For two decades, Rob Will has been on death row for the murder of a cop. But activists say there is enough additional evidence to save him. Will Texas execute an innocent man?
“Near as I can recall,” he says, “he’s been no trouble at all.”In fact, everyone here seems pretty friendly. Inside, a guard holds up a visitor’s baggie filled with Altoids, frowns, well aware that candy of any sort isn’t allowed inside, and says, “What the hell are those? Oh. Sure. Why not?” And overseeing visits today is a stout gentleman named Robert Hurst, also friendly, who has been shuttling folks like Dr.
But that’s all on the outside. Right now, inside Cage 24 on A Pod in the Polunsky Unit, Will has stripped down to be searched before he can go to the visitation area. One officer paws through his clothes, while another gets more personal, saying something along the lines of “Run your fingers through your hair. Arms out, turn around. Lift your feet one at a time. Bend over, spread your cheeks. Turn around, lift your nuts.
So, that’s where he’s coming from and what he wants to do during today’s time outside his cage, before he returns there in 60 minutes, to solitary confinement, 23 hours a day of it, and the bewildering circumstances of his long confinement. “At times, I’ve felt like I’m trapped in some type of Orwellian, Kafkaesque, Huxleyan alternate reality.
He pauses. “I’ve seen people here go completely all the way insane. Just yesterday, they had to go run a SWAT team on a guy, gas him, and drag him off to another pod.” One day, Will will either be set free or put in a vehicle and driven 50 minutes west to the death chamber in Huntsville, Texas, where a tie-down team will strap him to a gurney, a medic will slip IV needles into his arm, witnesses will watch from another room — including the seemingly unchanged Robert Hurst, friendly as he is — and soon the poison will flow, after which he will be pronounced dead.
In court, on the day that Will received the death penalty instead of life in prison, Barrett Hill’s widow, Cathy, addressed him directly: “The punishment administered to you is just and fair, according to our law. You did not give my husband the option of life; and, so, we do not give you that option, either.” The next day, she stood beside a memorial for her husband erected at the murder site on the bayou and said, “This is where he met Jesus face to face.
“There’ve been so many hyper-manipulative, devious, and duplicitous individuals involved with my case, it’s unbelievable,” Will says today. He shakes his head and groans. “I mean, one thing I’ve come to appreciate about Donald Trump and his administration is they are showing the world how people in positions of power can function in treacherous ways with absolute impunity. Just say anything and push the issue and create an entire alternate reality, and people accept that.
“And that’s another thing,” he says. “This is an almost 20-year-old wound, right? Now the state said that I supposedly shot the officer from six inches away. Well, if I fired from six inches, blood and bone and the tops of my knuckles are going to be all over everything. But none of my blood was on the deputy’s clothes. At all. So what does that mean? Well, guess what? The state’s theory is completely fictitious. There’s no physical evidence.
He dropped out of school in the ninth grade, but not before being suspended once, he says, for “being mean to Jesus. At least my conservative Republican teacher thought so, because I always thought of deities as being feminine. I mentioned this in class, got in an argument with the teacher, and he kicked me out. I was mainly a quiet, reserved kid who liked to read. I thought I was a weirdo.”
Certainly, in recent years, Will has been a fairly easygoing, get-along prisoner. Mostly, he reads and studies and paints and writes long, long letters and blog posts for his Free Rob Will website. He’s earned a yoga-instructor certification and a paralegal degree. “Unless you’re involved with gang stuff or drug stuff, you don’t really have too much to worry about in here, and I don’t care nothing about those things,” he says.
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