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It was sometime after dawn and the first slivers of light were just beginning to creep through the narrow fenestrations in each of the tiny cells at the Capital Sentence Unit at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. No matter what the day is like outside -- it could be a cherry-blossom scented spring morning, or a scorching sun-baked August afternoon inside the CSU the light always seems weak and anemic, as if even the sun has given up hope.
On mornings like this, as was their practice, most of the inmates simply rolled over on their hard cots and pulled their coarse blankets over their heads. In the near-total isolation of death row where each day bleeds into the next, there's no sense in getting up before you have to. It's always better to wait until the incessant jangling of the guards' keys, and the institutional stink of breakfast banishes any hope of sleep before facing the day.
 | | Robert O. Marshall, older |
Robert O. Marshall learned that lesson 18 years ago, soon after he was first trundled, shackled and disoriented, into the unit to face death by lethal injection for the murder-for-hire of his wife, Maria. It was a lesson that was reinforced for him as, time after time, his appeals to overturn both his conviction and his sentence were shot down, rejected by state appeals courts, the state Supreme Court, even the U.S. Third District. With each of those decisions, according to his account in the book Tunnel Vision Marshall found himself retreating deeper into the sanctuary of his bed.
 | | Tunnel Vision |
But on this April morning, though you couldn't tell it by the light in his 7-by-12-foot cell, Marshall had a reason to get out of bed. In a decision that drew the ire of death penalty proponents all over New Jersey, Robert O. Marshall, the dapper, debt-ridden suburban dad whose life had been chronicled in both a best-selling book and a made-for-TV movie, was at last about to walk off death row.
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