penalty, most have a supermax prison. Texas alone has 16. Florida in 2000 made its push to join the ranks. Its corrections commission cautioned that while there has been little assessment of the effects of locking someone in such a cell for 23 hours a day, some studies have found it can lead to depression, uncontrollable rage, delusion and paranoia. But prison officials also say it is needed for security.

"As far as the allegation that it makes them worse, do you understand how ludicrous that is?" asked Department of Corrections Director Terry Stewart. "Here we're dealing with a human being who either won't behave in prison or he is a predator and you can't leave him in the general population. What else are we going to do with him?

"Where he is is a function of who and what he is."

If it's safe, said attorney Eckerstrom, it's also "extremely creepy." On one tour, he said, a man howled in a nearby cell. One paced. Another was curled into a fetal position, sleeping, in midafternoon.

"The people were behaving the way you would see animals behaving at a bad zoo," he said.

It's difficult to determine what shaped Comer. He apparently wasn't abused by his middle-class parents. He went fishing, got average grades and was one badge away from Eagle Scout. A psychiatrist who evaluated him suspects he was twisted in part by the California penal system, where he served a five-year stint in 1978 for rape and kidnapping.

He did part of that time in Folsom's segregated housing unit, which would later be declared "cruel and unusual punishment" by a U.S. District Court. Inmates there spent 24 hours a day in windowless cells, 5 feet by 8 feet, infested with rats and the stench of human excrement. The usual term was 30 days. Comer spent five months.

In a 1987 letter to a friend, Comer recalled fearing that Folsom's gray walls were going to close in and squash the life out of him. He wrote that he could feel his mind shut down, piece by piece.

"I used to mess with the rats," he wrote. "I never could figure out how they got in. At night they would crawl on you. . . . I used to talk to the rats at first. After four months, they talked back."

Later he would write it was in those cells he "learned about the Bible and found there is no God." He saw four knifings on Folsom's main yard and started making shanks. In a court affidavit, he said that at first he thought he could put it behind him, but "I now know that once they take your humanity, you never get it back."

In 1987, only three years after getting out of the California prison, Comer murdered a stranger at a campground near Apache Lake, then kidnapped and raped a woman camping nearby. She escaped and he was captured.

He didn't attend his trial. He tried not to attend his sentencing. Angered because guards had made his handcuffs too tight earlier, he tried to stab them with a handmade shank. He was flushed out of his cell with a high-powered hose and attended the hearing, bruised and shackled to a wheelchair, naked but for a cloth over his lap, his head drooping toward his shoulder.

Comer refused to comment for this story, but details of his life are outlined in court records and in 10 hours of testimony during a three-day hearing in March before a federal judge, asking that his appeals be waived. He comes across as an articulate man who prides himself on doing crossword puzzles in ink without a dictionary.

Two expert psychiatrists disagree on whether he's competent.

Dr. Sally Johnson, a North Carolina psychiatrist who has worked on celebrity cases including the Unabomber and John Hinckley, said she believes he is competent.

Dr. Terry Kupers, a California expert brought in by Eckerstrom who has written a book about abysmal mental health care in prison, says Comer suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome, which could distort his reasoning. Kupers says Comer's testimony during the hearing was a 180-degree turn, adding he believes Comer is saying what he thinks the court wants to hear. While he once said that "waking up every day is worse than dying" and that he doesn't believe in the death penalty, he now says he wants to pay his debt to society and could do more time "standing on my head."

Prisoner advocates have suggested basic changes such as more rehabilitation services, more windows and an outdoor recreation yard.

"It might be nice, but is it realistic?" asked Director Stewart. "Absolutely not."

The Arizona Attorney General's Office agreed in court filings: "This case is not a forum to evaluate alternative methods of running a prison."

That forum, though, may be coming.

Eleanor Eisenberg, director of the Arizona Civil Liberties Union, said her organization is weighing a range of prison issues for possible litigation, from supermax facilities to health care and discipline policies.

That's no idle threat. In March, a federal court approved a settlement between the ACLU and Wisconsin's Corrections Department. The settlement forces improved medical coverage, better recreational facilities and vocational training. Under the agreement, prison officials can no longer call the unit "supermax" or refer to the inmates as "the worst of the worst."

"There's a lot of support in the literature that the mental health of anybody in those conditions for any period of time is going to deteriorate," Eisenberg said. "Most people who are in prison are going to get out of prison. It seems to me our interest should be to have people come out of prison not worse than when they went in, and ideally better prepared. They aren't getting there in complete isolation and in the absence of any rehabilitation, psychological counseling or jobs skills development."

In his writings to the court, Comer said that unlike his victim, he can still think and hope and dream. "I will say it's just time to end it," he wrote. "I've a lot of hate in me, that is what those lawyers mean about the incarceration. But that's for somebody else to worry about, how to quit creating monsters."

* Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield at 807-8430 or rhondab@azstarnet.com.

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