The Chronicle‘s Allan Turner reports that a potential Chron Eye subject is refusing food:
Life on death row, says Roy Lee Pippin — condemned for killing two men in a Harris County narcotics murder — is a living hell.
And unless courts spare his life, Pippin says, he plans to go to his March 29 execution on an empty stomach. He’s trying to draw attention to what he considers horrendous conditions at Texas’ massive, ultra-maximum-security death row.
A one-time air conditioner repairman, Pippin has spent almost 12 years on death row, roughly half of them at the forbidding, electric- and barbed-wire encircled Allan B. Polunsky Unit just west of Livingston. Pippin, 51, the latest in a series of inmates who have stopped eating to protest prison conditions, started his hunger strike on Feb. 19 and had lost more than 20 pounds.
Pippin, who consumes only water, undergoes daily medical evaluation. If his condition seriously deteriorates, doctors could order that he be fed intravenously.
Didn’t Anne Linehan see this coming about a year ago?
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