Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [4]
When we got back to our home in northern Michigan, the local beautification committee had dumped three truckloads of horse manure waist-high in our driveway so that we wouldn’t be able to enter our property—a property which, by the way, was freshly decorated with a dozen or so signs nailed to our trees: GET OUT! MOVE TO CUBA! COMMIE SCUM! TRAITOR! LEAVE NOW OR ELSE!
I had no intention of leaving.
Two years before the Oscars and before the war, in a calmer, more innocent time—March 2001—I received an envelope one day in the mail. It was addressed to “Michael Moore.”
And the return address? “From: Michael Moore.”
After pausing a moment to consider the Escher-esque nature of what was in my hand, I opened the letter. It read:
Dear Mr. Moore,
I’m hoping when you saw that this letter was from you—not really!—that you might open it. My name is also Michael Moore. I have never heard of you until last night. I am on Death Row in Texas and am scheduled for execution later this month. They showed us your movie last night, Canadian Bacon, and I saw your name and I saw that we had the same name! I never saw my name in a movie before! You probably never saw your name in a headline, “MICHAEL MOORE TO BE EXECUTED.” I am hoping you can help me. I do not want to die. I did something terrible which I regret but killing me will not solve anything or undo what I did. I did not receive a best defense. My court-appointed lawyer fell asleep during the trial. I am appealing one last time to the Texas Prison Board. Can you use your influence to help me? I believe I should pay for my crime. But not by killing me. Below are the names of my new attorneys and the people who are helping me. Please do what you can. And I like your movie! Funny!
Yours,
Michael Moore
#999126
I sat and stared at this letter for the longest time. That night I had a bad dream. I was at the execution of Michael Moore—and, needless to say, I didn’t want to be there. I tried to get out of the room but they had locked the door. Michael Moore started laughing. “Hey! You’re next, good buddy!” I froze in place, and as they administered the lethal injection, he would not take his dying eyes off me as his life expired.
The following day I called the anti–death penalty advocates who were helping him. I offered to do whatever I could. They told me that things seemed pretty hopeless—after all, this was Texas, and no one gets a stay or a pardon from the governor here—but they were filing one last appeal nonetheless. They said I could write a letter to the governor or the Court of Criminal Appeals.
I did more than that. I began a letter-writing drive on my website and appealed to the half-million people on my e-mail list to help me. I spoke out publicly against Michael Moore’s execution. I told people the story of a young man, a Navy veteran of nine years, who was severely abused as a child and never mentally recovered from the abuse. Now at the age of thirty, he kept a notebook of the high school girls in town he liked to stalk. One night he thought he would sneak into one of the girls’ homes and steal what he could. She wasn’t home. Her mother was. He was drunk and he freaked out and killed her. Pulled over an hour later for a traffic violation, he volunteered to the police (who were unaware a murder had been committed) that he had just done something bad. And that was that. He got a lousy lawyer (who, to his credit, filed a statement on behalf of his appeal, admitting he didn’t do a good job for Michael) and a quick trial. Michael Moore was found guilty and given the maximum sentence: death.
Thousands responded to my appeal to stop the execution of Michael Moore. The Texas governor and prison board were deluged with letters and calls from people protesting his killing.
And then something unusual happened: on the day before he was to be put to death, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution for Michael Moore. Michael Moore to live! In Texas!