Imagine being accused of armed robbery and first degree murder, and being unable to defend yourself properly because you don't speak English. You're sitting in a courtroom on trial, but you're lost in there. The only thing you really understand is that if you are convicted, you will be sentenced to death.

This was the situation I found myself in over twenty years ago.

Although I was born in Brooklyn, NY, I was raised on the island of Puerto Rico and therefore grew up speaking Spanish. What I remember most about Puerto Rico was walking to school barefoot. There was a lot of disease on the island, and when people walked barefoot, they often became infected. Many of my little friends and brothers died, but I survived.

I began cutting sugar cane when I was barely fourteen years old, and by 1970, when I was only eighteen years old, I had decided to leave the island to make a better life for myself. I became a migrant worker, a fruit picker, and I labored first in Delaware and then in Florida.

I walked very dangerous roads as a young man, but I never imagined that one day I would be convicted and sentenced to death for a crime I did not commit.

The year was 1984. I had to leave Florida early that season because the citrus fruit had been hit by the frost. The grapefruits and oranges fell right off the trees, and all we had to do was pick them up so we were out of work in no time. I needed work, so I decided to migrate north, from Florida to Pennsylvania, where I knew a farmer who would give me a job pruning apple and peach trees.

One day we were eating lunch under an apple tree when a group of FBI agents and local police suddenly arrived, pointed their guns at us, and told us to hit the ground. I heard an officer call my name, but I was too scared to get up because of the gun that was pointed at me, so I raised my arm instead.

They asked me to walk over to them. I obeyed. After the officers had inspected the tattoo on my left arm and looked inside my mouth to confirm that I had a missing tooth, they told me that there was a warrant for my arrest in the state of Florida for first degree murder and armed robbery. They read me my rights, slapped the handcuffs on me, and took me to prison.

A week later, I found myself in front of a federal judge who was talking about extradition. I didn't understand what extradition meant, so they brought in an interpreter. All he told me in Spanish was that I could either waive it or fight it, but that they were going to take me back anyway. So I started thinking: I did not commit this crime. I am not a killer. I will waive it, and as soon as they see my ugly face in Florida, they will let me go.

A week after I arrived in Florida, they put me in front of a judge who read the charges to me. He said I was accused of murdering a beauty salon owner named Delbert Baker and announced that the state was seeking the death penalty against me.

I'm not OJ Simpson. I didn't have any money to hire a lawyer, so the court appointed a public defender to my case. This attorney, he used to pat me on the back and say confidently, "You're going home. Don't worry about it!" and I believed him. Of course I should go home! I did not commit the crime.

They started picking the jury on a Monday. On Tuesday, after they had picked eleven whites, one African-American man, and no Hispanics, they told the jury how to conduct themselves in a capital murder trial. Wednesday of the same week, the evidence came in, and this is what they had against me:

Their case relied almost completely on the testimony of two convicted felons, David Falcon and John Berrien. David Falcon was what they calla "police informant." He claimed that I had confessed to the crime to him, and he also implicated a man named John Berrien.
John was arrested and interrogated. He made fifteen contradictory statements and incriminated himself in the crime. Then, after he was charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery and threatened with the electric chair, he struck a deal with the state in order to get his charges dropped to accessory after the fact. John testified against me, and basically all he said at trial was that he drove me to Mr. Delbert's beauty school on the date of the crime, dropped me off, and then picked me up two hours later. After I was convicted and sentenced to death, John's charges were reduced to two years probation in exchange for his testimony.

So the prosecution had two questionable witnesses with criminal records from here to California and no physical evidence. I, on the other hand, had an alibi witness, four witnesses corroborating the alibi's testimony, and other witnesses testifying that the police informant had a grudge against me. But I had a problem: every witness I had was African-American, and the jury was almost completely white.
Thursday of the same week, the jury found me guilty. They sentenced me to death on Friday, and the judge complained that it was taking too long.

*******

I went to death row on Tuesday, November the 2nd, 1984. It was an ugly day, and the place was horrifying. It was dark; it was cold; and every time they moved me around, they moved me around with shackles on my legs, chains around my waist, and handcuffs on my wrists. The place was also infected with rats and roaches.

Breakfast-time was the worst. They would place the food through a flap in the door, and if I stayed in my bunk for five seconds before getting up to get it, I was out of luck. You see, the roaches beat me to it; they were waiting for my breakfast, too.

It gets cold in northern Florida and they supplied us each with a thin blanket. I would cover myself toes, face, and all, but the rats also wanted to get warm so they'd climb the blanket. At night I could feel them running up and down my body. When I'd feel one rustling by my chest, I'd get a good grip on the blanket and shake it until I heard the rat hit the floor. Boom!

Shortly after I came to death row, they executed the tenth person in the State of Florida since the death penalty was reinstated there in 1976. When they executed that 10th person, I became even more scared. I didn't understand the system and I didn't know the language. They seemed to be executing people there every week. How long would it be before they killed me?

I swore to myself that when they came for me, I wouldn't walk quietly to that chair. I made a plan. I decided to take the sheets from my bunk, tear them up, and make ropes with them to tie the door shut. Then, when the officers came to cut the ropes, I would fight them to the end.

At count time, I started doing push-ups and sweating really hard. I tried to get muscles coming out of my eyebrows because I wanted to scare those people. I was trying to intimidate them, but all the time, I was the one intimidated. I was the one who was scared.
The other condemned men told me I was a fool.

"You mean to tell me," I asked them as best I could, "that they're killing people here every week and we're not going to do anything? We're supposed to fight these people! We're supposed to burn this place down!"

"All you do is get up in the morning and nag and cry and curse about your innocence," they argued. "Why don't you learn to speak English instead?" I began to get angry with them, too, until I heard them say the most wonderful thing - they told me they would teach me.
So it was the most despised people in the nation, the "worst of the worst," the ones whom the prosecutors call "monsters," who taught this Puerto Rican how to read, how to write, and how to speak English; without their help, I would never have survived death row.

**********

After I had been on death row for about ten years, I was tired. I started asking myself, "Why do you have to take this? You say you didn't do it. You think they care? They're going to kill you anyway. You're supposed to be a Puerto Rican man, a real macho man. Do it yourself. Don't satisfy them." I wanted out of there, and the only way out was to commit suicide. I needed the runner's help.

A runner is an inmate who is doing time in the prison population, but who is not condemned to death. They take him out of general population and have him work in the death row facility. This runner, he's the one who can get you toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, or even a mop and a broom so that you can clean your cell. He can also supply you with a tool to kill yourself.

All you have to do is give him four stamps or a pack of cigarette rolling paper, and he will swing that tool inside your cell. Perhaps he does it because the items he needs are more important than your life, or perhaps he does it because he also knows that death row is Hell.

The tool is simple - it's a plastic garbage bag. You give him four stamps, and when the guard isn't looking, he'll swing the bag inside your cell. You take it, twist it all up, make a rope with a noose, put the noose around your neck, tie the other end on the bar doors, and then throw yourself down. You're dead, but you're free.

So after the runner swung the bag inside my cell, I twisted it all up and I made a rope with a noose in it. I looked at it, and then I looked at my bunk. I decided that I better think about this a little bit more, so I threw the rope under my bunk and lied down.

Immediately I fell into a deep sleep and began to dream.
I found myself in the beautiful Caribbean Sea. The water was warm, the sun was bright, and the sky was blue. It was a beautiful day. The palm trees looked so good! Then I saw something that I had never seen before - four dolphins coming my way! One pair got on one side of me, the other pair got on my other side, and they all started jumping and flipping like dolphins do. I was having a ball in there. I looked to the shore and saw a lady waving and smiling at me. It was my dear mother, and she was happy because I was happy.
When I woke up, my cell smelled like a beach. I grabbed the rope from underneath my bunk, walked straight to the toilet, and flushed it.

********

The death penalty causes a lot of collateral damage - the families of both the victim and the condemned man suffer. I believe that my mama suffered more than I did.

During my time on death row, she wrote me lots and lots of letters, but there's one that stands out in particular. Its one that I keep with me today, and when I need something to comfort me, I read it. "Son, I just built an altar," she writes, "and I put a statue of the Virgin of the Guadalupe in it and I cut roses and put them in it. I pray five rosaries a day, seeking for a miracle. Someday that miracle will come. You just have to put your faith in God. I know you're innocent, and God knows you're innocent, but you have to trust him."
Seventeen years, eight months, and one day after I arrived on death row, that miracle came.

My lawyer came to me with tears rolling down her cheeks and told me, "Johnny, I can't work on your case anymore. You're innocent, and I can't handle it anymore. I'm going to talk to the agency and see if they will assign their best lawyers to your case." I finally got the dream team!

"Melendez, you've lost too many appeals," my new lawyer told me when we first sat down together. "We're going to try one more time, but if you lose this one, you'll be lucky if you live three years. The first thing I'm going to do is send an investigator out to talk to your old trial defense lawyer to see if he has any files left."

It was then that the first miracle occurred: we found out that my former public defender, the one who used to pat me on the back, had become a judge. This created what they call in the legal world a "conflict of interests," and gave me the opportunity to move my case out of racist Polk County to Hillsborough County, where my case fell in the hands of a courageous woman, the Honorable Barbara Fleischer.
When the investigator spoke to my former lawyer, she also learned that he had kept a box of information about my case on file. She rushed down to his old office to get it. When she pulled out the box, a tape cassette fell to the floor. She carried the box to her car, remembered the tape cassette, and went back for it.

Thank God that she did because on that tape was the confession of the real killer, a man named Vernon James. Before long, we found out that my trial lawyer not only had such a tape, he had possessed it one month before I went to trial! This opened a whole can of worms.
Immediately, the Honorable Barbara Fleischer ordered the prosecutor to release any files from my case that he had, and the information that surfaced was unbelievable. In addition to a transcript copy of the same taped confession, it turned out that he had no less than sixteen documents corroborating James' confession, sixteen documents that he had never turned in to the defense!

By that time, my attorneys had already presented 20 witnesses who testified that Vernon James was involved in the murder. The witnesses included James' wife and sister, a former prosecutorial investigator, law enforcement officers, and even a former FBI agent.

In light of this information and because the prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence, Judge Barbara Fleischer granted me a new trial. The prosecutors decided not to appeal the judge's decision, and they dropped the case. So I was saved - not by the system, but in spite of it.

*******

Despite the events in court, I had no idea when or if I would be released. One day, two officers appeared in front of my cell and told me that I needed to have my photo taken. As they were walking me down the hall, I noticed that there were a whole bunch of correction officers coming towards me, and every one of them had on a white shirt. When you see a guard with a white shirt, it's a guard with higher rank, so I got scared again. The superintendent of the prison and the warden were there. I didn't trust these people, so I locked my legs and refused to move.

The warden came and stood behind me. He patted me on the back and told me to move. His actions reminded me of my trial lawyer, who I believed had deceived me, so I became even more frightened. "I'm doomed in here. They're going to kill me!" I thought to myself.
Then this one correction officer started speaking Spanish. "Melendez, don't start any trouble in here now," he said. "You're going to the information room. I believe you've got good news." I was still skeptical, paranoid, and scared, but I decided to move.
They took me to an office and sat me in a chair. In front of me was a woman typing on a computer and asking me crazy questions. "With whom are you going to live? What kind of job do you have?" she asked me.
I must have given her a weird look because she got up from that chair, put both hands on the desk in front of me, looked straight in my eyes and asked, "You don't understand what's going on in here, do you?"

"I don't have the slightest idea!" I answered. "I've been on death row for almost 18 years. They don't have any jobs on death row!"
"We're fixing your paperwork," she told me. "They're going to release you today."

I don't know if you watch cartoons and you've seen one cartoon character hit another one over the head with a sludge hammer. You know how he has stars going around his head? He's in a state of shock, but he's smiling? That's how I was - in a state of shock, but smiling.

Then the guards started acting differently. They started calling me something they'd never called me before: they began calling me Mr. Melendez. I liked that. They offered me soda pop and sandwiches, but I didn't want anything to eat. I just wanted to pack everything up and get out of there!

Soon they took me to my cell. By that time, everyone on death row knew that I was going to be released. I had just started packing up my stuff when all of a sudden my door flew wide open and the captain and two officers stepped inside my cell. I got scared again, but I turned around so that they could put the handcuffs on me. One of the officers started putting them on, but the captain stopped him, saying, "No. Mr. Melendez is a free man. He will walk out of here without handcuffs today."

I went to say goodbye to my friend who lived in the cell next to mine, but when I stood in front of him, I was suddenly unable to speak. I was happy, but part of me was still sad because I was leaving him and the others behind. The men who had taught me how to read and write, I was leaving them there to die. With tears running down his cheeks, my friend looked at me and said, "Don't get in trouble out there. Take care of yourself and your momma, and don't forget about us."

Overcome with emotion, I turned to walk out, but before I reached the door, I heard a clap. Then I heard another clap. Then a third clap. Then a whole lot of claps. They were making so much noise clapping their hands in joy that the guards got angry with them and told them to be quiet, but they didn't stop making noise until I had left that terrible place. They didn't stop clapping until they knew that I could no longer hear them.

*******

When I opened the door that led to my freedom, this is what I saw: I saw a whole bunch of reporters. The first question they asked me was, "How do you feel?" and I told them that I felt happy. I'm a free man. I'm going home.

"What do you want to see? What do you want to do?" they asked me.
"I want to see the moon," I told them. "I want to see the stars. I want to walk on grass, on dirt. I want to hold a little baby in my arms and play with it, and of course, I want to talk to some beautiful women."

On death row, I missed the things that we all take for granted, the simple things in life. I cannot understand people in the free world when they tell me that they're bored. I was bored inside those walls, not outside. I've always been the type of man who can sit on a rock and look at a mountain for hours and hours and enjoy every minute of it.

Today, I'm still a dreamer. I dream and pray that in my time I can see the death penalty abolished.

NOTES:
Juan Roberto Melendez became the 99th person to be exonerated and freed from death row in the nation and the 24th in the state of Florida. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 123 condemned men in 25 different states have been exonerated. Florida, which currently has a death row population of 371, leads the nation with twenty-four exonerations.

Most states have no law providing an innocent person who was wrongly convicted with compensation for his or her time in prison. When Juan Roberto Melendez was released from death row in 2002, he left with only a pair of pants, a shirt, and one hundred dollars. He was given no compensation for his wrongful incarceration, no job training and no mental health care.

Since his release from death row on January 3, 2002, Juan Melendez has been sharing his story of supreme injustice with thousands of people throughout the country and abroad. Juan Melendez is a board member of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and president of Juan Melendez Voices United for Justice. For more information about the outreach that he has been doing since his release from death row, please visit www.voicesunited4justice.com [1].