North Carolina Death Row Inmate Writes Letter About Life of 'Leisure'

[Snake Alchemist]

A convicted murderer on death row in North Carolina wrote a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper about his life of "leisure" in prison and making a mockery of the legal system.

Danny Robbie Hembree Jr. was found guilty of murdering 17-year-old Heather Catterton in 2009 and was sentenced to death on Nov. 18, 2011.

Hembree, 50, is on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., but he's not looking for any pity in the letter he sent to The Gaston Gazette.

"Is the public aware that I am a gentleman of leisure, watching color TV in the A.C., reading, taking naps at will, eating three well balanced hot meals a day," Hembree asked in the letter. "I'm housed in a building that connects to the new 55 million dollar hospital with round the clock free medical care 24/7."

http://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-death-row-inmate-writes-letter-life-152637993--abc-news.html

[uppityperson]

1. Yeah yeah yeah. I can go outside whenever I want, can go where I want, etc etc etc. Sounds like a

real asshole, he does.

[Snake Alchemist]

2. Its the "niener-niener look at all I've got" aspect of this that gets me. nt

[uppityperson]

3. Yup. All you have to do to get good health care, 3 square meals a day, freedoms lost is hurt, kill

other people. Sounds like a person who is well locked up and out of circulation.

[Snake Alchemist]

4. His victims have a bit less though. nt

[shanti]

8. sociopath is more like it

he's asking for it.

[glowing]

5. Sadly, he is kind of right.. Although, most wouldn't prefer to be locked away in prison

or look at the situation as being able to live the life of "leisure". He is still locked up... locked up doesn't seem like something I'd like to live my life out in.... However, he does have access to the basic necessities of life along with colored tv. AND we the working, tax payers pay for his incarceration. And because he was sentenced to death, he has more than a few appeals to play out that would extend his life past the date of the death sentence... The two hearings for the other murdered women's lives are still to take place. I'm not sure that it makes a lot of sense to waste the money on those trials when another jury has convicted him of another's and has already sentenced him.

I do believe he ought to be locked away for the rest of his life for his crimes, but the death penalty is morally reprehensible in a modern world and in a so-called civilized society. AND it costs quite a bit more to have the state kill him than it does for him to be kept in prison until his death.

The other travesty of it all is that the man has access to things that regular law-abiding Americans do not. Food, housing, clothing, and health care that includes dental and vision. Americans who work, don't commit crimes, pay their taxes, and try to do the best with what they can do, are often handed death sentences of their own if they lack medical insurance or if they lose their jobs and can no longer afford a roof over their heads or food in their bellies. The avg cost to house an inmate is close to $30,000 a year, but if a family falls into hard times, the govt will give them limited help that doesn't come close to those totals... Just a travesty all the way around.... And these days, more and more people are falling into the poverty... 1/2 the country is living in poverty or near the poverty thresh line.

We are going to have to re-evaluate how people can live and what we value quickly. Capitalism destroys way too many people's lives and creates a vacuum where the very rich engulf all the resources and wealth and uses it to insulate themselves from the rest of the world. Straight-up socialism or equality in a drone like manner halts progress, individuality, and people's natural abilities to be different. We need a mode of living that works throughout the world in a sane and just world.

[Snake Alchemist]

7. The problem is that not all people are bothered by being locked up.

When punishment is not actual punishment then we have to start rethinking matters.

[Puregonzo1188]

9. I seriously suggest you look into American prison conditions. There are pretty inhumane and will

probably go down in the history of humans as one of the worst and greatest affront to human decency of all times.

From the New Yorker:

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1kWRCymPz

Prison is no life of leisure and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a sadist of the worst sort.

[Snake Alchemist]

10. Your mileage may vary.

Do we not lament when some executive goes to club fed for a few years and then gets out more tan and just as rich as before? I would prefer the older style prisons where prisoners spent all days breaking rocks. Oddly enough, that is considered inhumane, but the new prison rape and torture is seen as the humane option.

[Puregonzo1188]

14. The old style prisons were filled with horrendous abuses, as well, and prison rape and torture

is not a new trend in American prisons.


And no, I don't lament when some executive goes to club fed, because as someone who has been involved in prisoner's rights issues and knows something about American prisons I know the idea of club fed is a bunch of bullshit.

American prisons are cruel, brutal, and barbaric. And they're going to be remembered a lot like Stalin's gulags.

[Snake Alchemist]

16. If you think that club fed is not a real concept than there is nothing I can impart to you. nt

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. This has hoax written all over it...

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

11. Could be a hoax....

...or he may not even be living the life he claims.....but some of these guys get off on the fact they are making people angry, because they can't kill.

[yardwork]

12. That's what I think. He's mostly lying because he knows it will upset his victims' families.

I'm surprised that the newspaper published his letter. It might be best not to give this sadist the attention that he craves.

[rustydog]

13. He got exactly what he wanted when he went fishing with this trap

suckers bit and are pissed at him.
He is in prison until the day he dies. he gets up when told, goes to sleep when told. eats when told. maybe a deth row inmate gets to see daylight, one hour a day....Yes a life of leisure...
If you are outraged by his letter, he got to you too...sucker!

[Snake Alchemist]

17. That is only punishment to some people.

The problem is that it's impossible for the average person to relate to a psycho or sociopath.

[Nye Bevan]

15. OK, is there anyone in the USA who would take that deal voluntarily?

Three "well balanced meals" every day, and free medical care, in exchange for being locked up for the rest of your life and having to do whatever the guards tell you to? If this was such a great deal people would be committing murders just to go to prison, and I don't see that happening.

[Snake Alchemist]

18. No, but if I murdered several people and that was all i got. I may chuckle from time to time. nt

[Selatius]

19. No, because quite a lot of people realized prisons are gladiator arenas.

If you look at all the rape cases where males are the victim, a plurality of those male victims were raped in prison.

Prison is not so leisurely when everybody segregates themselves according to gang and skin color in the courtyard and what you say or do can get you shanked.

[Nye Bevan]

20. Even if you could have absolute assurance that you would not be raped or otherwise harmed,

I think nobody would agree to be locked up for the rest of their lives, free food and medical care notwithstanding.

BTW, that assurance is one that I believe we should aspire to in a civilized society, regardless of the prisoner's crimes.