By MICHAEL GRACZYK
The Associated Press
HOUSTON — Texas prison officials recovered yet another contraband cell phone from a death row inmate after conducting an X-ray of the man on Friday.
In the second seizure this week since a systemwide lockdown and search for contraband ended, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officers have found a phone inside the body of condemned inmate Hank Skinner.
“It was hidden in his rectum,” said department spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.
Two cell phone SIM cards were found hidden in Skinner’s Bible during a routine search Friday afternoon of his cell at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston.
“They suspected he had a cell phone that he would not admit to,” Lyons said. “They escorted him to the unit infirmary where they conducted an X-ray and confirmed he was in possession of a cell phone.”
Skinner, 46, has been on death row since 1995 for a triple slaying in Pampa in the Texas Panhandle.
He already was classified as a Level 3 inmate, the most troublesome, and his latest infraction will impact any future reduction in his security level, Lyons said.
“I think if nothing else, it illustrates how difficult it can be to locate these phones on death row,” she said. “It’s not only having to look in their property. In some cases, we have to look inside their bodies.”
On Wednesday, just hours after the more than 3-week-long lockdown ended, prison officials found a cell phone, a charger, a makeshift weapon and what appeared to be marijuana in the cell of a different death row inmate. The inmate, Mark Stroman, 39, was condemned for the slaying of a Dallas-area convenience store clerk during a robbery.
During the lockdown, a dozen cell phones, nine chargers, three phone batteries and seven SIM cards were among contraband found on death row.
The Polunsky Unit was the last of the state’s prisons on a systemwide lockdown imposed last month after another condemned inmate, Richard Tabler, made threatening calls to a state senator using a phone that had been smuggled to him.