The Silent Treatment

After staring at the phone for a few minutes, I call Pat Bliss, the 69-year-old paralegal who has been working on Felix's case since 1996, when the Lord told her to minister to prisoners. Pat lives in southern Virginia, almost 600 miles from Felix's Florida prison. She doesn't have a lot of money, doesn't know sign language, and isn't a lawyer. But for the last 15 years, she has crafted his defense strategies, written motions and briefs, and helped usher his case through the state and federal courts. For the past five years, Felix has called her "Mom." One lawyer I talked to calls her "an angel." And that's something Felix needs more than anyone I've ever met.

Felix Garcia grew up in a working-class home on the edge of the Hyde Park section of Tampa, Florida, one of six children in a Cuban American family. He was born with normal hearing, but almost from birth he suffered from severe ear infections. A former schoolmate who knew him when they were teenagers remembered how Felix would complain regularly of headaches and earaches, and often miss school: "Felix wore cotton balls in his ears every day," to keep pus from leaking out, she explained.

By all accounts, Felix was a good-looking boy with a sweet demeanor who sometimes compensated for his hearing loss by getting girls to tutor him—or even help him cheat. When Felix was very small, he told Pat, his parents once took him to a clinic to have his ears looked at, but he can't recall receiving any treatment. In any case, the problem persisted. "I asked Felix why his parents did not take him to the doctor," his schoolmate recalled. Felix in 1984 Courtesy Pat Bliss."He told me his parents were ashamed of having a child that could not hear so they did not want anyone else to know." By this time, Felix was having difficulty understanding people even when they spoke up. He learned to read lips a bit but struggled to speak clearly as he gradually lost the ability to hear his own voice. "When people talk, I had to look into their faces," he would explain in court testimony. "I hear sounds, and I hear voices. But I can't make out the words unless I am looking at the person." It felt like being underwater.

While still in high school, Felix found work as a brick mason. After graduating, he had a brief run-in with the law for check kiting, receiving probation. When he was 19, he and his girlfriend, Michelle Genco, had a baby girl whom they named Candise. Felix kept doing masonry work when he could get it and lived with his grandmother, whom he described as "very poor, but she loved me." At times, he hung around with his siblings, some of whom had gotten involved with, as he puts it, "the street."

On August 4, 1981, Felix accompanied his brother Frank, his sister Tina, and her boyfriend, Ray Stanley, to a pawnshop. Frank had a ring he wanted to hock. He said he didn't have his ID and asked Felix to sign the pawn ticket. The ring, it turned out, belonged to a man who'd been murdered the day before at a motel. Six days later police, having traced the ticket, arrested Felix at Tina and Ray's house.

Felix now says that he didn't understand the officer who read him his Miranda rights. In any case, he insisted he knew nothing about the crime, and he refused to sign a statement for the police. Michelle and her mother both later testified that Felix was with them at the time of the killing, eating pizza and watching videos at the mother's home. But Frank—who knew the victim and had left fingerprints at the scene—cut a deal with the state to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed robbery and fingered Felix as the killer. Tina—who married Ray shortly after the arrest—also agreed to testify against her younger brother. It wasn't until nearly a quarter century later that Frank would confess that Felix had had nothing to do with the crime.

At Felix's trial, in 1983, an expert declared that the defendant had a 70-decibel hearing loss, which is considered severe deafness. Through most of the proceedings, he had cotton in his ears to stop the pus. Felix was given a hearing aid, which he said didn't work, and a loudspeaker, which amplified noise but didn't help him understand what people were saying. He tried to read lips, but the prosecutor often faced away from him, and he had no clear view of the witness box. In other words, he was largely clueless as to what was going on.

"Deaf people have a hard time when they are thrown into the criminal-justice system," says MacKay Vernon, a psychologist and authority on the deaf who is familiar with the details of Felix's situation. "The courts—judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers—just don't understand what they're up against. Turning up the sound system doesn't mean the defendant better understands what's going on. He just hears more noise. In the case of Felix, sign language interpreters wouldn't be much help because at the time of the trial he couldn't understand signs. And anyhow, sign language interpreters can't keep up with the speech in courts. Moreover, deaf people often don't have the vocabulary to understand. Their ability to read can lag far behind hearing people."

Even when he took the stand, Felix struggled to understand what the lawyers were asking him. Years later, after reviewing the trial transcript, Pat asked Felix why he had been so quick to answer "yes" to one question after another. "If I say no, they're going to think I'm stupid," he replied. "Plus I wanted to get off the stand and go home. And Frank told me they would not convict me for something I didn't do." At another point, Felix said, "If I say no, they will do it all again…I spent a long time in that place. I wanted out." (By trial time, he already had been in jail for two years.) "It is tragic," says Dick Watts, a criminal attorney who later helped represent Felix. It's easy to be confused because "Felix smiles, nods…but he doesn't understand.''

On July 23, 1983, Felix was convicted on the basis of his siblings' testimony and the pawn ticket he'd signed for Frank—the only piece of physical evidence against him. He received a life sentence for first-degree murder and a concurrent 99 years for armed robbery and was placed in a maximum-security lockup. He and Michelle parted ways, and he never saw her again (although he has recently been in touch with his grown daughter). His mother visited a few times, but then he called Pat to say he'd received a letter from his parents saying they were moving to Tennessee, and that if Felix ever got out he shouldn't bother looking for them. When Felix's childhood friend connected with the family years later, "His father told me he once had a son named Felix, but that person was in the Polk Correctional Institution."

James Ridgeway

Senior Correspondent

James Ridgeway is a senior correspondent at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. RSS | Twitter