Buddhist death row inmate backed by Oprah vows to fight on after losing bid to overturn conviction

California inmate Jarvis Jay Masters plans to appeal rejection in federal court

A long-time California death row inmate, whose innocence campaign has attracted support from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, plans to continue fighting after a federal court rejected his appeals earlier this month.

“I was hopeful, but I had also prepared myself emotionally for yet another legal hurdle in securing my freedom,” Jarvis Jay Masters said in a statement to The Los Angeles Times.

Masters, 62, is on death row for the 1985 murder of San Quentin State Prison corrections officer Sgt. Hal Burchfield.

Prosecutors accused Masters of making the weapon that others used to kill the sergeant and said notes in the inmate’s hand describing making the sharpened piece of metal used in the murder.

Family members of Burchfield are split over Masters’s claims of innocence, they told the Times.

Masters, meanwhile, maintains his innocence and says he was forced to copy out the notes by superiors in a prison gang.

The California man entered San Quentin in 1981 at age 19 on an armed robbery charge, after a childhood marked by chronic hunger, neglect, foster care, and domestic violence against his mother.

Buddhist death row inmate backed by Oprah vows to fight on after losing bid to overturn his conviction (freejarvis.org)

In prison, Masters converted to Buddhism and wrote the 2009 memoir That Bird Has My Wings, which was later featured as a pick in the influential Oprah’s Book Club.

In a 2022 discussion of the book, Winfrey described the memoir as “the story of a young boy victimized by addiction and poverty and violence and the foster care system and later the justice system,” and said Masters’s account “touched me so deeply and still does today.”

Other public figures, including the writer Rebecca Solnit, have championed Masters’s innocence claims.

“The legal system shows little interest in the strong case for his innocence on the charges and seems to see him as only the surly young Black man it locked up all those years ago,” she wrote in The New York Times in 2022.

The #FreeJarvis campaign alleges issues with the underlying conviction against the inmate, including witnesses who have recanted, and the fact that the man convicted of Burchfield’s murder got a life sentence, rather than a death sentence.

State and federal courts have been less persuaded.

Jarvis Jay Masters in 2021 (freejarvis.org)

Masters has exhuasted his legal appeals at the state level, according to The Los Angeles Times, and a federal court dismissed his claims on September 3.

“We knew this battle for Jarvis’ exoneration from death row would not be easy, but we remain confident in the strength of our evidence and legal arguments,” attorney Michael F. Williams told the paper on Tuesday.

The Independent and the nonprofit Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) have launched a joint campaign calling for an end to the death penalty in the US. The RBIJ has attracted more than 150 well-known signatories to their Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty - with The Independent as the latest on the list. We join high-profile executives like Ariana Huffington, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson as part of this initiative and are making a pledge to highlight the injustices of the death penalty in our coverage.