Oh, no; California is civilized.  There is no such law on the statute books.  It is a cruel and unusual punishment, and no modern state would be guilty of such a law.  Nevertheless, in the history of California I am the third man who has been condemned for life to solitary confinement.  The other two were Jake Oppenheimer and Ed Morrell.  I shall tell you about them soon, for I rotted with them for years in the cells of silence.

Oh, another thing.  They are going to take me out and hang me in a little while—no, not for killing Professor Haskell.  I got life-imprisonment for that.  They are going to take me out and hang me because I was found guilty of assault and battery.  And this is not prison discipline.  It is law, and as law it will be found in the criminal statutes.

I believe I made a man’s nose bleed.  I never saw it bleed, but that was the evidence.  Thurston, his name was.  He was a guard at San Quentin.  He weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health.  I weighed under ninety pounds, was blind as a bat from the long darkness, and had been so long pent in narrow walls that I was made dizzy by large open spaces.  Really, mime was a well-defined case of incipient agoraphobia, as I quickly learned that day I escaped from solitary and punched the guard Thurston on the nose.

I struck him on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and tried to catch hold of me.  And so they are going to hang me.  It is the written law of the State of California that a lifetimer like me is guilty of a capital crime when he strikes a prison guard like Thurston.  Surely, he could not have been inconvenienced more than half an hour by that bleeding nose; and yet they are going to hang me for it.

And, see!  This law, in my case, is ex post facto .  It was not a law at the time I killed Professor Haskell.  It was not passed until after I received my life-sentence.  And this is the very point: my life-sentence gave me my status under this law which had not yet been written on the books.  And it is because of my status of lifetimer that I am to be hanged for battery committed on the guard Thurston.  It is clearly ex post facto , and, therefore, unconstitutional.