Watching the Dallas Cowboys on Death Row: Our Visit to a Supermax Prison

A staggering number of death-row inmates have used their last words to do the same thing: pay tribute to their favorite sports teams. So we sent correspondent Dave Fleming to a supermax prison in Texas to find out why. Charles Flores — Inmate No. 999299 at the notorious Polunsky Unit in Livingston — has maintained his innocence for over 25 years and counting… while living in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. And Flores agreed to take us inside his hidden world of game-day enchiladas, trash talk, and fantasy football. Where there isn’t always next year.= To learn more about the case of Charles Flores: https://www.freecharlesflores.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 2:56Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  So much of living under a death sentence is the unknown. You know, we're sent here. We were convicted and sentenced to death and sent to death row to have our lives taken from us, to be executed, you know? To be legally murdered. And, um,

• 3:26Speaker 02

  that's pretty heavy, man.

• 3:28Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.

• 3:46Pablo Torre?

  Dave Fleming, time is of the essence with this episode in lots of very real ways. Thank you for being here.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  My pleasure, as always.

• 3:56Pablo Torre?

  This one started, as many great things do, with a website I had never heard about.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  It started with me coming across a website, a database where you can read the final last statements of every prisoner that's been executed by the state of Texas.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Me being me, I went down that rabbit hole, started reading them. It is a gut-wrenching, awful, exhausting experience.

• 4:31Pablo Torre?

  The very basic premise of there's a publicly available website that records the last things that every executed prisoner on death row in the state of Texas says.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  You're mesmerized, right? You can't stop scrolling. This is William Prince Davis, prisoner number 614. He was executed on September 4th, 1999. His last statement was, quote, "I just thank the Lord for all that he has done for me. That is all. That is all I have to say, Warden. Oh, and I would just like to say, in closing, what about those Cowboys?"

• 5:11Pablo Torre?

  What's staggering is that that guy, the guy you just quoted, William Prince Davis, is not alone.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  No, no, there's a shockingly large amount of death row prisoners who use that final opportunity to shout out their favorite sports teams.

• 5:29Pablo Torre?

  John Burke, inmate number 949, his last statement says, quote, "The Raiders are going all the way, y'all. Y'all pray for me and it's going to be all right. That's it, and it's time to roll up out of here. It's going down. Let's get it over with. That's it. June 14th, 2000." And so, this is obviously the most remarkable proof of the power of sports that I'd ever encountered. Just that alone, this very basic fact, you're about to die, killed by the state, and you want everybody to know that the last thing you cared about was the Dallas Cowboys.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  I think your initial reaction was the same as mine, which is just, "Sports means too much. This is crazy. Why wouldn't you talk about the victim, or your families, or regrets, or anything like that? You're gonna shout out the Cowboys? It's like, what does sports really mean to people?"

• 6:23Pablo Torre?

  Right, and also, therefore, what's it even like to love sports on death row?

• 6:29Speaker 04

  How do they even have access to sports?

• 6:31Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  How can they be Cowboys fans and Raiders fans?

• 6:35Pablo Torre?

  Are they arguing about Dak Prescott?

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Right. Are they playing fantasy football? Are they, is there trash talk? Is that dangerous?

• 6:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes. And so, with these curiosities in mind, and with me immediately... Immediately just saying, okay, this is assigned. Who do you decide to reach out to?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  There are websites, there are databases where they will connect you to be a pen pal, to people in prison, especially to people on death row who are exceptionally isolated, usually. You get to look at their bio, sort of what their crime was, when they were put in prison, what are their interests? And, you know, I came across a guy who had potential.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  He was a lifelong Cowboys fan, grew up in Fort Worth. His dad was in the Air Force. They had a family ritual of going to church every Sunday and then coming home and sitting down in front of the TV to watch the Cowboys. You know, you just kind of knew right away, it was like, okay, this guy is a legit sports fan.

• 7:40Pablo Torre?

  But how does one arrange an interview, Flem, with somebody on death row?

• 7:46Speaker 04

  We correspond back and forth over several weeks. I would say about half a dozen emails in.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  This guy just said, "Well, if you're so interested in talking, why don't you just come to Texas and we'll talk in person?"

• 8:06Pablo Torre?

  And so the prison warden okay's this, the inmate in question okay's it, his attorney okay's it, and then all that's left is for us to be like, do we really want to send one of our correspondents to a supermax prison?

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Yes, and the next thing I know, I'm on a plane to Texas.

• 8:40Pablo Torre?

  And so I do need to establish just who it is exactly that we sent you to go and visit with, because the inmate in question is somebody that we had to collectively and exhaustively research and figure out why exactly this man had been sentenced to death by the state of Texas. So who is he? What is his name?

• 9:01Speaker 04

  His name is Charles Flores. In 1999, at the age of 29, he was sentenced to death for his role in a burglary in the town of Farmers Branch, Texas, which is near Irving, which is actually where the Cowboys, their whole facility is.

• 9:19Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  It's their headquarters. During this burglary, a 64-year-old woman named Betty Black was killed. And Charles was then convicted for being an accomplice to that murder, which was part of the burglary. He was then sentenced to death row, where he has been for the last 25 years. And the default in Texas is solitary confinement for death row prisoners for up to 23 hours a day.

• 9:50Pablo Torre?

  And I do think we just got to clarify this because he's in solitary in a supermax prison, has been for a quarter century now. But he was an accomplice to a murder, not the actual killer, we're saying.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  He was not the gunman and was never accused of being the gunman. There is no DNA evidence linking him to the crime whatsoever. Charles has always maintained his innocence. And he's actually provided an alibi for the night of the burglary and the murder. But that's not even the craziest part of this whole story. The craziest part is that the actual gunman, Richard Childs, he pled guilty immediately. He served 17 years of a 35-year sentence. And as we speak right now, he is free and out of prison. He's a free man. He was actually released in 2016,

• 10:45Speaker 04

  right about the same time that Charles got his execution date from the state of Texas.

• 10:51Pablo Torre?

  Charles Flores got that execution date because of something in Texas that I want to briefly explain here, which is called the law of parties. Which is to say, if you are an accomplice to a murder, you are going to be sentenced, treated as if you are also a murderer.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Right. If you are part of a felony, it's like everybody pulled the trigger.

• 11:14Pablo Torre?

  So this is where a show that otherwise enjoys diving deep into the worlds of, say, athlete branded weed, or celebrity family feud, for instance, should probably explain the bizarre details of why Charles Flores was not executed, as scheduled, on June 2nd, 2016. And why the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals finally granted him that stay of execution, just six days before that date. Because all of this has to do with the eyewitness testimony that led to the capital murder conviction of Charles Flores, in the first place. You see, the eyewitness in question was the victim's neighbor.

• 11:57Pablo Torre?

  And what she reported seeing on the night of the burglary was a car with two men driving up to the house across the street. The driver, she easily identified as the aforementioned and eventually admitted gunman, Richard Childs, a white dude with long, dark hair. As for the passenger, what this neighbor recalled was that he was also white, with long, dark hair.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  So tell me, what is it that you remember about the incident that day? Offhand, things you can remember now?

• 12:29Speaker 06

  And first thing I remember is when I looked out the window, and I saw a car pulled up into the driveway. I remember it was a VW Bug. And I remember seeing two guys get out. And I remember looking at the passenger as he got out, and remembering his dark hair, but basically the same as the driver's.

• 12:56Pablo Torre?

  But Charles Flores, a local drug dealer who was one of the police's main suspects, absolutely did not look like that, as you'll see. In fact, this neighbor failed to pick Flores out of a lineup. And what happened next was something that I didn't even know was a real thing, until I started studying this case. Which was that the neighbor then submitted to a longstanding practice that has been around since the 1950s, known as forensic hypnosis.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Have you ever seen a documentary film? Like on TV, like the...

• 13:35Speaker 05

  With the Animal Kingdom show or, you know? What we're gonna do is, is, is when we get you into a deep state of hypnosis, we're gonna take you to a theater. It's gonna be your own private theater. Uh, and basically what it is, you're gonna be seeing the documentary. You're gonna be seeing the film of the events that occurred on that day, on that morning. Okay.

• 13:56Pablo Torre?

  Forensic hypnosis is basically what it sounds like. Police investigators hypnotize victims and witnesses so that they can, um, relax ostensibly, and then recall traumatic events with an even greater clarity.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Relax. This is an section that you're peeling on the bottom of your feet. I want you to still imagine it now shooting up through your ankle, and through the hazard of your legs.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  Feeling more and more relaxed. I want you to imagine the stress, the ceiling, the... Moving in and out of your, your leg, your calves. Just separating the muscles and all the...

• 14:34Pablo Torre?

  According to a 2020 Dallas Morning News investigation, police in Texas had used hypnosis in this way nearly 1,800 times over the past 40 years.

• 14:47Speaker 04

  So this woman comes out of hypnosis. They draw a composite sketch. It looks like the guy who actually pulled the trigger and admitted pulling the trigger. Skinny, white, long hair. Charles is heavy-set, Hispanic, and he had a buzz cut at the time.

• 15:05Pablo Torre?

  But Charles Flores, again, was one of the main suspects. And over the following year, as this case proceeded, something else happened. His actual mugshot got plastered in newspapers all across the state.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  So it wasn't until 13 months later, in a court, when the woman said, "Oh yeah, there he is." That's who she pointed out as being at the scene of the crime.

• 15:33Pablo Torre?

  And so the thing that spared Charles Flores in 2016, six days before that scheduled execution date, and after more than a decade, by the way, of exhaustive appeals here, was a groundbreaking new law. A Texas statute passed in 2013, known as the Junk Science Law. Now, in recent decades, as you might imagine, the credibility of forensic hypnosis had been called into serious scientific question. Evidence has shown that police hypnosis often distorts witness memories and leads to false convictions, and 27 other states, at last count, have banned the practice for this reason.

• 16:16Pablo Torre?

  And yet, while Charles Flores did get granted that stay of execution, as well as a new evidentiary hearing in 2018, relief, still, was ultimately denied. Prosecutors claimed that the eyewitness testimony in question wouldn't have mattered anyway, because they had other evidence placing him at the scene of the crime. And the Innocence Project subsequently filed multiple amicus briefs in support of Flores. His lawyers, meanwhile, requested that the case be tried federally before the Supreme Court. And that request, as of January 2021, was denied as well.

• 16:55Pablo Torre?

  So, from a purely legal perspective, this is where the story of Charles Flores stops. But for us, of course, it's where our story begins.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  He was into some, some bad stuff and he admits that. What we're saying is it's very clear that at the very least, he doesn't deserve to be on death row or in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for a quarter century.

• 17:28Pablo Torre?

  All of which is to say that the case of Charles Flores is this case that is a larger window onto capital punishment as an institution in the United States still today. But I also recognize that it wasn't exactly the easiest assignment for a reporter to receive.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I had to go to the Polanski unit in Livingston, Texas, which is a notorious prison, always ranked as one of the most dangerous, worst prisons in the world. There are all kinds of hoops that you have to go through, right? You have to submit to a background check. You have to agree to all these restrictions. You are allowed exactly one hour of rolling cameras. You have to submit a list of every piece of equipment down to pen and paper. So I was kind of freaking the [bleep] out and wondering why I couldn't go to the Family Feud or smoke celebrity weed. Like, how did I get this assignment?

• 18:38Pablo Torre?

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• 20:56Pablo Torre?

  So the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, where you're visiting Charles Flores. How does one get into prison?

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Where this really got real for me was when, right before we arrived, they reminded us, nobody can wear white. And that's because that's what the death row inmates wear. They're required to wear white. And so you step in and the first thing that happens in this guard shack, you get a big boy search.

• 21:22Pablo Torre?

  Not a TSA?

• 21:24Speaker 04

  No, this is a, this is a thorough search. I look to my right and I just happened to see the open closet where they keep all the guns, hundreds of guns and shotguns, in case something happens at the prison. You make it through that, you're still not in the prison yet. You come out and you are now between the fences. And it's perfectly aligned with the gun towers. Because they need to have a clean shot if someone makes it through that fence.

• 21:55Pablo Torre?

  What is the noise that you're hearing?

• 21:58Speaker 04

  It's the people inside screaming at each other, yelling everything under the sun. That's really when you're like, man, is it too late to turn back? And then the strangest thing happened. The room that they took us to, to interview Charles-

• 22:17Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Is where families go. And so you turn, after this giant steel door closes, and you're like, what am I doing? You turn, you go into the room, and the walls are painted with cartoon characters. And I'm staring at Cookie Monster, My Little Pony, SpongeBob SquarePants, and I'm like, wow, we really are down a rabbit hole.

• 22:41Pablo Torre?

  And so, as you're waiting there, where Charles Flores's family would have waited, what are you expecting?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  I'm starting to get into my thoughts, right? And it's starting to spiral. And then Charles comes in.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Hello, hello, can you hear me? Testing, testing, one, two, three. Can you hear me? Sound good? Okay.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  And we sort of make eye contact. We kind of say hello through the glass.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I've, uh, I've taken pictures in the past, and it's usually better to put the phone down like this, so you don't see that phone like right next to your ear.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  So if you want, you can just let them both hang down.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Okay. You guys want me to let the phones hang or leave them here? And Charles kind of saves me because it's clear that he wants to talk football. I looked at the Cowboys' schedule before, before we came over here, and I did, I noticed, okay, they play the Texans. Is it like week?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  I think it's 11.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Week 11.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Week 11.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Charles grew up big. You can tell that from the, from the, the clips that we're watching. Was an offensive and defensive lineman in middle school. And the first thing he wants to talk about is the Cowboys-Texans game on Monday night, of course.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  So the way Death Row is, the population is it's,

• 24:08Speaker 02

  there's more guys from the big cities, the big counties. So there are more guys from Dallas and Houston than anywhere else. So that makes for a lot more fans of, of, of both teams, right? So on that day,

• 24:27Speaker 02

  football is the sport. We wake up thinking about it. You know, when, when the, um, when the weekend starts, that's what we're talking about. And especially like a, a big game like that, a big rivalry. Because I don't know, man, it's just, it seems like that because the Texans have been up and down a lot of times. They, uh, they seem to play the role of the little brother. You know what I'm saying? And so, so they want to get, they want to beat the, uh, the Cowboys. You know, if they don't beat nobody else, they want to beat the Cowboys. And I've been telling the guys, the Texan fans, I'm like, you know, on that day, we're not going to be friends. We're going to be rivals, you know what I'm saying?

• 25:10Speaker 04

  His cell, smaller than this studio, 9 by 12?

• 25:14Speaker 02

  It's probably...

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Three of these booths wide. Right, right. One on this side and one on this side. So it's about nine foot. Uh huh.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Some of the death row cells are actually as small as sixty square feet. And they are in there twenty-three hours a day without exception.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  And the doors, they have this mesh where windows are supposed to be. Okay. We have two, three foot, I think it's four inches. Openings in, in the, in the door. So we can stand at the door and we can talk. You know, it's not like normal conversational tones, but when we, when we talk loud, we can hear each other. And of course, everybody's hollering and when, when, you know, the kickoff starts and they make a big play or, you know, a big tackle or something like that. People, people are hollering and, and yeah, interacting. So yeah, it's really great.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  He described it to vertical windows, thin windows with the mesh screen on them.

• 26:14Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, those grates, those vertical grates.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Right, at the front of his cell. And basically, they have to go there and sort of put an eye between the grate to see the community television that, by the way, just showed up a couple of years ago.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  There are seven cells on the ground floor in a section. And then there's seven cells on, on two row. Right. On the second story. We call it one row and two row. Okay. And in that area, there's a TV. It's a thirty-five inch TV and it's from my cell. It's probably from here to that back wall. Mm-hmm. And one, two, three, four.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Four cells, for the most part, are able to watch it on one row by standing at the door. So you stand at the door and you, you look through. The grate. Yes, the grate, the grate. And so, so yeah, you know, when, when, um... When it's fourth and three, or fourth and ten, third and ten, you know, believe me, you're up at the grate and you're looking through that little diamond to make sure you can see, you know.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Okay, but that's four hours, you're standing.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yes, so, some people stand, other, uh, other people will make a makeshift chair.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Uh huh, how?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Okay, so like for me, I have quite a bit of legal documentation, legal paperwork, and I just have it in mesh nylon mesh bags. And I've made a chair that's about this big, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so I strategically put it at the door, and I sit on it, I'll sit on it, but like I told you, when it's, when the kickoff is gonna happen or something, you know, you get up and you, you get close to the grate so you can, you can see what's going on, so yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  The fact that it's his legal papers that he's using to help him with his sports fandom, it's, it's, it's perfect.

• 28:16Pablo Torre?

  It, it is quaint, in a way.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:19Pablo Torre?

  In a way that almost makes me, uh, wonder, so, we're in a supermax prison, where is the [BLEEP] talking, where is the conflict, where is all that?

• 28:30Speaker 04

  I don't wanna overstep or anything like that, but I, basically, my question was, trash talk could be dangerous, can it, in a prison? I mean, it's like, I'm not gonna trash talk anybody, and he had a really interesting explanation for that.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  I can remember last season in the playoffs, you know, we thought the Cowboys were gonna do good, and then Green Bay showed up, and they didn't do good.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  So, believe me, the Texans fans were letting us have it, right? They were letting us have it, and they were talking trash, and they were laughing at us, and, you know, they kept showing Dak, and he was like a deer in the headlights.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  I'm just so mad, I could cuss.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  It just is like the same thing keeps happening.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  And believe me, the next week, when the Texans lost against the Ravens, I gave them the blues.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  Is that scary? I mean, you're talking trash with, with, you could be talking trash with some, some pretty bad dudes, right?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  That's, that's the thing about the death row, it's so difficult is that we're not the worst thing that we've ever done. Are you the worst thing that you've ever done? Cause I know you've done something that, that you, when you think about your cringe, we all have. Every human being that's alive has done something like that. So that's what they're here for, but that's not the person that I know.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  I'm not that person, right? And, and so for the most part, you know, guys, guys are, guys are pretty, pretty, pretty calm, you know, pretty, pretty low key. And so there's not a lot of friction on death row. Now, general population, it's different.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  And when there's a bunch of guys together and then it gets personal. Cause someone, somebody, you know, somebody starts talking trash and they put it out, but they can't take it in. And then they get angry. And then once you get angry, well, then you'll say something that you shouldn't say and they'll start fighting. So yeah, there is that element, but I think that's, that's out there in the free world too.

• 31:18Pablo Torre?

  No, the, the perspective that Charles is offering here about how death row was not exactly what you'd presume it to be, it is sort of juxtaposed against the way that he as a Cowboys fan is exactly what I presumed him to be. Guy who's still complaining about Dak Prescott. Right? It was kinda like, it was like he-

• 31:38Speaker 04

  He's a, it's just classic Cowboys fan. Almost more so, almost more pure.

• 31:44Pablo Torre?

  It raises other questions to me about like, okay, the rituals of Charles Flores and his fellow Cowboys and football fans on death row. Game day. What's that like?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  It's kind of like what we were just talking about. It's like every other fan, right? There's a whole ritual.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  So, so we get up, you know, I'll get up about eight o'clock. And because it's a big day, we'll make a feast. And we make stuff out of, out of the items that we can buy at the commissary. And so it might be nachos or it might be tacos or special, like Super Bowl or something. We'll do enchiladas.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  And is that something you guys are like, okay, what are we gonna eat?

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, because this has to be planned. We go to commissary two times a month.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  So you gotta buy the stuff a month before to make sure you have everything that you're gonna need on that day.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  If it's enchiladas, are you cooking those in your, in your cell?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Everything that's made is pre-cooked. So you buy items. Beef tips and gravy.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Summer sausages are also used. Chicken chili. And all these things are, are pre-cooked. So they come in little like plastics pouches. And it's, it's an intricate process. We have to put all these things in, in cleaned out plastic chip bags and we heat them up. What we cook in is a hot pot. It's, which essentially looks like

• 33:20Speaker 02

  a water, an electric water kettle, which heats up the water, right?

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  So everything is heated up in water in a plastic bag. And, and the trick is knowing how to mix everything and warm it up together to make the enchilada is good.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  And so I've been here, I've been here for a while and, and yeah, I can, I can cook pretty good. That's why I'm fat.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  He's as proud of the food and the tailgate, right? As, as any Georgia Bulldog fan, as any LSU tailgater.

• 33:57Pablo Torre?

  Oh, it's the pride of someone with a chili recipe that they are bragging about on a Sunday morning.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Right. That's an incredible thing to be on death row and it's like, oh my God, there's no difference.

• 34:08Pablo Torre?

  It's right up there in the most predictable brags by any NFL fan, along with, check out how my fantasy team is doing.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Oh, we went there. How did you guys even draft players though? Or how do you, is it all through the window?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Mostly it was week to week. So depending on the matchups, you would make a new lineup. You understand?

• 34:30Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  You know, Tom Brady's playing whoever, so you're starting Tom Brady. And if it's a two quarterback league, you know, whoever, whoever else it might be, you know, and Rogers, right?

• 34:41Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  And then, and so Ezekiel Elliott has a good matchup, so you're gonna start him. And then, you know, you're, you're mixing and matching, you're mixing and matching.

• 34:50Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  And so there wasn't no need to get together and have a draft. But what you would have to do is turn in your team because there's a, there's a commissioner that's running it, right? And he's the one that's gonna get the, get each team, then he's gonna create what we call master sheets. So there's a deadline, you gotta turn them in by, you know, Friday at noon. Slide the stuff out from the cells to the day rooms and then those guys would get the stuff and give it to another day room. And then that guy would tell the commissioner, hey, man, I've got these teams out here. And then he would, he would, uh, he would make his way out there with the, with the, what we call fishing line.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  And it's essentially like a long string that he'll, he'll slide to the day room and he pull them back in. And then the same way he would pass out the, the master sheets, you know, and it's the same thing.

• 35:47Pablo Torre?

  I have never felt worse about forgetting to check my lineup. That is what it takes to play fantasy football on death row.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  I always thought that fishing thing was in movies.

• 35:58Pablo Torre?

  That, that part, right, right.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  It's real, it's real and they're not using it for anything nefarious. They're using it to submit their fantasy football lineup.

• 36:07Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, the nefarious part is that they're playing apparently in a two quarterback league. Just like, what are you guys doing?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  I've been here literally 25 years.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Before, there was no TV. Um, so it was all sports talk radio and it was mostly AM. And when you'd get the station, you would hope it stays in and so that's where we would get our sports update. Because when you, when you play fantasy football, if you don't know what's going on, you're just donating. You're just don't, you know what I'm saying? You just might as well just give your money away. You know, we would have to wait on the newspaper. You gotta wait on the newspaper to get the stats. Cause you know, you don't have the stats. You know, nowadays I know that as soon as the games are played, the stats are online. Right, right. But man, no, man, you know, people would be waiting for the, for the newspaper.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And then the commissioner, he would add it up. Cause everything has to be official, right? Everybody's agreed that he.

• 37:08Pablo Torre?

  I have so many more questions, but just like, what's the scoring system? Like waiver wire, like it's easy to get lost again in this familiar minutia of what it's like to just be a football fan.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  Right, and just enjoying this conversation, one fantasy football player to another. And you sort of get lost in that, you forget where you are. And then there's this gut punch. But what, what happened to your league?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Slowly but surely, the guys that have played, the guys that played, they've just been pushed out of existence. They've been executed, they're gone. You know, and that's just a reality of, of being on death row. That's a reality of being sentenced to death.

• 37:58Pablo Torre?

  It gets to the point where him saying the most obvious thing that we all knew heading in is now the thing that is most jarring.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  The conversation kind of lured us into, oh, we're all the same. This is all the same. It's like, no, we're not. His has one very dreadful, awful difference.

• 38:27Pablo Torre?

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• 39:11Pablo Torre?

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• 39:56Pablo Torre?

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• 40:36Pablo Torre?

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• 41:21Pablo Torre?

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• 41:48Pablo Torre?

  So, give me the scouting report on Charles Flores, the football player.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  You know, one of the things in our early emails that we exchanged was this memory he had of springing the game-winning touchdown with a great block when he was in eighth grade. And he mentioned that writing about that little detail of his football career still gave him chills 40 years later. The other detail that he added that I loved was, he wore 79 in honor of Harvey Martin, the Cowboy great.

• 42:22Pablo Torre?

  And so, his family, then, this is a football family we're describing.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  We were fans. We used to watch at home. Of course, we watched when I was little.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  It was a ritual. Go to church, come home, gather around the TV, root on the Cowboys.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  I was real close with my family. I might have lived separate, but you know, on the weekend, I'm going to mom and dad's house, just being with them and we would watch football all the time.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  That deep connection to the Cowboys, it sort of, it continued once Charles was put on, on death row.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  That was one of the main things that we would talk about. The Cowboys this, the Cowboys that. They continued to watch the football games at home. And so it was the same thing. Back then I would wake up early and I would start a letter and a lot of times I would leave it. I would say half of what I wanted to say and then the game would be going. And then after the game, I would have comments. And oftentimes I would be writing my mom and my dad and they would be writing me at the same time. And I remember that I was writing them, you know, at four o'clock and then I would see that mom had started this letter at four o'clock.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  And so that was like the synchronicity of it all, right? And yeah, man, you know, it was special. There's, there's nothing like that. So, so like I said, I think, I think fandom is part of family too, because it's part of that bond that, that we have.

• 44:00Pablo Torre?

  Talking to your family about the Cowboys through letter writing is such a, I, I, it's just a sad, it's a sad thing to do for a quarter century and counting, Flem.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  It gets sadder because he's been there so long now. Both his parents, that ritual is gone now because both of his parents have passed away. And as you listen to Charles, you understand that with his parents gone, that's just made sports all the more important to Charles and his survival on death row.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  So much of living under a death sentence is, is the unknown. You know, we're sent here, we were convicted and sentenced to death and sent to death row to have our lives taken from us, to be executed, you know, to be legally murdered. And.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  That's pretty heavy, man. You hang your hopes on appeal courts and on things that might happen that will allow you to have a reversal in your conviction or your sentence and maybe get out of this situation. So, so, you know, that's, that's pretty stressful. And, um, some guys can't take it, you know, some guys lose their mind. I had a friend of mine, his name, we called him Big G. He was from Oak Cliff in Dallas. And we called him Big G for a reason. He was like six, five, about 300 pounds. It looked like he could play offensive tackle for the Cowboys. Great guy. One day he told me, he says, man,

• 45:38Speaker 02

  he says, what if we got it wrong? He says, what if the crazy dudes are normal because they can't cope? And we're the crazy people because we are able to adapt and accept this insanity. And, you know, I've never forgot that.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Because that would be, that's a normal, a normal reaction would be to go.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, lose your damn mind that they're gonna kill you.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  And that you're gonna sit around for 10 or 15 years until they do it. And so, sports for me, especially football, it takes me out of this place. When the game is on, I'm at the stadium. I'm not, I'm not in this place. I'm not here, I'm not under that death sentence. I'm not worried about, oh, man, are they gonna send me an execution day? Or, oh, man, are they gonna deny my appeals? You know, and, cause that's real, that's real there. Being locked up and.

• 46:36Pablo Torre?

  You know, this notion of sports as an escape. I, I don't know of a more vivid manifestation of that promise than what Charles is describing there.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  The way I interpreted what he was saying was, he lives in a way where 24 hours a day, seven days a week, someone's trying to kill him. That's the white noise of his life. He doesn't know when it's gonna happen. But that's the stress that he lives under. And so, the line about how maybe the crazy ones are the ones who continue to live on death row and the sane ones are the ones who check out by committing suicide. I mean. If there's a better way to explain the insanity and the pressure that they live under, I haven't read it.

• 47:27Pablo Torre?

  No, and there is this one statistic that I do want to just read to you for the record, because at least eight death row prisoners at Polanski, where Charles Flores is, where his fantasy football league is, at least eight of those inmates have committed suicide in the last 20 years.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  It's just amazing that one day, two of these prisoners were talking and they were like, maybe we're the crazy ones, because we've adapted to live like this.

• 47:52Pablo Torre?

  Right, because we can smile while talking about our favorite sports.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, we can survive in this situation. It's stunning.

• 48:15Pablo Torre?

  All of this reminds me now of why we got into this story in the first place, right? This website, this database of last words said by people who are about to be executed.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the whole point of this exercise, right, is to find out why someone would love sports that much, that they would include it in their last words. And before even leaving on this assignment, I shared this database with an anthropologist in Chicago. Her name is Dr. Shannon Lee Doughty, and she is an expert in death rituals. And I just wanted to get her opinion on it. And I really, at this point, asked her in almost a flippant way about get a load of these death row inmates who are using their last words for sports shout outs. She immediately connected it to this concept called social death.

• 49:10Speaker 06

  There was a historian of African-American history called Orlando Patterson, and he came up with this fascinating, powerful idea called social death. Social death. And he argued that slaves and certain other kinds of people, inmates of concentration camps, they experience social death where their body is alive, but they're so cut off violently from meaningful social connections and relationships and meaningful groups that they experience social death. What's really interesting to me about this example is that they're trying to overcome the social death. And maybe they're succeeding by saying, no, I belong to a group.

• 49:53Speaker 06

  And they take that moment right before they're executed to reassert themselves as socially alive. And I think that's fascinating and powerful. It's empowering to them to do that.

• 50:04Pablo Torre?

  What did Charles have to say about that in specific?

• 50:09Speaker 04

  I wanted to go get Charles' opinion and his thoughts on his own last words.

• 50:14Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  But it turns out he and his attorney, you know, they don't want him to be seen as somebody who is contemplating being executed.

• 50:24Pablo Torre?

  Hmm. They don't want to concede that he's going to have to give his last words at all.

• 50:34Pablo Torre?

  This is where you should know that Charles Flores has exhausted all of his known legal avenues for petitions and appeals. His attorney, Gretchen Sween, told us, quote, "In order to bring new claims, we would need new evidence sufficient to convince a court to reopen the case in exceedingly high burden," end quote. But there is another change that I think is worth you knowing about. Because on September 1st, 2023, the Texas State Legislature enacted a new bill, a bill that Governor Greg Abbott, by the way, had vetoed in 2021. But Texas Senate Bill Number 338, citing "an alarming amount

• 51:16Pablo Torre?

  of unreliable eyewitness identification testimony," officially prohibits any future testimony gleaned from forensic hypnosis as admissible evidence in a criminal trial, which is a dramatic, but not retroactive, change. Meaning, it does not help Charles Flores.

• 51:40Pablo Torre?

  Who is waiting, as we speak, for a new execution date. A date that could be announced at any moment now.

• 51:50Pablo Torre?

  All of which is why I was also wondering how this unthinkable degree of uncertainty, of injustice, might logically impact the patience of a long-suffering Cowboys fan when it comes to the thing he loves the most.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  There's a saying, "There's always next year."

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  But for you, the future's uncertain.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  There isn't always next year, I guess.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  I've thought, I've thought about that. I'm like, man, will I ever see the Cowboys winning another Super Bowl? Because that's my thing.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  I think that we might have to wait till Patrick Mahomes goes to another team or something. Because can't nobody beat him.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Do you have a prediction?

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, this is their year, no matter what. Every year is a year, and one of these years is going to get it done.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  If some of you predict it every year, eventually you'll be right.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Well, you gotta believe, bro. You gotta believe, huh?

• 53:00Pablo Torre?

  And so, given that mix that you just heard of totally sincere hope, of longing, cut with a resigned familiarity bordering on sarcasm, we did want to find out more about how Charles Flores viewed the opportunity, more broadly, to have his last words memorialized for all time on that database, even if he very understandably did not want to personally preview his own final communication on Earth.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  One of the first things that you and I talked about was the trend of inmates

• 53:41Speaker 04

  shouting out their teams

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  with their last words.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  And it seemed like that was something you could understand, right? Because of the connection to sports?

• 53:52Speaker 02

  That situation, I don't think nobody will ever understand it until you are there and experiencing that.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  But I've tried to think about it and I've tried to say, well, man, why would somebody say that? And I think it is that. I think it's, it might be our last, our last grab at, hey, I'm still part of, if nothing else, I'm still part of this family. I'm still relevant in the fact that even with, as I'm being ushered out of this, this life, this reality, I'm still a cowboy fan. And I'm gonna declare it at the very end with, you know, reminding the world of what tribe I was from. I'm still human. Even though you're taking my life like an animal, I'm still human. I have a soul. And that's deep, man. That's profound.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  I mean, Charles, again, gives just the most incredible answer.

• 54:54Pablo Torre?

  It's the sort of thing you just want to sit with.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:56Pablo Torre?

  For a while.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 54:57Pablo Torre?

  You know?

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, we had reached the end of our hour and they were very strict about it. I got a 10 minute warning.

• 55:04Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  And so here we are, just sort of.

• 55:07Pablo Torre?

  The clock again ticking on this.

• 55:09Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. And now we're packing up and he has to wait for a guard then to recuff him, uh, hand back the wireless mic and take him back to his 23 hours of, of isolation. And so we can't talk anymore, but Charles is sitting there watching us pack up. And that was as close as we all came to getting emotional and even crying because the look on Charles' face, and I know he was trying to hide this, was just a look of like, you guys get to leave. He's imagining that we get to leave. The look on his face is easily one of the saddest

• 55:50Speaker 04

  things that I've ever experienced on this job in, in, in 30 years. And it got to the point where I couldn't look at him anymore. Because you just feel so helpless and you just feel so much empathy for this other human being and the situation that he's in. In the strangest place, under the worst conditions, through sports, we've kind of, uh, bridged this disconnect. And trying to face that moment again, I went back and listened to the tapes. And I realized that as my mic is cut, Charles is still live. And so you can hear him.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Were you listening?

• 56:28Speaker 04

  No.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Oh, you weren't?

• 56:31Speaker 04

  He's talking to the guard that comes to escort him back and he's wondering how the interview went and talking about the Cowboys.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  They're actually from East, so one of them is a Cleveland Brown fan. But I was telling him what it is. I'm like, man, look, yeah, yeah, you know, you know, like, man, look, this is Texan territory.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  And you can hear him physically exchanging our microphone for the clinking and clanking of the handcuffs.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  A little accenturized. Okay, good deal.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  And then I will let him know. So come pick up the movie star.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Here you go. And that is another really sort of profound moment of it's over. We all have to go back to our normal lives.

• 57:31Pablo Torre?

  Dave Fleming, thank you for taking this trip, accepting this assignment and reporting this story.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Pablo, it was my pleasure and I'm glad we went.

• 57:51Pablo Torre?

  Since we taped this episode, Dave Fleming, you should know, has continued to trade emails with Charles Flores, his new pen pal. And Charles, for his part, wants the PTFO audience to know that he has now made peace with the fact that this year is not the year officially for his Dallas Cowboys and that more information on his case can be found at freecharlesflores.com.

• 58:25Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Arc Media production, and I'll talk to you next time.

• 58:38Speaker 07

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