THE DEATH WATCH

FOR CONDEMNED INMATES IN OHIO, LIFE HAS TAKEN ON A NEW SENSE OF URGENCY

You watch television - countless hours of it.

You view your world - an expanse of prison grounds - through an 8-inch window slit.

If your family and friends haven't disowned you, you visit them through a Plexiglas screen. No touching allowed.

If you're good, they'll let you exercise twice a day in a room-sized chain-link cage.

This is Death Row, home to the 148 men whom Ohio juries have deemed unworthy of life.

It's a world where life drones on year after year in a paradoxical mix of boredom and suspense as appeals wend their way through the courts. A world where execution has seemed more an abstract concept than an imminent danger in a state that hasn't put a killer to death in 32 years.

A world frozen in amber that soon may change forever.

No one knows for sure when it will happen or who it will be, but experts say it's likely a killer will go to the electric chair or the lethal-injection gurney in the next two years. It almost happened last year, when inmate John Byrd Jr. of Cincinnati came within 45 minutes of execution. It could happen again, experts speculate, in 18 to 20 months, for longtime inmates such as John Glenn, whose last appeal was heard in April.

"It's getting close," said John Spirko, convicted of the 1982 slaying of Elgin postmaster Betty Jane Mottinger. "Some inmates think it's not going to happen, but it is."

Condemned men who have been on Death Row as long as 13 years are confronting tough realities: Unlike his predecessor, Gov. George Voinovich supports capital punishment. Two weeks ago, he signed into law a bill which speeds appeals by giving inmates just six months to file claims not related to specific trial questions - claims that the judge was biased, for example. And while voters and politicians impatient with crime are shortening the appeals process for new cases, longtime prisoners' appeals are grinding inexorably toward conclusion.

A grim reminder

A chill came over Death Row in March 1994 when Byrd was prepped for execution. His appeal had been suddenly rejected by an appellate judge, but the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay. It was the closest Ohio had come to an execution in 31 years.

One of Byrd's fellow inmates, Romell Broom of Cleveland, said Death Row fell unusually quiet that day, as inmates spent their recreation time in their cells, or talking with Byrd to keep his spirits up.

"Things were really quiet, waiting to see what would happen," Broom said. "I felt my situation real bad then. It made a lot of people more serious about investing time in their case and the legal aspects."

Ronald Ray Post, on Death Row since 1983, corresponds with death-penalty opponents overseas, but he senses that the American public has little sympathy for condemned killers.

"If you're convicted of it, they think they should make your appeals as short as possible and kill you and make room for somebody else," said Post, who, like many of his Death Row neighbors, claims innocence. "There's no way to prepare yourself for it. I try to live one day at a time."

"I worry about it every day," said Dennis McGuire of Preble County, sent to Death Row in December for the 1989 rape and stabbing death of a pregnant woman. "It bothered me so bad when I first came here, I was on medication."

Jerry Lee Allard of Knox County sometimes dreams about being executed - and the witnesses are the former wife and 2-year-old daughter he was convicted of stabbing to death in 1992. "In here, you got nothing to do but time," Allard said. "Here, it all comes back, including some of the nightmare stuff."

Death Row, housed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville since the 1970s, moved to Mansfield in February, although any executions would still take place at Lucasville. Some inmates say the move has been good for them because of better living conditions, increased privileges and improved rapport with guards. "It's like going from hell to heaven," Spirko said.

That's not to say the new Death Row is any outsider's notion of heaven.

"If (people) think this is a Holiday Inn, I'll trade with them," McGuire said. "Even the homeless out on the streets, I'll trade with them."

In a far-flung corner of the prison are the five housing units of 181 cells that once were used to isolate troublemakers.

To get there, you walk a long, narrow hallway one prison official likened to the Last Mile. Along the way, guards buzz open electronically controlled steel doors that slam behind you with the authority of a judge's gavel.

Death Row isn't a movie-set prison. There are no long ranges of cells with barred doors. In their place are pod-shaped cellblocks designed to give guards maximum visibility, with cells encircling a common open space dominated by a chain-link cage - the recreation area. There's a Chinese-puzzle quality to the scene: boxes within boxes, cages within cages.

In this closed world, inmates spend their days moving from their cells to the rec cage and back again.

They watch sitcom reruns and play spades and checkers, but the Death House casts its shadow over all their mundane rituals. "You might play cards with a guy and he's showing you he ain't got a worry in the world, but inside, he's shaking," McGuire said.

TV time is cherished

A typical day begins at 7 a.m. when breakfast is served through slots in the cell doors. If prisoners get too noisy during lockdown periods, the guards isolate them by shutting the slots.

Each cell is a 91.58-square-foot cubicle containing wall-mounted bunk beds and desk, a stainless-steel toilet and sink, a shatter-proof mirror and a shower.

Most of the inmates are single-celled, and the spare top bunk stores everything from toiletries to space-age clear plastic pouches filled with Kool-Aid or water, saved up from meals. Here too are the inmates' personal law libraries: Copies of the Criminal Law Handbook and the Courtroom Manual reside in one cell alongside back issues of Popular Mechanics.

Some inmates fight boredom by reading voraciously. McGuire, who learned to read during an earlier prison stretch, read 137 books during his two months on Death Row at Lucasville, before his stepfather in West Carrollton helped him get a TV for his cell.

Prisoners are allowed to bring their own TV sets and portable stereos to Death Row. TVs are plugged into the prison's cable system, which includes several area stations and a channel for commercial-free, newly released movies, shown at least three times a day.

TV is at once a pipeline to popular culture, a welcome refuge from reality and a tormenting reminder of the many joys of freedom lost to them. Many inmates plan their day around the program listings. McGuire watches talk shows, while Allard's daily schedule includes reruns of Family Ties, The Wonder Years and Northern Exposure.

Sex is a common preoccupation. Inmates avoid discussing their cases, preferring to talk about "sports, sex and petty things" about daily prison life, Allard said. "Some of the guys really burn with it. We're talking about cold showers all the time."

Good behavior is rewarded with up to three hours a day of recreation in groups of 10. Troublemakers get only an hour of rec time every other day - by themselves.

Every morning, Allard runs 20 laps around the cage-like day room. Weather permitting, inmates can walk or jog inside a 12-foot-high cage inside an austere concrete courtyard.

In the day room, prisoners can exercise with simple equipment - chin-up bars, situp benches - but no free weights like the ones used to attack guards at Lucasville during the 1993 riot.

On a recent morning, one cell-block rang with Jethro Tull's Bungle in the Jungle. Generally though, there's little of the din of many prison cellblocks.

"Once they've come to terms with what they're facing, you don't have any problems wth them," corrections officer John Temple Jr. said.

A change of philosophy

At Lucasville, conditions were so restrictive that inmates were permitted only one five-minute phone call a year, at Christmas. At Mansfield, Death Row inmates can use the phone nearly every day. Prisoners are likely to be allowed supervised "contact visits" in the near future. The most trusted inmates can also hold jobs - custodial, food service, clerical - inside the Death Row complex for the first time ever.

It's all part of a change of philosophy by corrections officials, who are trying to treat condemned inmates more like other prisoners. Overall, Warden Carl Anderson said, Death Row inmates cause fewer discipline problems than other prisoners, although Mansfield's Death Row has been the site of some assaults, and homemade knives have been found in cells.

"There are definitely inmates in the general population who have more serious crimes than inmates on Death Row, but they didn't get the death penalty," he said.

The warden said both inmates and staff, after some early apprehension, are getting more comfortable with the new routine.

"It's a lot better here than it was at 'Luke,' " McGuire said. "At Lucasville, you were locked down all the time, you wasn't allowed out, it was nasty, it was trifling, your cells were nasty.

"And your COs (corrections officers) down there, they'd be playing these little electric games with you. They'd tell you to turn your light off and you'd touch the switch and they'd act like you'd been electrocuted. They'd make fun of you. Here, the officers give you respect, and they expect respect back."

State prison officials decided to move Death Row so Lucasville could reduce the risk of riots by focusing solely on regular maximum-security inmates. The move also means staff who have guarded inmates don't have the psychological stress of participating in their executions.

"I don't let myself get personally attached to the inmates," Temple said. "If the time comes when the state fires up the electric chair again, I can deal with it."

Some staffers avoid learning about the crimes that put inmates on Death Row. "What the guy does on the outside is his business," corrections officer W.J. Wells said. "The way they treat me is the way I treat them."

The prisoners, however, don't have the luxury of forgetting.

"Memory is part of the punishment," Allard said. "You can never get away from memory."

Allard's earliest memories are of being beaten, neglected and sexually abused in a series of foster homes from the time when his mother gave him up at age 2 until he found a stable foster home at 6 1/2. "The day I was born, my dad had said, 'Great, another mouth to feed.' " He soon disappeared from his son's life.

"(My mother) didn't want me. There was no love. The second man she married told her: no children."

Allard, 37, has seen his mother only once since age 4. That was when she testified at his trial for the slayings of his ex-wife, Karen, 25, and their 2-year-old daughter, Rachael.

'Never had a chance'

Since arriving on Death Row Feb. 23, 1993, Allard hasn't had a visitor. Although he could use the phone nearly every day, he has few numbers to call.

Strikingly pale, with perpetually clenched teeth and eyes at once leaden and angry, Allard careens from relative calm to intense agitation, seeming to relive the past as he tells his story.

He was living in a Mount Vernon apartment for the mentally ill - he said he's manic-depressive - when he fatally stabbed his ex-wife and daughter and cut the throat of his 5-year-old son, Aaron, in a 90-minute standoff with police. Aaron survived to testify against his father. Another son was unharmed.

Authorities said Allard plotted to kill his former wife and their three children because she refused to remarry him.

Allard contends he stabbed his ex-wife's body after she'd already died of a self-inflicted pill overdose. He says he accidentally stabbed his screaming daughter while subduing her, but "there wasn't no 13 stabs like the newspaper said, 'cause I know better."

Aaron testified his mother swallowed pills because Allard held a knife on his sister.

Allard said he panicked when police, who had been called by Karen Allard's mother, knocked on the door.

"I took my wife's pulse," he said. "She was already dead. She was already gone. Sitting there in the chair by the couch where she was laying, I thought and I thought and I thought: She'd rather be dead than to spend the rest of her life with you, she'd rather be dead than to deal with you and your problems.

"And I took a knife and I stabbed her, and I stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her."

Police talked him into surrendering after what Allard calls a "fictitious hostage situation" in his bathroom in which the son's throat was cut. Allard calls the cut "a scratch."

In April, Allard lost his first appeal, but he believes he'll eventually be freed. In the meantime, he's taking a correspondence course for the ministry. Allard said the murders were "the Lord's will" because God wanted him to preach, and prison was the only place where Allard could calm down to study and pray.

"Here, I can sit in my cell all day and read my Bible and pray and commune with God. No problem. Because I'm a mellow fellow in here. He had to bring me down. He had to put me in a place where He could literally put His thumb on me."

Allard says he doesn't hate women, as prosecutors alleged, but that he doesn't understand them - a thought that preyed upon him during the stabbings.

"It was kind of in the back of my mind while all this was going on," Allard said, his voice dropping to a raspy whisper: " 'This is what women have done to you through your life, through your years. First your mother - she discarded you, she threw you away like a piece of trash. You never had a chance.'

"To be honest with you, I and the world would have been better off if I had died at birth, and that's the God's honest truth."

Like Allard, Dennis McGuire had an absent father and a troubled childhood. His mother trundled him all over the Miami Valley - Trotwood, West Carrollton, Moraine, Miamisburg, Franklin, Springboro, Lebanon, New Lebanon, Drexel, West Alexandria, Eaton - sometimes moving because Dennis was fighting with other kids. "Me and the blacks didn't get along," he said.

"There's a lot of things I wished I could have changed from the time I was 9 years old. That's when I started taking drugs, smoking marijuana, running on my own, doing what I wanted.

"My father was never around me, and I always said my kids would never be without theirs," he said. "I'm eating my own words; I'm in here."

McGuire hasn't seen his two children since early 1993, but he bears a reminder of them on both arms: Tattoos of their names and birth dates, beneath pictures of pit bulls and Beauty and the Beast. He has a menagerie of animal tattoos - a tiger, a lion, a bull, a lizard - that were etched on his body at Chillicothe Correctional Institution. On his back is a scene of a man riding a Harley Davidson. "It symbolizes freedom," McGuire explained.

A troubled family

McGuire's late father, Genis Sr., was a convict who once gained notoriety by escaping from London Correctional. Now his brother, Genis Jr., faces a possible death penalty if he's convicted of killing a Warren County convenience store clerk in January.

Dennis McGuire, then in jail for an unrelated assault, became a suspect in Joy Stewart's rape and murder in December 1989 after he told authorities his former brother-in-law killed the pregnant woman 10 months earlier. Prosecutors said DNA tests ruled out the brother-in-law as a suspect, but didn't rule out McGuire.

McGuire says the conviction "eats at me every day" and contends police failed to pursue other suspects.

"My mom's playing private eye out there," said McGuire, whose family visits frequently. "She's been talking to the witnesses that should've been called at my trial."

McGuire remains hopeful his appeal will succeed: "The only thing a man can do on Death Row is keep faith. As long as you've got faith, you've got hope, you've got that possibility that your innocence is proven. That's what I hang on to."

Notions of justice

Like many of his Death Row neighbors, Spirko says he didn't do it. He professes not to fear the executioner.

"You're going to go out one way or another - or at least, I am," he said. "So why fear death?"

Spirko's eyes, wary and inquisitive, dart around the cellblock through the food slot in his door. Lithe and lean in a navy muscle shirt, Spirko expounds on a philosophy about capital punishment honed over 10 years on Death Row.

"These politicians want to kill somebody so they can say they did their job," he said. "Right and wrong doesn't have anything to do with it."

But Spirko said he continues to appeal because he didn't get a fair hearing at his trial. "I always said if I'm guilty, go ahead and execute me," he said. "Just look at the facts of my case."

Some might say the facts of Spirko's case make a compelling argument for capital punishment.

Now 49, Spirko committed arson at age 8. In 1970, a Kentucky jury almost sentenced him to death for strangling a 73-year-old Covington widow, but a single juror held out for life imprisonment. After serving 12 years, Spirko was paroled and went home to northwestern Ohio. Thirteen days later, postmaster Mottinger was abducted, murdered and dumped in a cornfield.

In 1991, after six years on Death Row, he wrote to the Ohio Supreme Court that although he is "a completely innocent man," he wanted to die before he lost his sanity. He soon retracted that position, and now admits the letter was a publicity ploy.

Spirko is far from alone in his legal quest. Warden Anderson said the law library on Death Row is "a very busy place. They're into their appeals, and most of them are focused on that. That's what gives Death Row inmates hope."

Justice is a recurring theme among inmates, much as individual notions of justice frame the public debate about capital punishment. Some inmates even believe in the death penalty - for other people, of course.

"I understand that society has to protect itself and as a whole just can't have murderers running the streets," Allard says. "Biblically, I agree with the concept You take a life, and your life should be taken. "

Inmate Greg Esparza of Toledo disagrees.

"I don't believe in the death penalty for the simple reason that who's to say what murder is right?" he said. "People say an eye for an eye, but the Bible also says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

CREDIT: JAN UNDERWOOD/DAYTON DAILY NEWS

(#2) Small world: The view from inside a Death Row cell is limited. (B&W)

CREDIT: JAN UNDERWOOD/DAYTON DAILY NEWS

(#3) Jerry Lee Allard: Convicted in the murder of his daughter and ex-wife, he has been on Death Row for two years. (B&W)

CREDIT: JAN UNDERWOOD/DAYTON DAILY NEWS

(#4) Making a statement: A tattoo on the back of inmate Anthony Apanovitch proclaims, 'Execution is murder. (B&W)

CREDIT: JAN UNDERWOOD/DAYTON DAILY NEWS