The Law: Living on Death Row

The Supreme Court in 1972 declared that the death penalty as it had been imposed in the U.S. violated the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause. Though the decision was widely interpreted as ending capital punishment altogether, that conclusion is premature. Three of the court's five-Justice majority keyed their constitutional objections to the "arbitrary," "capricious" and "freakish" choices made by sentencing judges or juries in determining which convicted defendants should be executed. To meet those objections, 30 states have made death the mandatory sentence for certain offenses.

Thus at least 186 men and two women are currently under threat of execution.

Now the Supreme Court has agreed to decide before June whether the mandatory provision makes constitutional the death sentence of one convict, Jesse Fowler. His case appropriately originated in North Carolina, which has one of the stiffest new statutes. It now has by far the nation's largest death-row population. TIME Correspondent Jack White recently visited Fowler and the other condemned inmates.

Almost weekly the overpopulated death row at Central Prison in Raleigh grows more crowded. Nine more men arrived last month, raising the total of those awaiting asphyxiation in the gas chamber to 62 men. Two women facing execution are confined in another Raleigh prison. The rapid influx has long since filled the 42 dingy cells in Central's F-block that were originally designated death row, and some inmates are being held in other cell blocks. Says Warden Sam Garrison: "If this keeps up, we will have to start doubling up the men in the cells."

That would be yet another torment for the inmates, some of whom have been in their strange purgatory for as long as 18 months. They are confined 22 hours a day in 6-ft. by 9-ft. cells, emerging only to eat and spend 60 minutes in the recreation pen. They are allowed one hour-long visit each week by a relative; visits by friends must be approved by prison authorities.

One Paper. The cell walls are concrete, and the only way an inmate can see the face of the man next door is by holding a mirror at arm's length through the steel bars at the front of the cell.

Reading material for the 38 blacks, 20 whites and four Indians is scarce. Every day a single newspaper is delivered to each of the three tiers. It makes its way section by section down the row of cells. Books and magazines are even scarcer. The inmates pass their days in numbing boredom.

Though their common fate—and the prison policy of segregating them from all other prisoners—has knit the men of death row into something of a fraternity, racial antagonism remains.

Tommy Noell, 21, a black onetime high school football star who was convicted of raping a white woman and has a white wife, was stabbed recently by a white inmate. Other blacks angrily threatened the assailant. Said one: "We warned him that if anything like that ever happened again, he would pay for it."