For the past several months, nearly a year, I’ve been doing a weekly podcast with a guy named William Noguera, who is currently on Death Row in California’s San Quentin State Prison.
To my surprise, in this era of politically correct euphemisms often times meant to obscure reality (the state’s university system recently mandated the word “manpower” be changed to “person hours”) Death Row isn’t slang, the state of California still calls the wing of cells where men who have been condemned to death reside Death Row.
While perhaps a vestige of less sensitive times, the term Death Row is also misleading.
The last person executed in California was in 2006, when the 9th circuit court issued a hold which was not officially resolved until 2019, when Governor Newsom placed an official moratorium on executions in the state.
Barring a fascist overtaking of California’s state government (which is always entirely possible) it’s extremely likely nobody will be legally offed in this state ever again.
Still, my colleague, my friend, Mr. Noguera, has been given two execution dates during his tenure in California’s prison system, which is emblematic of the fairly dehumanizing existence he has mostly lived out in a 6 x 8 foot cell, surrounded by demented gang member murderers and serial killers if he steps outside onto the yard, for nearly forty years.
I met him when I was working on another podcast, during the pandemic, to busy mysel with something. This was about a murder that happened in my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska, called Murder on Ice.
While researching the case I interviewed dozens of people, including a prison reform advocate who passed Noguera’s info to me and we started talking and eventually recorded the conversations to form a weekly podcast.
The question everyone rightfully asks is, what did William, Bill as people call him, do to end up on Death Row?
Well, he’s a convicted murderer. In 1983, when he was eighteen years old, he killed his girlfriend’s mother.
The circumstances are murky, but at the time Noguera was the youngest person ever to be sentenced to death in the state of California.
If you believe Bill, and his supporters, the woman, Jovita Navarro, had been physically and sexually abusing her daughter, and Bill snapped in a fit of rage.
This rage, according to Bill, was brought on by the fact that his father, a Columbian expat, had been entering his son into underground street fights, often against grown men, since the age of twelve, and, in combination with a strict martial arts training regimen, had been feeding him steroids disguised as vitamins to bulk up his physique, which evidently produced the intended results, as Bill is still, in his sixties, yoked.
At trial the D.A. produced a witness who said Bill and his girlfriend killed the woman for a life insurance settlement and because she stood to inherit the house. The testimony was later recanted, and the witness was given a lesser sentence in exchange for his testimony.
Whatever you choose to believe, killing someone for the hell of it or just out of anger does not make you eligible for the death penalty in California, you have to have a “special circumstance” such as killing multiple people at once, or as was ruled in Bill’s case, doing so for financial gain.
My personal stance on the death penalty is likely not looked favorably upon by liberals or conservatives:
I like it in principle, the idea of killing indiscriminate murderers, pedophiles, and rapists, but I also believe there’s not a jurisdiction in the United States that has proved they can handle the privilege of executing people, because those sentenced to death and then executed are disproportionately poor, black, and Latino, and there is zero doubt that innocent people have been killed by governments in the country in recent years, so, we need to take this toy away from them.
Also, as Bill will quickly point out, convicts sentenced to life without parole prefer to be sentenced to death.
This is because with a death sentence comes nearly limitless appeals, as well as being appointed a bullpen of high-priced lawyers who will scrutinize every detail of your case and possibly spring you.
Further, those on Death Row are housed alone, without the glowering creepy cellmate afforded to those in the general population.
In other words, since nobody is being executed or will be executed in California, Death Row is a tremendous waste of money for the state, and those who think it’s a ‘tough on crime’ measure are being snowed by those who profit from the prison industry.
So anyway, after talking to Bill weekly for nearly a year, I can tell you with some authority what it’s like being on Death Row, coming from him.
He’s chosen to pass the time by studying the serial killers he is serving time with, in hopes of extracting information about various murders they have committed, yet not formally admitted to.
He’s one of the few, if not the only person who has done this in their natural environment, so after nearly forty years of observation I have dubbed him the Jane Goodall of a certain foreign species, not apes, but sickened, infected killers.
From what I gather, you wake up in the morning with the fog of the San Francisco Bay looming, and it’s usually very hot or very cold, as there is no air conditioning or thermostat.
If you have signed up in advance, a phone is wheeled up to your cell on a cart, and you can call people, me, for example.
Then, you can do whatever you want for a few hours. Most guys sleep, watch TV, or read books on philosophy or the legal system. Bill writes and paints.
If you choose to, most days you can go outside for an hour. This entails a quick strip search and a walk through a metal detector, where you find yourself on the yard.
Years ago the State took away the dumbbells and weight benches which were formerly a major staple of prison culture, so guys do pullups and run or run or play basketball.
The yard is segregated by race: The Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerilla Family, the Northern (meaning Bay Area) Mexicans and the Southern (meaning LA) Mexicans control a given territory of the yard, and they rotate, so that each group may get an equal chance of using the pull-up bars or basketball hoop.
If you cross into the area of the yard that doesn’t correspond to your race, you are very likely to be stabbed.
You don’t have to join the gang; there are pros and cons.
If you do, they will protect you from other people trying to kill you, but you’ll also be asked to stab someone at some point, which will go on your record and jeopardize whatever chance you have of getting out.
Bill saw a guy who had two days left on a thirty-year sentence kill another inmate, because the guy looked at him funny.
These guys are, for lack of a better word, a bunch of retards.
You then go back to your cell.
The inmates love the Dodgers, and the Lakers and the Warriors, but they especially love the NFL, so Monday and Thurdsay nights during football season are a cacophony of illiterate goons caterwauling into the abyss about Bill Belichick and Tyreke Evans.
The best food is hamburgers.
Bill has been incarcerated with Richard Ramirez, with monsters like Rodney Alcala, with the torturous child killer Larry Bittaker, and many like them.
Nobody really worries about these guys, but everyone wants to kill them, so they stay in their cells, because they are cowards.
Every week or so someone gets stabbed, and they lock down the prison while the administration investigates. During these times, you can’t leave your cell for days on end.
Most inmates believe the prison to be haunted, as hundreds of prisoners have been tortured, shot and hanged inside these walls since the times of the Gold Rush, when the building was constructed.
One particularly twisted warden had a fetish for killing people by means of a special “suit” which constricted them to death. This is not folklore, which it sounds like, but documented fact.
If you scrub away a layer of paint, you will still see the pentagrams that Richard Ramirez painted in blood on the walls, on which he pinned photos of naked women of which he had cut the eyes out of the paper.
The night passes, and you are awakened by a loudspeaker calling these killers into their daily mental health counseling session.
You’ve never used a cellphone, let alone a smartphone. Never been on the internet.
You don’t allow yourself to think about getting out, because another setback could be too much to handle.
You switch on the TV, National Geographic, and there’s a world you’ve never seen.
Forty years go by, and you write, and talk, and think about your existence and what you’ve done wrong, and what you want to accomplish, just like everyone else.
If you listen to podcasts, I’d recommend Death Row Diaries. It’s not nerds talking about murder in their sweatpants while sipping wine, it’s a guy on the inside who has the knowledge few others do.
Check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you may listen to podcasts. Listen to the most recent episodes first.