The Silent Treatment
Imagine serving decades in prison for a crime your sibling framed you for. Now imagine doing it while profoundly deaf.
By James Ridgeway on Fri. December 16, 2011 3:00 AM PDT
Illustration: Brian Stauffer
"This is a collect call from a correctional institution," says the robotic female voice at the other end of the line. After a moment of confusion, I realize it must be Felix Garcia, whom I'd visited several weeks earlier in a northern Florida prison. He is serving a life sentence for a robbery-murder for which his own brother now admits to framing him. I'd sent him a card for his 50th birthday. It had a picture of flowers—something he probably hasn't seen in 30 years—and some lame words of encouragement. Now he's calling to thank me and to plead for help. His words seem surreal, relayed in the emotionless drone of a TTY operator: Four of his fellow deaf inmates have tried to commit suicide—one somehow managed to swallow a razor blade. It sounds like he's thinking about doing the same. "Please,'' the voice intones, "will you phone my lawyers? I can't get through to them."
Felix has been deaf, for all practical purposes, since childhood. For most of his three decades behind bars, which began when he was 19, he's been housed in the general population with few special services for his disability. His experiences are the stuff of TV prison dramas: He's ignored or taunted by guards, raped and brutalized by other prisoners. Last year, he tried to hang himself.
"Felix," I plead awkwardly. "You are not going to kill yourself. Please, please, hold on."
"I won't do it,'' he says finally. "I have Jesus."
I repeat: "Do not kill yourself."
"Yes, sir." The call abruptly cuts off.
After staring at the phone for a few minutes, I call Pat Bliss, the 69-year-old paralegal who has been working on Felix's case since 1996, when the Lord told her to minister to prisoners. Pat lives in southern Virginia, almost 600 miles from Felix's Florida prison. She doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't know sign language, and isn't a lawyer. But for the last 15 years, she has crafted his defense strategies, written motions and briefs, and helped usher his case through the state and federal courts. For the past five years, Felix has called her "Mom." One lawyer I talked to calls her "an angel." And that's something Felix needs more than anyone I've ever met.
Felix Garcia grew up in a working-class home on the edge of the Hyde Park section of Tampa, Florida, one of six children in a Cuban American family. He was born with normal hearing, but almost from birth he suffered from severe ear infections. A former schoolmate who knew him when they were teenagers remembered how Felix would complain regularly of headaches and earaches, and often miss school: "Felix wore cotton balls in his ears every day," to keep pus from leaking out, she explained.
By all accounts, Felix was a good-looking boy with a sweet demeanor who sometimes compensated for his hearing loss by getting girls to tutor him—or even help him cheat. When Felix was very small, he told Pat, his parents once took him to a clinic to have his ears looked at, but he can't recall receiving any treatment. In any case, the problem persisted. "I asked Felix why his parents did not take him to the doctor," his schoolmate recalled. Felix in 1984 Courtesy Pat Bliss."He told me his parents were ashamed of having a child that could not hear so they did not want anyone else to know." By this time, Felix was having difficulty understanding people even when they spoke up. He learned to read lips a bit but struggled to speak clearly as he gradually lost the ability to hear his own voice. "When people talk, I had to look into their faces," he would explain in court testimony. "I hear sounds, and I hear voices. But I can't make out the words unless I am looking at the person." It felt like being underwater.
While still in high school, Felix found work as a brick mason. After graduating, he had a brief run-in with the law for check kiting, receiving probation. When he was 19, he and his girlfriend, Michelle Genco, had a baby girl whom they named Candise. Felix kept doing masonry work when he could get it and lived with his grandmother, whom he described as "very poor, but she loved me." At times, he hung around with his siblings, some of whom had gotten involved with, as he puts it, "the street."
On August 4, 1981, Felix accompanied his brother Frank, his sister Tina, and her boyfriend, Ray Stanley, to a pawnshop. Frank had a ring he wanted to hock. He said he didn't have his ID and asked Felix to sign the pawn ticket. The ring, it turned out, belonged to a man who'd been murdered the day before at a motel. Six days later police, having traced the ticket, arrested Felix at Tina and Ray's house.
Felix now says that he didn't understand the officer who read him his Miranda rights. In any case, he insisted he knew nothing about the crime, and he refused to sign a statement for the police. Michelle and her mother both later testified that Felix was with them at the time of the killing, eating pizza and watching videos at the mother's home. But Frank—who knew the victim and had left fingerprints at the scene—cut a deal with the state to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed robbery and fingered Felix as the killer. Tina—who married Ray shortly after the arrest—also agreed to testify against her younger brother. It wasn't until nearly a quarter century later that Frank would confess that Felix had had nothing to do with the crime.
At Felix's trial, in 1983, an expert declared that the defendant had a 70-decibel hearing loss, which is considered severe deafness. Through most of the proceedings, he had cotton in his ears to stop the pus. Felix was given a hearing aid, which he said didn't work, and a loudspeaker, which amplified noise but didn't help him understand what people were saying. He tried to read lips, but the prosecutor often faced away from him, and he had no clear view of the witness box. In other words, he was largely clueless as to what was going on.
"Deaf people have a hard time when they are thrown into the criminal-justice system," says MacKay Vernon, a psychologist and authority on the deaf who is familiar with the details of Felix's situation. "The courts—judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers—just don't understand what they're up against. Turning up the sound system doesn't mean the defendant better understands what's going on. He just hears more noise. In the case of Felix, sign language interpreters wouldn't be much help because at the time of the trial he couldn't understand signs. And anyhow, sign language interpreters can't keep up with the speech in courts. Moreover, deaf people often don't have the vocabulary to understand. Their ability to read can lag far behind hearing people."
Even when he took the stand, Felix struggled to understand what the lawyers were asking him. Years later, after reviewing the trial transcript, Pat asked Felix why he had been so quick to answer "yes" to one question after another. "If I say no, they're going to think I'm stupid," he replied. "Plus I wanted to get off the stand and go home. And Frank told me they would not convict me for something I didn't do." At another point, Felix said, "If I say no, they will do it all again…I spent a long time in that place. I wanted out." (By trial time, he already had been in jail for two years.) "It is tragic," says Dick Watts, a criminal attorney who later helped represent Felix. It's easy to be confused because "Felix smiles, nods…but he doesn't understand.''
On July 23, 1983, Felix was convicted on the basis of his siblings' testimony and the pawn ticket he'd signed for Frank—the only piece of physical evidence against him. He received a life sentence for first-degree murder and a concurrent 99 years for armed robbery and was placed in a maximum-security lockup. He and Michelle parted ways, and he never saw her again (although he has recently been in touch with his grown daughter). His mother visited a few times, but then he called Pat to say he'd received a letter from his parents saying they were moving to Tennessee, and that if Felix ever got out he shouldn't bother looking for them. When Felix's childhood friend connected with the family years later, "His father told me he once had a son named Felix, but that person was in the Polk Correctional Institution."
Felix in 1999 Courtesy Pat Bliss.At Polk, Felix met a few other deaf inmates, who taught him some sign language. But his world grew ever more silent and menacing as he lost what was left of his hearing. By 1987, when he finally got an operation that helped stop the pus drainage, he was profoundly deaf. In prison, Felix lived alone in a kind of sensory solitary confinement—until Pat Bliss found him.
To get to Pat's home from Washington, DC, you drive five hours south through the Shenandoah Valley, with the Blue Ridge Mountains on the left and the Alleghenys rising to the right. Wytheville, a town of about 8,000 tucked into the rolling hillsides of western Virginia, is little more than one long street surrounded by horse and cattle pastures. A country road winds out of town, past the turnoff for the First Assembly of God church, which Pat describes as her home away from home. A little further on, atop a hill, stands a five-sided house that serves as her one-woman defense headquarters.
Pat is a short, thin woman, twice married, once widowed, and now in the midst of a divorce. She lives alone in this big house decorated with teddy bears and wallpaper with pictures of deer. When she speaks, she is right to the point, and if you need some fact about Felix, she'll hustle into her office, where the walls are adorned with photos and documents from his case. His only personal possessions, his early photo albums, are displayed on one shelf.
Pat grew up on carnival lots in Canada. "My mom and dad made candied apples, saltwater taffy, cotton candy, caramel crisp, and traveled to local fairs and carnivals in Ontario," she explains. "Ever since I was eight years old, I was running the cash register." The family eventually moved to Florida, where Pat spent eight years working as a flight attendant for United Airlines. She later got married and was living in Clearwater and working for Bic when her husband, Jack, one day called to her to "come see this guy on TV." It was Jimmy Swaggart. "I felt the spirit of the Lord," she recalls. "That's what I needed. It filled this empty void in me."
She was born again on Palm Sunday in 1986. But after Jack died of cancer, Pat was at loose ends, watching a lot of cop shows on TV. Her life changed in December 1990, when "I got a prophetic message from the Lord," she recalls; a woman in her Bible study "spoke out the message" that he was sending her to work among prisoners. Soon afterward, she heard about the work of Chuck Colson—the Watergate conspirator who went on to found a ministry called Prison Fellowship—and attended one of his weekend trainings.
Dedicating herself to her new calling, Pat took courses in law and landed a job at a county law library. She also began working for defense lawyers as a liaison to the local jails. After she helped an indigent prisoner who had been sentenced to many more years than the law allowed, inmates began seeking her out. In October 1996, she got a package from an inmate at Polk who was helping Felix Garcia with sign interpretation. The package contained some of Felix's legal documents and a note that said, "This is a charity case. See what can be done." By the time she'd finished reading the file, Pat was determined to help Felix.
She immediately started preparing motions aimed at overturning Felix's conviction in the Florida courts. The first motion, arguing that Felix's constitutional rights were violated because of his inability to understand trial testimony, was quickly shot down. In Florida, as in many states, defendants have only two years from the time of their direct appeal to file such motions. The deadline for Felix had passed some 12 years earlier.
Traditionally, the federal courts have provided recourse for constitutional claims that have timed out in state courts. But the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, championed by Bill Clinton and passed with broad bipartisan support in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, imposed time limits on such cases. "These statutes of limitations are just killers," says Steve Bright, senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, noting that the law cuts off appeals even in capital cases.
Laura Rovner, a former attorney for the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) who now runs the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, says Felix could well have had his conviction overturned were it not for that missed deadline. Under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, any entity receiving federal money needs to have an effective communication system in place for the deaf or hard of hearing. "It is hard to think of a situation where that is more critical than where somebody is being tried for a serious crime," Rovner says.
The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) strengthened that requirement, demanding that the criminal-justice system take "appropriate steps" to make sure a disabled person can communicate as effectively as anyone else. This might require "appropriate auxiliary aids and services," such as a setup akin to closed captioning or an oral interpreter to facilitate lip reading.
In fact, criminal justice agencies "frequently do not honor the letter and spirit of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act," says Howard Rosenblum, who heads the NAD. "The challenge has been to actually litigate against every law enforcement agency, lawyer, court, and prison that violate the requirements." The Justice Department could enforce the requirements, he adds, but to a large degree has failed to do so. (The DOJ asked me to submit written questions for this story but did not respond to them by press time.)
In 2003, Pat went back to the Florida courts with fresh evidence that wasn't subject to the time limit. Felix's brother Frank, who was still serving his time, had sent Felix a letter admitting that he and Ray had done the killing and that "Felix Garcia was never at the scene of the crime or had any participation."
Frank was the star witness at an evidentiary hearing the court finally granted more than three years later. Pat had collected affidavits from five inmates who had known Frank in various prisons. All of them swore that Frank had told them he'd blamed his little brother for the murder because he was afraid he'd get the death penalty. Taking the stand, Frank initially responded to most of the questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment. Then, suddenly, he turned to the judge and asked: "How much does perjury carry? Five years? I'll do that. Felix Garcia did not have nothing to do with that murder case.It was me and Raymond Stanley that did it. I'll take the five years."
Felix's attorney, Dick Watts, kept interrogating Frank:
Q. Felix's ID was used for a pawn, is that right?
A. Yes. I gave him the jewelry.
Q. Did he know where the jewelry came from?
A. No, he did not.
Q. Why did you give it to Felix?
A. I didn't have ID.
Q. So, Felix got hooked into this by—by that incident?
A. That incident, yes.
Q. And you are saying today that he was not involved in the planning, wasn't there, didn't participate in any way?
A. He had nothing to do with it.
Q. It was you and who else?
A. And Raymond Stanley…
Nearly a year later, the judge denied Felix's motion for retrial or release, saying he couldn't tell what was true and what was a lie. Pat was devastated. "We were in court 10 months with depositions, and we were denied," she recalls as we sit on her living room sofa in the late afternoon sun. "He sat there in that jury box," she says. Then she begins to cry. "He was shackled. And he mouthed to me, 'Why? I am innocent.'"
Pat remembers turning to Watts as they sat in the courtroom that day. "'He has no family. They don't want anything to do with Felix. He had nobody here during all our times in court,' I said. 'That young man is going to be my son until this is over with. And I'll be his mom if he wants that.'
"So," Pat continues, "I went to the jail after that and I told him, 'Felix, I am sticking with you till the very end. I will be that mother you don't have, that sister you don't have. I will not let you alone without somebody on the outside caring for you.' And we both cried together. And he called me Mom. And he's called me Mom ever since. He calls me Pat when it's legal; he calls me Mom when it's personal. I will see this young man to the very end, till he walks out that courtroom door a free man."
Pat Bliss and Felix at Polk, June 5, 2010 Courtesy Pat Bliss. Until that day, Felix, like other inmates with serious disabilities, will face what David Fathi, head of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, calls "a nightmare of vulnerability, abuse, and exclusion from the most basic prison programs and services. I think prisoners who are deaf or blind are often the worst off of all."
Numbers are hard to come by, since prison authorities often don't bother to count deaf inmates. But when Katrina Miller, a former corrections official turned assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, looked at Texas prisons a decade ago, she found that a full 30 percent of inmates were hard of hearing—defined as having a 50 percent hearing loss in one ear.
Under the ADA, hard-of-hearing inmates are supposed to be provided with the same "auxiliary aids and services" in prison as in court. But prisons "have routinely ignored" the legal requirements, says the NAD's Howard Rosenblum. "Deaf and hard-of-hearing prisoners are unable to understand instructions of guards, to take classes that make them eligible for early release, to learn skills, to know when meals are announced, to know when visitors are here to see them, to watch television, to use the telephone, to express grievances, to communicate with counselors or doctors, and to defend against claims of misconduct."
Jack Cowley, a former prison warden in Oklahoma who now serves on the advisory board of the National Institute of Corrections, says there can be wide gaps between policy and practice. "While most directors of corrections, and perhaps even wardens would say, 'Oh yes, we make accommodation'…there is still this sort of deliberate indifference when it comes to back in the cellblocks," Cowley told me. "Most state facilities are aware of deaf inmates and try to house them together and they look out for one another, and hopefully some staff member will find some compassion and look after them." But "there's not a lot of sympathy in the halls."
In theory, Felix could file a federal civil rights lawsuit—but there he would run into the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a Clinton-era law that makes it extraordinarily difficult for prisoners to bring a case in the federal courts. Class-action suits in New York and Virginia have somewhat improved services for deaf prisoners in those states, and similar suits have been filed against the Illinois corrections department and the federal Bureau of Prisons. Earlier this year, two attorneys sued the Florida Department of Corrections seeking to win deaf inmates access to a device that would enable them to watch TV or listen to the radio. But their class-action suit was dismissed after corrections officials argued that the tiny gadget could be used to hide contraband. In any case, the officials claimed, the state housed too few deaf inmates to justify a class action. How few? In a deposition, the department's ADA-compliance official admitted she had no idea. (In December, a DOC spokeswoman told me Florida has 74 inmates receiving services related to a hearing impairment.)
Felix may not have much going for him, but at least he has Pat. She gets on the phone with prison classification officers—who dole out stints in solitary confinement and other punishments—explaining that Felix is not being unruly when he doesn't answer a guard. If he has a medical problem, she talks to the prison doctors. She saves up to visit Felix in person once a year. They used to speak on the phone weekly, until the TTY calls became collect, a luxury Pat couldn't afford. Now they correspond by mail. Sometimes Felix's letters don't arrive. He says the guards tear them up.
With Pat's guidance, I eventually receive permission to interview Felix face to face. After driving all the way down from Virginia, Pat picks me up in her red Nissan Xterra at the Jacksonville airport. The Jefferson Correctional Institute is about two hours due west; the final approach takes us through farmland and down a narrow tree-lined road. The prison itself consists of an innocuous-looking group of low, sand-colored buildings with dark, slanted roofs. A friendly classification officer leads us through the grounds and into a building where an assistant warden welcomes us and clears out his office for our interview. Leaning against the wall about 10 feet off, facing away from us, is a tall man with short salt-and-pepper hair. I automatically call out, "Hi Felix," before reminding myself aloud, "Oh, right, he can't hear me."
"Oh, Garcia?" says the warden. "He can hear."
In fact, the prison's medical staff has deemed Felix profoundly deaf, with hearing loss exceeding 90 decibels. This means he can hear, in some muffled fashion, the sound of a car horn, a motorcycle, or a jet taking off, but not human voices. Felix says his prison-issued hearing aid doesn't make speech more understandable; it merely amplifies the din, allowing him to hear cell doors clanging shut and alarms going off. But because he can read lips a little bit, and because he tries hard to understand and accommodate, the prison's nonmedical staff has the impression that he hears more than he lets on. "I am being assaulted by a certain officer," he'd written to Pat. "He will not let me sleep. He will not let me rest kicking on my door and today he pushed me down and spit on me trying to get me to say something."
As I record Felix with my little Flip camera, guards pace the corridor outside. Felix speaks and signs simultaneously, and Pat—who knows only rudimentary sign language, but is used to Felix—understands him pretty well. He's used to her, too, and can reads her lips effectively, so she repeats my questions. Behind his round glasses, Felix's face is gaunt but expressive. His voice contains a note of desperation.
He explains that his situation has deteriorated rapidly in the past year. He was removed from Polk, where he had a small community of deaf acquaintances, and sent to a series of other prisons before landing here. Shortly before the move, he'd seen Candise, now 30, for the first time since she was three months old; his daughter lives in Florida, but too far away to visit regularly. None of the prisoners around him is hearing impaired and he hasn't been getting access to sign-language interpreters. He lives in fear of offending fellow prisoners by misunderstanding them or inadvertently ignoring their questions, and then paying the price; indeed, shortly after arriving at Jefferson, Felix got into a fight and was briefly thrown into solitary confinement.
After we talk for a bit, I ask him about the rape. It happened about a year ago, when two men assaulted Felix in a shower at the Florida DOC's Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler. He reported it, despite fears of retribution, and for weeks afterwards, he says, he spent hours crouching in terror against his cell door, trying to discern the noise of an approaching guard or assailant. Later, after being transferred to the Madison Correctional Institution, Felix attempted to hang himself with a bedsheet. Prison staff put him on suicide watch, he says, leaving him naked in a bare, cold cell for six days. (According to the DOC, inmates on suicide watch are clad in a nonflammable, untearable "shroud.")
Up until now, no one has written about Felix's situation, and I worry that Felix—Pat, too—are pinning too much hope on the power of the press. But I also know that she, at least, understands what they are up against. Beyond trying to improve Felix's lot in prison, Pat told me, there are few options. In his criminal case, every possible angle is exhausted—unless someone with firsthand knowledge, besides Frank, were to come forward with an account of the night of the murder.
In theory, Gov. Rick Scott could grant clemency, but Scott, a tea party champion elected in 2010, has little inclination toward that sort of move, and has in fact moved to make the clemency process more arduous. Plus, to qualify for clemency, Felix would have to acknowledge guilt, something he refuses to do. Short of that, he'll be eligible for parole in 2024, at age 63, but even then his odds are abysmal. Last year, just 50 Florida prisoners were paroled—0.1 percent of the total released—and not a single lifer has been released on parole since 1995. "While other states cut back because of costs," notes the Southern Center for Human Rights' Steve Bright, "Florida expands its prison population."
In October, Felix was moved to the Tomoka Correctional Institution, where there are other deaf inmates and some programs are available. He is now a bit less isolated but only slightly less fearful. "Many, many times, deaf people raped and beat and no help from the officers. Hearing people steal our things," Felix wrote in a letter MacKay Vernon showed me. "When we try to talk to officers, they just laugh. So hard for us. Many, many times I just want to die but have Jesus in [my] heart…Pray every day to help other deaf."
