Dennis My Friend on Death Row

By Jan Tystad

The Norwegian journalist and author Jan Tystad tells in this book about his American pen friend who has been on Death Row in Florida for 33 years. The prisoner tells in his letters how it feels to be isolated for so many years, and how he has been helped by listening to music player and follow the news and documentaries on TV.

Dennis has showed an unbelievable strength in such an environment, helped very much by classic music which he can listen to for hours. He has also developed great knowledge about the world and the politicians who runs it, by listening to news and documentaries on his small TV in the cell.

Dennis is only allowed out of the cell for five hours a week to walk in the forecourt.

He finds happiness and friendship in letter writing and fight every day to prevent that the death sentence is executed. He hope that the governor of Florida will change the sentence to life prisonment, which would mean that he will be a free man, the life sentence is 25 years in Florida.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728396026

Jan Tystad

Jan Tystad is a Norwegian journalist and author, living in London for many years. He has been a correspondent for Norwegian newspapers in London and written seven books in Norwegian. The author has been a war correspondent and reported from wars in Nigeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Bosnia and written about the famines in Ethiopia and Sudan. He has written books about hunger and refugees and the arms trade. He has also written two books about children in wars. The author was born in Bergen, Norway in 1936. He experienced as a child the German invasion and occupation of Norway as a four years old boy. After the war he worked in local Norwegian newspaper before he took his law degree I 1964 at the university of Oslo. Then he went back to become a journalist in one of the leading Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. He now lives in London and he has been a pen friend for eight years with Dennis Sochor, who has been on Death Row in Florida for 33 years, This is a book based on the letters between him and the prisoner and a critical view about the use of death penalty. Dennis Sochor is very happy now because the book will be published in English.

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Copyright © 2019 Jan Tystad. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   11/21/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9603-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9604-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9602-6 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Preface

The Road to Death Row

A Child of War

Lifelines, A Life Buoy

Jammed into a Box

Miscarriage of Justice

The First Letter

About Believing

Life inside the Box

Little Things

New Hope

The Letters

Death

The Death Penalty

Frump Years

Racism

The Simple Things

Latest Letters

PREFACE

Through more than two hundred letters I have come to know Dennis Sochor, to the point that now dare call him ‘friend’. This is not only his story, it is also the story of every convict’s life on Death Row in the USA. In the recent past, one out of ten death row convicts have had his or her conviction overturned.

Dennis has been in solitary confinement for 32 years. His letters convey better than anything what that life is like; what it means to sit all alone, in nothing but a cage, year after year. I thank him warmly for giving me permission to print excerpts of his letters and comment on their content.

I would like to thank all those who have encouraged and helped me write this book, especially my wife Alix who found the small notice from LifeLines in The Times and said This must be something for you, thanks also son Martin Tystad for copy editing and proof reading, writer and friend Bjørn Bjørnsen for his good advice, and publisher Otto Ersland in Kapabel Forlag for publishing the book in Norway in 2018. He also published my biography Korrespondentliv in 2016. Also a big thank you to the translators Kari Lyngstad og Robert Duncanson and my wife who also gave me good advice about the English language.

THE ROAD TO DEATH ROW

"You are prisoner number DC 639131. This you have to remember, this is your only identity here, » the prison guard tells Dennis Sochor when he is placed on death row in 1987, a number that has been associated with him ever since. Our first exchange was in 2011, and it has turned out to be a good friendship.

Dennis asks that I open with the following excerpt:

I was in Broward County Jail in Fort Lauderdale for almost two years before the trial. I had been arrested in Georgia, north of Florida, and I gave a false statement to the police to take the blame and prevent my brother Gary from getting arrested.

Dennis is bipolar and at that time he was in the up, overly optimistic, phase.

"I knew I was innocent, and I thought the court would dismiss the case and I would be released. But they sentenced me without having found a body, without any physical evidence. Some way or another they got my brother to lie and give a false statement about me being guilty. Our statements had no resemblance when it comes to details. Both were accepted by my lawyer, who was just a disaster. I came to this prison in Raiford, Florida in November 1987. I spent the over 600-mile drive in a noisy metal box, sitting on a wooden bench, being thrown about for all of the eight to ten hour-long drive. It was the middle of the night when we arrived and I had a terrible headache. I was asked who of my closest ones would be on the visitor’s list. Then I was taken to my cell where I found a dirty mattress with clean sheets.

The first night it was difficult to sleep. My breakfast was brought in at five in the morning. I heard a man on the same corridor shouting. His name was Stoney, he shouted down to the first floor, there were three floors on the corridor, and everybody could shout to each other. Stoney shouted: « I just emptied a cup of piss over myself. » Stoney screamed like a maniac. I thought to myself – where am I? In hell? That was my first morning on death row. Later that afternoon the door to the wing was opened and a black man, Bobby Francis, came in and made a racket. He sounded quite happy because his execution had been postponed just before it happened.

I listened and realised that this was my life now, all this happened within my first 16 hours there. In the prison I came from, they had given me things like soap and towels, but it took over a month for them to transfer my stuff to my new prison.

I remember the first execution. They were always carried out around 5 pm. The lights went out and the prison generator was started up. The electricity company didn’t allow their electricity to be used to kill prisoners in the electric chair. After the execution the lights came back on, and two white vans with a coffin came to collect the dead prisoner. Later I was told that it takes an hour for the body to cool off sufficiently to remove all traces of blood, urine, and stool.

All these things happened within the first month of my arrival. The first five years I had a cell to the driveway and the back door to the death cell.

During those years I witnessed several executions, Jan, but I am still a sensitive person who cares about those who suffer in the world. I am sure many people think that we deserve to die. Let Wakan Tanka* be our judge."

This, first, and many other of his letters, form the basis of this book. (*Wakan Tanka is the great spirit or the great mystery according to the Native Americans in Lakhota – today’s North and South Dakota.)

A CHILD OF WAR

My life as a journalist and writer has been full of moving and frightening experiences. I have had the opportunity to write about many a varying issue. From pop stars, to princesses, to wars, to refugees, and to hunger catastrophes. I worked mainly for Dagbladet and other Norwegian newspapers. Some of the topics were subsequently published as books in Norway.

I was a child of the Second World War, experiencing first-hand the German invasion and occupation of Norway in 1940. I was four years old when my mother took me to flee, along with some good neighbours, in a fishing boat, via Knarvik to Vadheim in Sogn, then on land to our family farm at Tystad near Sandane in Nordfjord.

I do not remember much from this trip, except for the rank smell of vomit in the hold of the boat where we were placed. The weather was poor and the fishing boat rolled heavily. I was scared and could tell that the grown-ups were, too, of being shelled or captured. Hearing them worry about being shelled or captured.

Wars and refugees became an integral part of my life as a journalist. The first international conflict I covered, over several trips, was the Biafran war in Nigeria (1967-1970). The next war was in East Pakistan (1971), leading to the establishment of the new country of Bangladesh. I especially remember this conflict for the very large number of refugees that were displaced. At the time, the UN Refugee Agency was headed by the Muslim Aga Khan, who would not admit to the existence of these refugees, much less their need for help. India would, by itself and without any international support, take in 10 million refugees, all of whom were allowed to return home at the end of the war.

Next came the war in Angola, where the Angolans, aided by Cuban troops, managed to defeat the South Africans. (The South Africans had been sent to Angola in order to secure oil for the white apartheid regime.)

I covered the hunger catastrophes of Ethiopia and Sudan in the mid-1980s, and I was in Liberia just after the civil wars in 1998.

Between 1969 to 1975 I worked as a London correspondent for Dagbladet, a Norwegian daily newspaper. In 1986 I returned to London as a correspondent and have stayed here since. I travelled a lot to Northern Ireland during the Troubles after 1969, reporting from there nearly 50 times, most recently in 2016.

Throughout these wars and conflicts I tried to describe the fate of the war victims, especially the harm done to children. Many stories are about slavery and the trafficking of children. In my opinion, it is crucial to highlight the tremendous impact that hunger catastrophe and war has on its victims, to engage the reader, and to encourage support for victims. While I am not a religious man, I believe that journalists have an obligation to speak for the weakest, for those without a voice in the world.

I hope this book will encourage the reader to fight against the death penalty, and to convey the value of connecting prisoners on death row prisoners to the outside world, that they have someone to speak to. I hope this book will inspire readers to become pen pals themselves.

My prisoner friend Dennis Sochor is, as I am writing this in 2019, 67 years old and by November he had spent 32 years of his life in a small cell, on death row, in Florida. He has taught me much about the conditions in American prisons, and about the American attitude towards capital punishment. Writing to people on death row all over the world does provides help them, it shows them that they are not forgotten.

Many Americans are brutal, inconsiderate and undemocratic. Police will often imprison civilians without reason other than to satisfy leadership, and without proper evidence. Gun sales in the USA is so unregulated that anybody can get a weapon. This is an important clue as to why there are so many mass killings in the country.

Since Dennis and I started our correspondence, I have learned much about the conditions in American prisons and of how convicts manage to survive so many years behind bars.

I have come