The Chestnut Hill Local is an award-winning, independent weekly newspaper that serves the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill and surrounding communities in the northwest Philadelphia region. They ran the following two part story by Amy Brisson.

PART ONE OF TWO

When poet Reginald Sinclair Lewis was moved to a death watch cell to await his execution in July of 1997, he almost gave up.

"It's cold and lonely being on the death watch, and every day that passed got darker, and I was getting depressed," Lewis told a Local reporter on August 4. "I thought I was gone. They asked me where I wanted my body to be shipped and what size suit I wanted to be buried in. That really shook me."

Lewis, a one-time resident of Mt. Airy, does not seem like the kind of person you expect to meet through a sheet of bullet-proof glass in a super-maximum security prison (Graterford). Lewis is on death row for the murder of a Philadelphia pimp in 1982, although he claims that he was in San Diego, California, at the time.

Read the rest at The Chestnut Hill Local

Full story...