DaytonDailyNews.com

As he was walking off of death row, mattress under his arm, Kevin Watson filed past the cells of condemned men who had grown as close to him as brothers.

"I walked past 15, 16 cells," Watson said. "I seen Alton Coleman, all of them: Rhett DePew, Johnny Stumpf, Brewer, Poindexter. You know what I saw in those guys' eyes? Despair."

Reaching the barred doors at the end of the row, "I looked back and hoped these guys would eventually get a chance to live again."

Watson, now 48, lived on death row from 1987 until 1991, when the Ohio Supreme Court overturned his death sentence and he was resentenced to life in prison. The court ruled there was "residual doubt" that he killed a Hamilton furniture store owner. He now resides at Lebanon Correctional Institution.

Since Watson left death row, some of his old friends have, like him, been spared by appellate courts. Others, including Coleman and Brewer, were put to death.

"I met some extremely decent, extremely intelligent guys there," Watson said. "(But) the only reason you're remembered (is) for the crime you committed."

It's easy for a convicted killer like Watson to sympathize with the condemned. But even public officials who support capital punishment say death row prisoners aren't monsters, although they have committed monstrous acts.

One man drove a railroad spike through a woman's head. Another butchered his girlfriend and her child with a machete. Yet another killed three people, including a child, with a wood-splitting maul.

"It's very difficult to describe these individuals as a group," said Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist. "There are people who may never have committed a crime previous to the one that sent them to death row, and then there are people who maybe have lived a life of continuous mayhem and destruction."

Judge William Klatt of the 10th District Court of Appeals was chief legal counsel to Gov. Bob Taft when Wilford Berry went to his death 10 years ago last week. He spoke with Berry just days before he was executed for the cold-blooded killing of his boss in Cleveland.

"He did not seem like the person I had read so much about," Klatt said. "I think he was a very angry and, obviously, dangerous young man. As a middle-aged man, he did not strike me as dangerous."

"In a certain sense, I kind of liked the guy, and I think the warden also liked him. The whole thing was kind of a bizarre experience, to be honest."

Eight of the 28 inmates put to death since 1999, like Berry, volunteered for execution by waiving appeals. "He didn't want to die, but he didn't want to live in prison the rest of his life," Klatt said.

Most death row inmates now are housed at Youngstown's Ohio State Penitentiary, but those with mental illness are at Mansfield Correctional Institution. Ohio's only condemned woman, Donna Roberts, is at Marysville Reformatory for Women.

In the 1980s and early '90s, death row was a special cellblock at the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville, where all executions still are carried out.

"You had some guys then, they didn't feel like the penalty would be enacted again," Watson said. "They played chess. They went about their daily business."

Once their appeals were exhausted, some of them "started to unravel a little bit," Watson said. "They'd try to fight, but you can't fight behind bars. So they'd start throwing feces and urine on each other."

Death row, according to several who have lived there, is no Holiday Inn.

"You're trapped in a box and you got no real say (in) anything that goes on," said Bill Penix, who beat a man to death with an aluminum baseball bat in Springfield one night in August 1982. "It just seems like you're so far in a maze of walls and corridors that you really don't see daylight."

After less than five years, Penix got off death row on what he calls a "technicality" when the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the trial judge had given jurors incorrect instructions. He remains in prison.

Dale Johnston was freed from death row — and from prison — in May 1990 after his 1984 double murder conviction was overturned. In December 2008, another man pleaded guilty to the crimes and a second man faces trial later this year.

"A living hell would probably be the best description," Johnston said of death row. "There is no way you can adequately describe it to someone who has not experienced it. Every moment of your life is controlled. They predetermine what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, if you're going to do it."

Still, conditions on death row at Youngstown prison are humane, according to prison officials and inmates interviewed by the Dayton Daily News. Security is very tight, but the controls aren't as draconian as they were at Lucasville, where each man was allowed only one phone call a year.

"The death row population — while they're locked up — are pretty well-behaved," warden David Bobby said.

Corrections Officer Edward Jack doesn't want to know details of the prisoners' crimes. It's easier that way.

"I don't want to know if they killed their family or went on a rampage and killed four or five people, because that doesn't have anything to do with me and my job," said Jack, who has seen half a dozen inmates taken away for execution. "I can't get involved. Maybe I feel bad about them inside, but I'll never show them."

Some inmates use the empty time on death row to work on their court appeals. "I spend my time trying to prove my innocence and get up on out of here," said Timothy Coleman of Springfield, who was convicted in 1997 of silencing a witness in an upcoming drug-dealing case against him.

Being executed, Coleman said, "is the last thing I think about, because I know God will make a way for me."

The condemned men also pass the time by reading, writing letters, watching TV, painting, playing chess, and even doing community service. They create origami Christmas ornaments, paint theater backdrops for school plays, and make stuffed bears for hospice patients.

"If you let them know what's out there to be done, they're more than happy to do it," said Deputy Warden Betty McDonough.

Some get regular visits, while others, like Samuel Moreland of Dayton, haven't had a visitor in more than a decade. Moreland was convicted in 1986 of killing two women and three children in one of Dayton's most notorious mass murders.

One man who has befriended many death row inmates is Father Neil Kookoothe, a Catholic priest from North Olmsted who has gone to the Lucasville prison to protest most of the 28 executions since 1999. He said Brett Hartmann, scheduled to be executed April 7, "is a very good friend of mine."

Kookoothe said many regular prisoners have committed more heinous acts than some on death row, but they weren't charged with death penalty specifications. "And those are guys who are going to be back on the street someday. It just doesn't make any sense."

He has kept boxes full of letters from death row inmates, some now dead.

He said the inmates often ask about life on the outside — "they want to live vicariously" — though some ask more poignant questions, like whether God could forgive a murderer.

Kookoothe acknowledges the convicts of death row have done horrifying deeds.

But "I don't think they're the monstrous people that the system always wants to paint them to be," he said. "The state always tries to paint these guys as animals and vicious and ferocious. I don't know those guys."