..  ..David Lee Powell ...No 612 ...Eilis I Unit, Huntsville, Texas ...Year of Birth 1951 ...Marital Status single ...Children none ...Date of offense May 18, 1978 ...Sentenced to death September 11, 1978 ...Status Under Appeal Click on the image to view a larger version. Scroll below for an account of the session.

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David Lee Powell was convicted of killing a police officer in Austin in 1978. Ralph Ablanedo had confronted Powell & his girlfriend, Sheila Meinert, on a routine traffic stop. Who fired the AK-47 automatic rifle at him has never been clear. Meinert was sentenced to 15 years in prison & released in 1989. At the time of the murder, Powell, a student at the University of Texas & a heavy drug user, pleaded insanity. In 1989 the Supreme Court reversed his conviction, but in 1991 Powell was resentenced in front of 85 uniformed police officers. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated the second death sentence 1994; a new trial is pending. David Powell is an exception to the rule that only the poor & those with little chance in the world are sentenced to death. He is white, middle class, & smart. Powell has been battling psychiatric problems for years. His family has a history of mental illness. Before his trouble with the law, Powell was medicating himself with street drugs. A high-IQ student, he has the reputation of having made the highest score on the Texas college entrance exam. Powell occupies his time in prison with mental exercises. He once devised his own random number generator by flipping a coin over & over. Then, using a mathematical formula, he composed a musical score. "So I sit down with my little hand calculator...& a pencil & paper & a dime...& I'm flipping this dime recording the outcomes, right...heads or tails, I don't know, 500, a 1000 times or something to get a random input which I'm going to feed into this function....It's going to spit out a rhythmic variation of this Mozart piece, right.... So I flip & I flip & I flip & I write & then I start the number crunching & I compute & compute....By the time I finish I've sworn I'll never do this again....Had it figured, realized why, for years, I've put this off....This is not work fit for himan beings. It's too monotonous. At length, I have a piece of music. And the piece of music I used & the scheme I used to compose it, as such, just as a florish, you take the piece of music & if it were on one page which it wasn't...you can flip it upside down & play it. It would be the same piece. It had that type of symmetry."

Of all the interviews we conducted, Powell's was the most unpredictable. Against his better judgement, he allowed us to meet with him. Expressing his displeasure with our "lack of preparation," he told me exactly what he thought of me & my entourage. Powell was still thin as a fence post; nervous energy & prison food helped to keep him lean. In the all-white room, in the all-white uniform, his ghostly pallor blended into the background. While sitting he was all angles-elbows, jutting jaw, crisscrossed legs. Standing, he was a raw nerve. I didn't think we would finish the meeting with any civility. As the session progressed, David's distrust subsided & he grew more engaging. I asked him questions with global & political implications, & he fielded them with intellegence & reflection. Then we broached the more personal subject of how the press treats death-row inmates. "In Texas, the media is so bad that I tend to think....This may be a very bad idea but it used to be, in Eastern Europe, one of the things they would do in reporting crime is instead of having sensationalistic slasher stories every day, they would have composite crime figures published every so often. If nothing else, it stands to reason that it would inspire less copycat crime. But it lends itself to more objective discussion too." On the day at Ellis I, sweat was dripping down my shirt collar. But though I was weighed down by the humidity, I did not want this unique man to slip away from me. Because of my conflicting emotions about Powell, this chapter was the most difficult for me to write. Describing his broken genius was harder than I imagined. But despite the wobbly start, I grew to appreciate David. Two years after we met he called & explained that he had not been at his best during our interview. He would have called sooner, but this was the first time he had access to a phone: he had been transferred to a local jail where he was awaiting retrial. Released from the day-to-day strain of death row, David Powell has become a friend & champion of our project.