..  ..Abdullah Bashir,  ..a.k.a. Clifford Phillips ...No 723 ...Ellis I Unit, Huntsville, Texas ...Year of Birth 1935 ...Marital Status married while on death row ...Children two, by a previous marriage ...Date of offense January 13, 1982 ...Sentenced to death September 13, 1982 ...Status Executed, December 15, 1993, by lethal injection. . Click on the image to view a larger version. Scroll below for an account of the session.

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Abdullah Bashir was convicted of strangling Iris Siff, 58, during a robbery at the Alley Theater in Houston. Siff had been a performer & administrator at the theater for 30 years. She was working late the night of her death, filling out an application for a government grant. Bashir, a former security guard at the theater, had been fired a few weeks earlier for sleeping on the job. According to Bashir, he went to Siff's office to collect the back wages he felt were owed to him. During the ensuing argument, Bashir strangled Siff with a telephone cord. Arrested outside his mother's home in Los Angeles a month after the murder, he made a full confession. Like his victim, all the members of the jury that convicted him were white, & they took only 40 minutes to agree on the death sentence. I focused my camera. Staring back at me through the lens was a face dark as night, but full of harmony. Abdullah Bashir's prison whites, crisp & starched, looked heavy & formal. His clothing contrasted starkly with his complexion & surroundings, but matched his unblemished demeanor perfectly. I could see the acceptance of fate in his face. He spoke of his life on the outside, when he lived in New York as a family man. He had been a member of the board of his church, had worked on community projects, & had visited local prisons. His bearing was almost regal; his every utterance was crafted & thoughtful. "I haven't gotten to that point where I've given up on myself, you know. I still love life & if I didn't think that I was still a productive person then perhaps my attitude would be different, you know. But I could stay here another 50 years....It wouldn't matter." Bashir's spirituality, tinged with Middle Eastern mysticism, was very unlike the agnosticism of other death-row convicts we had met. But it was clear as well that he had become a creature of habit. Years of repeated routine had taken its toll. The Department of Corrections, including most of the guards, insisted on using Bashir's old "slave" name, which he had changed in 1974. He had done business, brought property, existed as Abdullah Bashir for years. Now he was Clifford Phillips again. How insulting to have the courts, the police refuse to use one's chosen name?

We queried Bashir at length about his crime, why he thought he was on death row. "Spiritually I could just feel myself...I was like a man falling from a height down to a level & couldn't put on the brakes. And I just kept falling. I woke up one morning here on death row...." His philosophy seemed to be a pragmatism laced with a strange optimism. "I didn't feel bad once I got here. For some reason I felt I had an opportunity to really get my life together. And I think that was the most joyful experience...feeling I had when I come here. I didn't see death. I didn't see it perhaps the way people see it. A lot of people come here & see life coming to its final stages." Bashir had constructed another reality, beginning a second life when he arrived on death row. He corresponded with a woman in Ireland whom he had never met. Eventually she emigrated & converted to Islam, & they were married. She visited Bashir regularly. Why some prisoners marry is shrouded in mystery. We can assume that prisoners need contacts on the outside, for affection, for dignity, for survival; it's easier to do time when you have someone than when you're alone. Bashir understood time in his own way, in the framework of his own reality. It had become very finite & he was calm in his expectations. "They're trying to speed up executions in the state of Texas. I'm sure you heard about that. They won't settle for being second. They want to be the trailblazers when it comes to taking life. So they're not wasting no time." Bashir had suffered through several stays of execution. We had been involved with one of his vigils ourselves, held our breath all day long. But though he was granted another last-minute stay, his reprieve was brief; he had been living on borrowed time. Five months after I photographed him, he was executed.