Life After Death

Berry came over to help his half-brother, but they fumbled around so long that customers, including two men in their late teens, began filing into the store. The two men, Dave Masters and Matt McKay, had come from Houston and were heading home to Oklahoma City. Lewis pretended to be a clerk, but in his addled state he couldn't maintain the ruse for long. Brandishing the gun, he ordered the customers to hit the ground, and all complied save for McKay, who appears on the videotape to be oblivious to the commotion around him. Lewis shouted at McKay, then finally lost his temper and pulled the trigger, firing a single bullet into his gut. A red stain spread across his white shirt. He asked his friend Dave, "I'm dying, aren't I?" On the tape, Lewis appeared to kick McKay.

McKay would survive his gunshot wound for 10 days, but after several surgeries, his parents told the doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital to turn off the equipment keeping their son alive. Matt McKay was pronounced dead at 3:07 a.m. December 9, 1985.

Less than eight years later, Andre Lewis had consumed his last meal and been guided to a cell to await his escort, a Grim Reaper dressed as a Texas Department of Criminal Justice officer. He wondered if he'd see his family one last time and what awaited him "on the other side."

He was damned near in the ground when, at nearly the last moment, U.S. District Judge Joe Fish granted Lewis a stay of execution--and, as it turned out, released him from Death Row altogether.

Two days before Christmas last year, Lewis awoke from his nightmare. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his death sentence--not because Lewis was innocent, but because during the penalty phase of his original trial in 1987, his court-appointed attorneys didn't present a single shred of evidence that could have softened the jury's deathblow.

They did not tell the jury that Lewis, picked on at Pinkston High School for his shabby, ill-fitting clothes and for being unable to understand anything other than a football coach's commands, was a victim of ghastly abuse--had been since he was a child, since he was old enough to remember anything. They did not utter a word about his life story, which, in court documents and the testimony of family members and medical professionals, reads like the screenplay of a horror movie, filled with stabbings and shootings, sexual abuse and mutilations. They did not mention his father, Odell, a junkie and convicted felon who threatened his own children with guns and knives and put out his cigarettes on their skin. They did not mention his mother, Betty Mae, who used drugs and drank heavily during her five pregnancies. They did not mention how the Lewis family lived in the George Loving Housing Project in West Dallas, near the infamous RSR lead smelter plant that poisoned the playground on which Andre and his sisters and brothers played as children.

So the jury did what it believed just and necessary: It sent a man portrayed by prosecutors as dangerous and habitually violent to die, never knowing that he, like so many men on Death Row, was doomed long before he and McKay crossed paths in that convenience store.

It took several attorneys, including a lawyer living in San Francisco, 11 years to convince the courts that Lewis did not have a fair trial. In that time, the federal courts intervened, and the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in another case that would directly impact Lewis'. Lewis' attorney persuaded the courts to hear the terrifying testimony the jury did not in 1987. Family members and psychiatrists paraded into court, each bearing their own horror stories. Lewis even became something of a poster boy for legal experts trying to link lead poisoning to mental deficiency and criminal behavior. And in that time, Lewis and his lawyer hoped he wouldn't be executed, but never had the temerity to believe his life would actually be spared.

"Being in prison for a long time will change anyone, for good or worse," Lewis says. "For me, it was for the good. When I first got here, I was young, angry, scared. I didn't have a sense of direction. All I did was react. Then one day I saw the older guys smiling, getting along. One day I said, 'I want that kind of peace.' I have always hoped, but I tried not to put all my hope into one basket. I tried to live day to day, and whatever happened, happened."