CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DOCTOR DEATH
INTRODUCTION: THE PRISONER
Sean McMichael had always been a different sort of fellow. If some would seem to have their own drummer to whose beat they marched to, Sean McMichael would seem to have his own band.
Sean had dropped out of high school after his junior year, having had enough chemistry courses to learn how to make crystal methamphetamines. He reasoned that he could make more money doing this than he could with a good education, even from a private high school and private college where his parents had offered to send him.
At his parent’s behest, McMichael had taken the test to get his graduate equivalency diploma. He scored the highest score ever recorded in the state of Texas on this test. It was the third highest score ever recorded in the United States. Out of curiosity, Sean took the ACT college entrance exam. He scored a 28 (out of a possible 36). He had recognized a pattern one-half of the way through the test and followed that pattern to the end. The questions that he missed were the ones he had answered while he was trying to establish the pattern.
Unfortunately for this bright young man, he had sold some of his crystal meth to an undercover DEA agent when he had just turned 18. This earned him three years in a Texas state correctional facility. A string of bad decisions and bad luck had landed McMichael in prison three more times. His offenses were all non-violent. These offenses ranged from crimes such as possession of schedule one narcotics with intent to distribute, theft of property (less the $7500), and loitering, the offense that had earned him twenty-five years in a Texas state correctional facility.
Sean’s public defender had been busy handling three other cases at the time and did not have time to give a good argument for McMichael’s defense. The judge, having seen McMichael four times in his courtroom, was tired of him getting in and out of prison. The judge had noticed that McMichael already had three felony convictions. He was tired of McMichael and others of his like congesting the courts. Finding a loophole, the judge sentenced the defendant to the maximum penalty that the law would allow. In the state of Texas, if one has three felony convictions, he or she can be given a twenty-five-year sentence for his or her next offense. Sean McMichael was the unfortunate victim of a weary judge’s wrath.
Having an I.Q north of 140 and being a veteran of the criminal justice system, McMichael could usually vacillate enough with the officers who were charged with keeping him behind bars to get out of doing any real work. (Prisoners are assigned jobs when they are housed in a facility. Sean was adept at avoiding putting any effort into these jobs.) These officers, many of whom did not have any more education than McMichael, could often be swayed by his words and his quirky personality.
When Sean McMichael learned that he was being transferred to a maximum-security facility (mainly because he had angered the one officer with enough pull to get him transferred), he came up with a plan. McMichael convinced the officers, as well as the warden at his new facility that he had suffered a stroke at some point when housed at his old unit. The stroke, he indicated through motions and nearly illegible writings with his left (nondominant) hand, had affected the left side of his brain. This left his right side totally useless, he indicated. Even worse, it had affected his ability to talk (or to understand the spoken word). Fortunately, he indicated, he was adept at sign language. McMichael’ advocate insisted that he must have an interpreter at any facility to which he was assigned. Failing this, one must be procured for him whenever he was in need of an interpreter to relay his medical or other needs to the people in charge of the facility where he was assigned. In the three weeks that he had been assigned to his new facility, no one had really cared enough to fulfil this request. Unfortunately for prisoner #275310, a.k.a. Sean McMichael, he was about to meet the one person who would care enough to grant him this request.
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