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Early on the morning of March 27, the state of California will flood my veins with a lethal cocktail of sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Death will follow swiftly.
I could live for several more years. I voluntarily abandoned federal appellate review of California's judgment of death. Many have labeled this suicide. It is not.
I did not ask the district attorney to charge my case as a capital crime. I did not persuade a jury to recommend the death penalty. I did not ask the trial judge to impose the death penalty. I will not push the plunger that injects poison into my bloodstream. These are acts of the state of California on behalf of you, "The People." It is preposterous to call my death at the hands of the state - whether now or later - an act of "suicide."
Even if I were to win on appeal, I will never again see the outside of prison. I have lived in prison most of my adult years, nearly 30 on Death Row. I am a rational man. I do not consider forgoing the raptures of another decade behind bars to be an irrational decision.
I knew my decision would draw attention to my case, and it has. I have something to say, and I want Californians to hear it: In your name, judges are violating their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They are disregarding their obligations to the rule of law in service of a process - the intricate machinery of extermination, constructed by the Legislature and legitimized by the courts, which exists for the sole purpose of producing a constitutionally airtight death sentence.
Take my case. When I came up for trial in 1979, my state-appointed lawyer tried to prevent me from pleading guilty. When he failed, and I was sentenced to death, another state-appointed lawyer appealed my conviction to the state Supreme Court against my wishes. The Rose Bird court reversed my conviction because my state-appointed lawyer didn't agree with my guilty plea. It sent the case back for a retrial that I never asked for and didn't want.
The second trial should have been barred by the double jeopardy clause, because a defendant cannot be tried twice for the same crime unless he - not the state - appeals. In my case, it was the state's appeal, taken against my wishes, that led to the second trial. But I was again tried, convicted and sentenced to death. The state Supreme Court refused to enforce my constitutional right, which would have led to freedom, to be free from double jeopardy.
The court considered and rejected arguments I never wanted to make (because they would have resulted in yet another trial that I didn't want) to make the decision appear to meet constitutional requirements. It affirmed my conviction on such blatantly specious grounds that the court's opinion can only be viewed as a deliberate effort to skirt the Constitution.
This was a transparent violation of each justice's oath to uphold the Constitution, and my execution will therefore be unconstitutional.
I have devoted more than a decade to studying the law in capital cases. Many men on Death Row have asked me to help them evaluate the work of their state-appointed attorneys - purportedly on their behalf.
Time and time again, I have seen solid constitutional arguments superficially asserted (if at all) and buried under a mountain of frivolous arguments that have no chance of winning. This allows the court to write lengthy opinions, rejecting issue after issue, without ever coming to grips with the serious constitutional issues which should have been the heart of the case.
Death penalty litigation is the state's process from beginning to end: state prosecutors, state-agency lawyers appointed to represent defendants, an intricate scheme created by state legislators geared toward one inevitable result, and a court whose complicity constitutes a repudiation of the justices' obligation to honor and uphold the Constitution.
I hope my death will give life to a challenge to California's machinery of death. Not simply because I got a raw deal, but because I see dishonesty and incompetence leading to unnecessary death all around me, every day.
The state's need for a well-oiled machine has assumed a position of superiority over the constitutional rights of defendants. The machine must be dismantled and replaced with attorneys who truly represent their clients and judges who enforce and uphold the Constitution.
Robert Lee Massie is scheduled to be executed on March 27 at San Quentin State Prison.
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