- One of the most restrictive death rows in the country lets inmates listen to the prison-run radio station.
- "The Tank has helped me," John Henry Ramirez, an inmate on death row, said of the station.
- Ramirez was convicted for a 2004 killing, and the Supreme Court has stayed his execution.
Death row inmate John Henry Ramirez said the prisoner-run radio station at a Texas prison helps get him through his time in solitary confinement, according to a report by The Marshall Project via The Guardian.
The Allan B. Polunsky Unit — described as "one of the most restrictive death rows in the country," according to The Marshall Project — under normal circumstances does not allow inmates to communicate with each other, but the radio station is the exception.
"You just don't know if you exist anymore," Ramy Hozaifeh, an inmate radio host, said, according to The Marshall Project. "It just kind of removes your humanity from you, and I think the radio has put that back in the equation."
Since August 2020, the radio station, 106.5 FM The Tank, can be heard across the prison. The station airs the audio of sitcom episodes like "Sanford and Son" and "Martin." It also plays music and reads written works from inmates, The Guardian reported.
He remains on death row and looks to the prison radio station for solace.
"I don't know if y'all really understand how big that is because y'all in GP [general population]," he told the other prisoners at a special outdoor church service before he was scheduled to be executed. "Look at how y'all all next to each other. Y'all posted up, y'all walking around, y'all touching each other. We ain't got none of that. Y'all got community. We alone, we all by ourselves."
"The Tank has helped me. The Tank has given me an avenue to do that," Ramirez continued.
The Court granted a stay the night of his scheduled execution on September 8, a court document shows.
Ramirez said he wanted his spiritual adviser, Pastor Dana Moore, to hold his hand and pray over him during his execution, and the Supreme Court has until June 2022 to decide Ramirez's fate, according to an email from his attorney, Seth Kretzer.
"The State makes no effort to hide its disrespect for the religious exercise of death-row inmates like petitioner who seek spiritual comfort in their final moments," Kretzer said in a brief. "It views condemned inmates only as nuisances who 'piggyback on one another's lawsuits to make ever-increasing demands on the State.'"
Ramirez, now 37-years-old, was convicted for the 2004 killing of Pablo Castro during a robbery and sentenced to capital punishment nearly four years later, according to The Washington Post. According to Texas Monthly, Ramirez was under the influence of cocaine, marijuana, and vodka, and looking for someone to rob so he could buy more substances.
"I was a horrible person — horrible," Ramirez said at the outdoor church service. "But I made the effort to do the best I could and to live my life the best I could once I realized how horrible I was."
He added: "If I do gotta walk there, I can walk there in peace knowing I did as much good as I could. It ain't never gonna make up for what I did."