William R. Blake spent 25-years in solitary confinement after murdering Deputy David Clark in 1987.

Blake was being escorted to court to answer charges of drugs and robbery. He was handcuffed, but still able to reach the gun from Deputy Bernie Meleski, who was also escorting Blake to court that day.

Once he had the gun, Blake began firing the weapon, injuring Meleski and killing Clark. Deputy Clark had a wife and was a father of two.

According to Yahoo News, the judge presiding over Blake's case told him he deserves "an eternity in hell."

During the end of his solitary confinement, Blake began writing an essay about his experience having no human contact for a quarter of a century. The essay appeared on Solitary Watch, a prisoner advocacy group, and was mentioned in the Yale Law Journal's Prison Law Writing Contest.

In the essay, Blake talks about the psychological effects of solitary confinement and how he found it to be a worse punishment than the death penalty.

He begins the essay by talking about the horrendous nature of his crime.

"Even by the standards of my own belief system, such as it was back then, I deserved to die for what I had done. I took the life of a man without just cause, committing an act so monumentally wrong that I could not have argued that it was unfair had I been required to pay with my own life."

He adds, "On July 10, 2012, I finished my 25th consecutive year in solitary confinement, where at the time of this writing I remain. Though it is true that I've never died and so don't know exactly what the experience would entail, for the life of me I cannot fathom how dying any death could be harder or more terrible than living through all that I have been forced to endure for the last quarter-century."

He also talks about his boredom and loneliness, which he speaks about with intense detail,

"You probably think that you understand boredom, know its feel, but really you don't. What you call boredom would seem a whirlwind of activity to me, choices so many that I'd likely be befuddled in trying to pick one over all the others... I've experienced times so difficult and felt broken and loneliness to such a degree that it seemed to be a physical thing inside so thick it felt like it was choking me, trying to squeeze the sanity from my mind, the spirit from my soul, and the life from my body."

In conclusion of the essay, he writes, "Had I known in 1987 that I would spend the next quarter-century in solitary confinement, I would have certainly killed myself. If I took a month to die and spent every minute of it in severe pain, it seems to me that on a balance that fate would still be far easier to endure than the last twenty-five years have been. If I try to imagine what kind of death, even a slow one, would be worse than twenty-five years in the box-and I have tried to imagine it-I can come up with nothing. Set me afire, pummel and bludgeon me, cut me to bits, stab me, shoot me, do what you will in the worst of ways, but none of it could come close to making me feel thing as cumulatively horrifying as what I've experienced through my years in solitary. Dying couldn't take but a short time if you or the State were to kill me; in SHU I have died a thousand internal deaths. The sum of my quarter-century's worth of suffering has been that bad."

Blake is now 48-years-old and still in prison, though out of solitary. He will not be eligible for parole until 2064, making him 100-years old.