He even talked over
long distance with the lawyers in New York. At last the rules were
relaxed and Kennedy was admitted on some technicality as counsel.
Counsel can see the condemned as often as necessary.
We were conducted down a flight of steps and past huge steel-
barred doors, along corridors and through the regular prison until
at last we were in what the prison officials called the section
for the condemned. Every one else calls this secret heart of the
grim place, the death house.
It is made up of two rows of cells, some eighteen or twenty in
all, a little more modern in construction than the twelve hundred
archaic caverns that pass for cells in the main prison.
At each end of the corridor sat a guard, armed, with eyes never
off the rows of cells day or night.
In the wall, on one side, was a door--the little green door--the
door from the death house to the death chamber.
While Kennedy was talking to the prisoner, a guard volunteered to
show me the death chamber and the "chair." No other furniture was
there in the little brick house of one room except this awful
chair, of yellow oak with broad, leather straps.
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