"I Want to Die"

"I've put life in one hand and death in the other and weighed the two. To me, death is my only route to freedom." Doris Ann Foster speaks from a small cell at the end of a third-floor hallway at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup, a small town midway between Baltimore and Washington. A heavy door marked "Maximum Security" isolates her not just from the outside world but from other prisoners as well. She is on death row and could become the first woman ever to be executed by the state of Maryland.

Foster says she is ready: "I have thought it out very carefully. I know what I am doing." She has sent a letter to the Maryland Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court requesting them to pay no attention to the efforts of her public defender lawyers, who have been trying to get her sentence reduced to life, with parole then a possibility after 12 1/2 years. She does not know whether the courts will heed her request, but she dreads the prospect of a long, drawn-out appeal: "If the court says you're guilty and you're going to die, why spend all this money to fight it? Let them carry it out. They will be satisfied, and I will have peace."

Foster previously served four years in other states for robbery and passing bad checks, so she knows about prison. Continuing on death row strikes her as intolerable: "This is ruining my body and eventually would ruin my mind. I could see what I'd be like after ten years here. I don't want to be hostile. I don't want to lose my peace. I have no desire to continue on in such an inhumane existence."

Her acceptance of punishment does not exactly constitute an admission of guilt. Although she was convicted last year of stabbing a 71-year-old woman motel keeper to death with a screwdriver during a holdup, Foster now says, "I couldn't have done it. And if I did, I would not do it with a screwdriver, not to some old lady." This declaration sounds less than ringing. Moreover, it was testimony from her husband Tommy, who had checked into the motel with her, that helped convict Doris Ann. Yet she seems to bear him no grudge. He is in a different Maryland prison, where he is serving a lighter sentence for theft and obstruction of justice, and she corresponds with him regularly. She has 35 other pen pals, including some Indians on death rows elsewhere.

A thin, wide-eyed woman with long, lustrous dark hair, Foster claims to be three-quarters Cherokee (she also says she is 27; Maryland lists her as 38). The walls of her cell are decorated with bold, dark drawings of Indian faces. Books on Indian lore are piled together with other texts on Buddhism, martial arts and the occult. She is allowed half an hour out of her cell each morning for a shower and an hour of exercise later in the day, but she has felt increasingly estranged from other inmates and no longer takes a recreation period. She receives no visitors because she says her surroundings would depress relatives and friends.

She is aware of the notoriety gained by other prisoners who have asked to die, and wants no part of it: "I'm not a Gary Gilmore. I don't want anyone to write a book about me. I want to die or be free. I have a dream to go West with my people. If I got out, that's what I would do." She does not expect that to happen. Instead, she hopes to arrange for the presence of an Indian medicine man at her execution. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.