Oh, another thing. They are going to take me out and hang me in a little
while--no, not for killing Professor Haskell. I got life-imprisonment
for that. They are going to take me out and hang me because I was found
guilty of assault and battery. And this is not prison discipline. It is
law, and as law it will be found in the criminal statutes.

I believe I made a man's nose bleed. I never saw it bleed, but that was
the evidence. Thurston, his name was. He was a guard at San Quentin. He
weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was in good health. I weighed
under ninety pounds, was blind as a bat from the long darkness, and had
been so long pent in narrow walls that I was made dizzy by large open
spaces. Really, mime was a well-defined case of incipient agoraphobia,
as I quickly learned that day I escaped from solitary and punched the
guard Thurston on the nose.

I struck him on the nose and made it bleed when he got in my way and
tried to catch hold of me. And so they are going to hang me. It is the
written law of the State of California that a lifetimer like me is guilty
of a capital crime when he strikes a prison guard like Thurston. Surely,
he could not have been inconvenienced more than half an hour by that
bleeding nose; and yet they are going to hang me for it.

And, see! This law, in my case, is _ex post facto_. It was not a law at
the time I killed Professor Haskell. It was not passed until after I
received my life-sentence. And this is the very point: my life-sentence
gave me my status under this law which had not yet been written on the
books. And it is because of my status of lifetimer that I am to be
hanged for battery committed on the guard Thurston. It is clearly _ex
post facto_, and, therefore, unconstitutional.