Pat says, “When they put that hood on my head, I don’t want that ‘Lord is my shepherd’ prayer. It will only delay things. I just want to get it over.”
I ask him if he believes God has forgiven him or does he feel condemned forever for what he has done? Now, for the first time, he talks to me about the murders.
“At first, no,” he says, “I felt that even God hated me, but I know now that God forgives me. I went to confession to the old priest.
“Nobody was supposed to get killed. Eddie was upset. We had just gotten him out of jail. He had come unglued over a girl who was pregnant with his child. She wouldn’t marry him, and he had gone to her house with a sawed-off shotgun, cut the telephone wires, and threatened to shoot her and her whole family. They had him put in jail and every day Mama was calling me at work. ‘Get your brother out. Get my baby out.’ We got him out, got the charge dropped, but his nerves was messed up. Something I think the boy David said to him teed him off and he shot the kids. I should’ve known he could blow. I shouldn’t have let us get mixed up in the bad things we was doing.”
He has his head down. The cigarette hangs limp between his fingers. The smoke comes up in a thin, curling line. It is very quiet.
“I read the articles about it at the Prison Coalition office,” I say. “Those poor children. Those poor parents. They must be in hell.”
“I will go to my grave feeling bad about those kids,” he says. “Every night when they dim the lights on the tier I kneel by my bunk and pray for those kids and their parents. Nobody was supposed to get killed.”
His voice is barely audible.
Later, one of the trusties [trustees], who served meals on death row, will tell me that he never saw anyone with more remorse than Patrick Sonnier. “The guy wouldn’t eat when he first got here. He didn’t sleep much. The guy was eaten up by what he did.”
Later, I will find out that after his arrest, while in the parish jail, he had attempted suicide by slitting his wrists.
But now I just look at him. I’m not sure how to measure his sincerity. I see the young people getting down on their knees and lying down in the cold wet grass. Even if he didn’t do the shooting, he participated in the kidnappings — not just this couple. There had been others.
The silence is heavy. And then he says with anger in his eyes, “I didn’t rape Loretta. I never touched her.”
He had confessed to the murders, he tells me, because it was their plan, his and Eddie’s — each would say he did it and the authorities wouldn’t know who had done it, and he was afraid of the police. Two of the police officers had taken him into an office, his hands cuffed behind his back, and one of them had taken off his jacket, revealing a holstered gun. He was afraid that they were going to pistol-whip him with the gun. He figured that he could do the time at Angola, he said. He had served time when he and his cousin had stolen a truck. “In the confession I said I killed the kids because they might identify me and I didn’t want to go back to Angola, but I had done good at Angola, and I could do it again.”
The murders and the arrest had happened in 1977, he tells me, shortly after the reinstatement of the death penalty by the Supreme Court, but he had not “kept up too good with the news. If I had known then I could get the chair, no matter what they did to me, I would never have confessed.”
He tells me these things all in a flow, all at once, no break in the words, his eyes down most of the time or looking past me to a place I cannot see. He seems to accept that he is responsible for what had happened, even though he claims not to have killed the teenagers. He does not press his innocence. Nor does he seem to harbor any bitterness toward his brother. A week before his execution he will face off with the warden over his right to visit with his brother before he dies.
I remember the old chaplain’s words: “These people are the scum of the earth, and they’ll try to con you.”
I simply do not know what to make of what he is telling me. I suspend judgment. With the electric chair waiting, with death close like this, who the triggerman was seems not the point. Two people are dead, and soon three people will be dead. That for now is the only point.
It is 3:00 P.M. — thirty-six hours away from execution. The guard comes in and tells me visiting time is up. No call has come from the Coalition office. I tell Pat I am going to Baton Rouge to my mother’s house (about an hour’s drive from the prison). If he does not get a stay I will come back to the death house to be with him. I brace myself inside.
About fifteen miles from the prison I hear on the car radio that he has been granted a stay pending a review of his petition by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
I try to comprehend the meaning behind the words. He will live. He will not die. He will be served his supper on the tier with all the others. The trays will come and one will be for him. He can unpack his toothbrush, his underwear, his paper bag of stuff, and put his things back into their regular place in his cell. Over the next days and weeks he will get his taste for food back, and perhaps he will be able to sleep when he climbs into his bunk for the night.
In a letter I quote to him lines from Psalm 107. “It was written for you,” I tell him.
… Some, driven frantic by their sins,
made miserable by their own guilt
and finding all food repugnant,
were nearly at death’s door.
Then they called to Yahweh in their trouble
and he rescued them from their sufferings …
he snatched them from the Pit …
He, too, has a favorite psalm, Psalm 31, he tells me in his next letter. After his death I will see this psalm highlighted in his worn Bible. He will hand me this Bible shortly before he dies.
… I am contemptible,
loathsome to my neighbors,
to my friends a thing of fear …
I am forgotten, as good as dead in their hearts,
something discarded,
… as they combine against me,
plotting to take my life.
But I put my trust in you, Yahweh …
On my next visit to the prison I follow the routine I have set up over the last several months — visiting Pat first, then Eddie.
When Eddie comes into the visiting room he looks almost as bad as Pat looked a couple of weeks ago when he had come close to execution. He greets me somberly. He is carrying a heavy load. His shoulders slump. His hands are shaking. As we sit down at one of the tables, he lights a cigarette. “I’ve got something really, really bad to tell you,” he says. I assume that Pat must have written him a letter, telling him that he had told me about the murders.
I reach over and put my hand on his arm. He is swallowing and his Adam’s apple moves up and down in his throat. He is trying hard to say the words. He is trying to push the words out with sheer willpower.
I say, “I think I know, Eddie. Pat told me you’re the one who killed those children.”
I say it first, but he needs to say it. Does he absorb it, take it in, own it? One moment like that. Six small pieces of metal from his hand destroying two human beings? And he is trying to find the words to tell me that he has done this.
He speaks in a measured, flat voice like a cancer patient, giving the history of his illness again and again to this doctor and that. How many times, I wonder, has he gone over these events in his mind trying to make sense of them, trying to grasp the catastrophic consequences: two families with two dead children, a brother facing the electric chair, and himself sitting here in this blue denim shirt and the bars, gates, fences, and guards that will be around him for the rest of his life.
He seems remorseful about the killings, but I can tell his most tangible regret is his own fate behind bars. Self-survival seems to dominate his moral horizon.
He lays out the facts of the crime, and I can only guess what they mean to him: his girlfriend pregnant, his offer of marriage spurned, the “coldness like a deep-freeze” by her family when he had gone to her house to ask to mar
ry her, she in the back room, refusing even to come out and talk to him, another man in her life named David who’s now her boyfriend; going home enraged and coming back to the girl’s house with his shotgun, cutting the telephone wires to the house, threatening to kill them all, the arrival of the police, arrest, jail; then some talking back and forth, an agreement reached, his release on bond, the record expunged; at home again, rabbit hunting, the kids in the car, the abduction, the boy, David saying, ‘Put down that gun and I’ll show you who’s a man,’ rage, the two Davids blurring, the gun in his hand. Snap.
I see no reason to doubt Eddie. The weight on him is tangible. I can see the pain and bewilderment in his eyes at the enormity of the evil he has done.
I have heard that this is the way most murders happen — an explosion of passion, not a cold, calculated, premeditated act.3
“What words could I ever say to the families of those kids?” he asks me. “I’m sorry? What good are those words now? No words can bring those kids back. I’ve been over it in my mind a million times. If I could turn back the clock …”
He looks up at me.
I miss the moment. I should say to him, Yes, yes, apologize. As weak and ineffective and futile as your words of remorse and sorrow may seem, say them. Only later will I learn from Lloyd LeBlanc, David LeBlanc’s father, what such an apology means. He will later tell a reporter that his main reason for attending Patrick Sonnier’s execution was to hear an apology.
“Why did you testify in court against Pat?” I ask. It had shocked me when I read this. What kind of man would testify against his own brother?
He explains that before their arrest they had planned what each would say, but he had understood one thing and his brother another. Pat had understood that they would each confess to the murders, but he had understood that they would each accuse the other. Pat’s attorney, he says, had not interviewed him before calling him to testify at Pat’s trial. “I was real, real nervous up there trying to keep everything consistent and not contradicting myself, and I was coming unraveled right there on the stand and Pat could see that, he could see I was about to blow, and he told his attorney to stop the questioning. His attorney didn’t know what the hell was going on. He didn’t know what I was going to say when I got up there.”
I am astonished that in a first-degree murder trial an attorney would call a witness to the stand, much less such a crucial one, without talking to him or her first.
In October 1983, I hear that the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans has denied Pat’s appeal. He is running out of time. In talk around the Coalition office I have heard of an attorney in Atlanta named Millard Farmer who defends death-row inmates. I decide to call him.
CHAPTER
3
Poor Millard Farmer. I am pleading with him: “a man on death row running out of time … even though you’re busy … help him, please, help him.”
I telephone him in early November 1983, about a week after Pat’s denial by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. I have heard that he is a native Georgian, but I am surprised by how thick his accent is. After a short pause: “Okay, we’ll ‘hep’ you. Send me the transcripts.” And he gives me the address and I thank him profusely. I waste no time in mailing the papers to him.
After a moratorium of twenty-two years, executions have once again become a reality in Louisiana. On December 14, 1983, the state executed Robert Wayne Williams, a young black man who had shot and killed a black security guard during a robbery. The execution was scheduled for midnight, but just as Williams approached the chair, news came of a delay so a legal question could be settled. Williams went back to wait in his cell, then, one hour later, was executed.
In Louisiana it’s unusual for a black man to be executed for killing another black man. Although the majority of victims of homicide in the state are black (90 percent of homicide victims in New Orleans in 1991), 75 percent of death-row inmates are there for killing whites. And when blacks do get death for killing other blacks, their victims typically fit a certain demographic profile: police or security guards, children, more than one person, or, more rarely, women.1
Tom Dybdahl, now heading the Prison Coalition office, comes over to use the Hope House photocopying machine and tells me about Williams’s funeral and that Robert Wayne’s mother would not let the embalmers hide the burns on her son’s body.2 “The casket was open and you could see the deep burn marks on his head and the calf of his leg,” Tom says.
About a week after the Williams execution I visit Pat. His eyes are dark and he looks pale. He’s having trouble sleeping, he says. He had seen an artist’s sketch of the Williams execution in the Baton Rouge newspaper (no cameras or recording devices are allowed) and noticed that Williams was barefooted.
“If they take me, I’m going with my shoes on,” he says.
Millard Farmer has reviewed Pat’s transcripts and is preparing petitions for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. Pat receives a letter from Michael Baham, his volunteer attorney, who has represented him thus far in his appeals. Baham tells him, “I think it is indeed fortunate that Mr. Farmer is now involved in your case … While I like to think that I am very dedicated to your case, I also realize that dedication — no matter how deep and sincere — is no proper substitute for experience and the resources needed to satisfactorily handle the important pleadings necessary at this time.”
Millard Farmer’s associate, Kimellen Tunkle, drives from Atlanta on Christmas day to meet me in Baton Rouge. “Time is short,” she tells me. “We expect that the Supreme Court is not going to give Pat a hearing.” Kimellen is young, has straight long brown hair, speaks quietly. She takes rapid notes as I tell her what I know about Pat Sonnier. She wants to know about his family and people in the community who might be able to speak for his life should he have to appear before the Pardon Board. I know the Pardon Board is the last appeal before execution.
On January 18 Millard picks me up around 7:30 A.M. and we drive to Angola to see Pat. Millard is a tall, thin man with a long face and grizzled gray hair. All the way to Angola we talk.
Though my daddy was an attorney, I tend to avoid lawyer talk, with all its jargon and razor-thin distinctions and counterdistinctions. But now I want to know and understand everything about the legal issues in Pat’s case. I feel that we’re in a boat in the rapids and we’re trying to throw out an anchor that will catch solidly on a rock. I am hoping that, even though it’s very late, Millard and his team will find an anchor issue.
What I learn first about the legal system is that it’s a system of gates that shut like one-way turnstiles, and you can’t go back in once you’ve come out. Millard explains that if the trial attorney does not raise an issue or make an objection, the higher courts say the defendant has waived his/her rights to raise the issue later on.
In looking through the voir dire — the interviews with prospective jurors at Pat’s trial — Millard has seen that the prosecutor used too many “strikes” — excusing jurors without having to give a reason. He used eight strikes. He was entitled to six. It was up to the defense attorney to notice and to object. “Too late now,” Millard says, and explains that one rule of thumb he uses to determine the quality of defense counsel is how long the jury selection process lasts. If it lasts several weeks or a month, he says, you know you have a strong attorney. The jury selection in Pat’s trial took two days.
Millard has also discovered that the prosecutor during the sentencing portion of the trial told the jury that Pat was incapable of rehabilitation and would kill again and the only way to protect other prisoners or society at large would be to execute him.3 That kind of rigid prediction of future dangerousness, which cannot be supported by evidence, is inappropriate, he explains, but again it was up to defense counsel to object, which would have assured a review of the issue on appeal. But it’s too late now. Gate closed.
Introducing these issues in a federal court now, after all this time, will almost surely evoke “abuse of the
writ” from the courts, he says, and explains that the court wants to protect itself from defendants filing issues piecemeal, which would keep cases before the courts indefinitely.
“But can’t you explain that it’s the attorneys’ fault, not Pat’s, that these issues have not yet been raised?” I ask. “Shouldn’t the courts be interested in the substance of the issues, not who raised them and when?”
In the past, Millard says, defense attorneys used to be able to count on the federal courts to monitor and check errors and abuses in state courts. It was the authority of the federal courts, he explains, which put legal teeth into the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and he believes that if it had been left to state legislatures to enact social legislation on their own, Jim Crow might still be the law of the land today. Then in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, he says, the high court, by removing the constitutional protection against capital punishment, essentially said that if states wanted to kill their citizens, they wouldn’t stop them. The Court interpreted the Constitution as saying that putting someone to death was not forbidden by the Eighth Amendment, which forbids cruel and unusual punishment. “I believe, though,” he says, “the political motive behind this decision was a power struggle between the federal government and states’ rights — that old struggle, as old as the Constitution itself. Southern states were mad as hell about the federal enforcement of desegregation in the sixties. And then they were mad as hell again with the Furman v. Georgia ruling in 1972, which said the application of the death penalty was ‘arbitrary and capricious,’ which looked like the Court might permanently overturn the death penalty. The South has always been a proponent of strong law-and-order measures,4 mainly to keep blacks in line, and they were not about to let the feds in Washington tell them how they could or couldn’t punish their criminals. They prevailed.”
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