Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  We chat like this for about thirty minutes. Marsellus agrees with everything we say.

  “I’ll study the petition very carefully,” he promises, “and I’ll see that each member of the Board does the same. See you tomorrow.”

  We thank him and leave the building, but once back at the car we cannot contain our excitement. Marsellus could not have been more sympathetic.

  “I feel so go-od” (two Georgian syllables), Millard says.

  I let out a whoop.

  Millard and Joe’s analysis is that Edwards does not want to execute people, but he must protect himself politically, so he has appointed a pro-clemency Pardon Board, who will make recommendations to him which he will then follow, thus giving himself “cover.” We are all buoyed up.

  Later Marsellus will serve time in a federal prison for rigging pardons and accepting bribes while serving as chairperson of this board. When he gets out of prison, he will weep as he tells me how he betrayed his deepest ideals by trying to be a “team player” for the governor by protecting him from difficult clemency decisions.

  On the morning of the thirty-first, the day of the Board hearing, I get up early to pray. I sit in the rocking chair in my room where I always begin the day. I face the crucifix and the small burning flame of an oil lamp. Just this space, this time now, not yet in the rapids, not yet in the fire of debate, the points and counterpoints. Only me here and, you, God of truth, God of life, give me words, essential words, words to pierce the conscience, to turn the heart.

  I am awed at the power invested in these five human beings on the Board. How can they possibly assess the facts, nuances, ambiguities, testimony, countertestimony, politics, race, class, and legal arguments all bundled into the case of this man? Or, maybe their lines of decision-making are much simpler. Perhaps they do not see it as their role to question the judgment of the courts. Maybe their position will be like Edwards’s: if they do not see a gross miscarriage of justice, they will go for death. They know that the law and the public mood demand this death. If anyone is opposed in principle to the death penalty, he or she is not sitting on this board.

  I have spoken before in public. But I have never pleaded for someone’s life.

  In my journal the night before the hearing I list a few basic points:

  I’ll acknowledge the evil Pat has done and make very clear that I in no way condone his terrible crime, but I’ll try to show that he is not a monster but a human being like the rest of us in the room: that he deserves punishment but not death.

  I’ll speak of mercy being stronger and more God-like than vengeance, and that this man can live the rest of his days productively at work behind the walls at Angola. He will pay for his deed and the public will be protected.

  The next day I dress in my navy blue suit and white blouse and look with new meaning at my little silver crucifix before kissing the figure of the Executed Criminal and slipping the chain around my neck. I go to Mass with the Sisters in St. Alphonsus church, eat some Cheerios, and drive to Baton Rouge.

  There I meet Millard and the others and we go to a little hamburger place for lunch. I find myself taking extra-deep breaths. I know I am doing all I can do and there is peace in that. I know that Millard Farmer is at the helm and I trust that. I keep asking God to bring these efforts to good.

  At one-thirty we head to the building on Mayflower Street where the hearing will take place. As we enter we are asked to sign a book, a kind of registry, and we must state which “side” we’re on — the state’s or the defendant’s. People are beginning to come in, mill around, drink coffee. I see some of the Sisters from my religious community. I had called them and invited them to come, and we stand in a little cluster and talk. Sisters Kathleen Bahlinger and Lory Schaff are here — good, reliable friends who work among the poor in Baton Rouge. They will play a crucial role in events over the next five days.

  Millard, I see, is over in a corner talking to Dracos Burke, the assistant district attorney who will argue for death.

  By two o’clock we are all in the small, airless hearing room, and people are sitting close together in folding chairs. Some are standing near the doorway. The Pardon Board members take their seats behind a large table. They each have the black folders Millard gave them. They also have other papers from the D.A.’s office. Howard Marsellus is in the middle.

  Our side will talk first. The Board will ask questions. The state will speak second. The Board again will ask its questions. Those are the rules. Marsellus in his introduction stresses the importance of order in the proceedings, both from those testifying and from those in the audience.

  We begin. Brad Fisher goes first. The Board has a copy of his affidavit but he takes his time and goes over the main points with them. He is calm and reasoned. I am struck by how ordinary, how banal the procedure seems. Someone looking in through a window, not knowing what is being said, might think this is a neighborhood meeting to discuss how the tree-planting project is progressing.

  Millard is up next. He points out all the legal issues not raised because of inadequate defense and why now it is difficult to get the courts to consider them. He raises the question of whether, under the law, Patrick Sonnier is guilty of first-degree murder. His voice is measured but earnest. He says that the state of Louisiana does not need to kill Pat Sonnier to protect its citizens, that this man will work and work hard for the rest of his days at Angola.

  I speak last. I say all I planned to say. Coming to the end, knowing these are my last words, I raise the question about which of these brothers did the actual killing. I raise it knowing that there is no way to prove what I am saying. I raise it anyway.

  Our side has had its say. Marsellus invites the state to present its case.

  Dracos Burke speaks. He says that it is six years and five months since the murders have happened and that justice is “long past due.” He reviews the “lengthy, thorough” court review given Mr. Sonnier — not only a trial but a retrial for sentencing, then the numerous appeals reviewed by both state and federal courts, and, finally, the successor petitions filed by Mr. Farmer, obviously a “most excellent attorney” at the service of Mr. Sonnier. He says that there has been no doubt in the courts’ mind about who did the murder, that the killings were “cool and calculated,” and now it’s time, he says, past time, for Mr. Sonnier to pay the consequences of his deed. He passes out pictures of the slain teenagers for the Board members to see.

  “If we don’t carry out the death penalty in this case, what case will be appropriate?” he asks.

  He calls as a witness Lloyd LeBlanc, father of David LeBlanc, who speaks for both of the victims’ families. Lloyd says that Elmo Patrick Sonnier has put himself in the situation he is in today and all this talk of Sonnier being a rehabilitated man is hard to buy. “I have a son that is in the grave — that I can show you — who is the product of this ‘rehabilitated man.’ ” He asks the Board to uphold the death sentence.

  The testimonies given, a few questions asked, Marsellus announces that the Board will now retire to render their decision. They gather their materials and move from behind the long table. People are standing up, beginning to leave. Outside in the bright white sunshine, clutches of people stand about on the sidewalk just outside the building. As I step through the door I meet Lloyd LeBlanc and his wife, Eula. They’re middle-aged. He’s solidly built, a little thick at the middle, receding hair. My heart is pounding. I fumble for words. “I’m so sorry about your son,” I say.

  LeBlanc says, “Sister, I’m a Catholic. How can you present Elmo Patrick Sonnier’s side like this without ever having come to visit with me and my wife or the Bourques to hear our side? How can you spend all your time worrying about Sonnier and not think that maybe we needed you too?”

  “I thought I would only add to your pain,” I say.

  I am shocked by what he is saying to me. I feel that I have made a terrible mistake and done what I was most trying to avoid — added to their pain.

  He intro
duces me to the Bourques, who are polite enough, but I can see the hurt in their faces and the deep resentment that a representative of the Church should be devoting her energies to keep their child’s murderer from the electric chair.

  Lloyd LeBlanc and I walk up and down the sidewalk talking. He tells me of his wife’s pain, how he has had to bring her to David’s grave every morning before she can get on with her day, the days and nights and weeks and months and years of weeping. He also knows, he says, another side of Elmo Sonnier, a side, he is sure, which I have not seen, an evil man who hung around bars with thieves and “trashy” people, who spouted obscenities, who stole, and who abducted teenage kids and raped young women.

  This is a Pat Sonnier that I have not met or even imagined. I have only met the man in the clean blue denim shirt, the man always so glad to see me, who writes me letters and can’t thank me enough for my love and care. In retrospect I wonder how I could be so naive. I wish now that I had gone to visit the Bourques and the LeBlancs. Too late now. Their hurt and anger sting.

  I look at my watch. The Board has been deliberating about an hour. Despite my failure to talk to the LeBlancs and the Bourques, I still want Pat to live. I feel I am still right to oppose capital punishment, but I had not thought seriously enough about what murder means to victims’ families and to society. I had not considered how difficult the issue of capital punishment is. My response had been far too simplistic.

  My instinct tells me the longer the Board deliberates, the better. The uphill battle is ours and uphill battles do not resolve quickly.

  The word comes to us casually. “The Board is back.”

  I take leave of Lloyd LeBlanc. “Thank you for talking to me,” I say, and I tell him I will be praying for him, for his wife, for his family, and again I say I am so sorry about his son. I cannot say it enough.

  We shake hands. I sense in him an unmistakable friendliness and a great loneliness. He has spent the last hour talking to me despite my earlier failure to reach out to him. I decide that later I will telephone him. Somehow, across the emotional minefields and opposing views of the death penalty, we can talk to each other.

  Voices drop and there is a subdued stillness and silence as Board members seat themselves once again at the long table. Marsellus announces that each is to record his or her decision on the form, which he now passes to them. I think of the Sisters handing out final exams, the silence in the classroom as the fateful papers are passed out, everyone anxiously scanning the questions, the sound of scribbling pens. The Board members can see the papers and we can’t, but soon now all will be revealed. My heart is racing. Die or live? There is a tight feeling in my stomach and I try to take a deep breath but it doesn’t catch.

  Marsellus waits as the marked papers make their way back to him in the center of the table. He looks at each of the papers. He arranges them in a neat, squared pile. He looks up and says, “It is the finding of this board that clemency be denied to Mr. Elmo Sonnier.” The vote is four to one. No one states a reason except Dr. Lionel Daniels, the one vote against denial. He is bothered, he says, by questions concerning the adequacy of Mr. Sonnier’s defense at the sentencing trial.

  A group of us gather in the back parking lot. Millard’s face is ashen and he is saying that he will get a private meeting with Edwards, he and I and Edwards — somehow he will do this.

  From the back door one of the Board members, Lawrence Hand, walks over to us. He’s a Catholic, has a sister who’s a nun. He pats me on the arm and says, “Even Christ didn’t win ‘em all, Sister.”

  “What happened to Marsellus?” somebody says.

  Millard and team will head back to New Orleans. I will stay in Baton Rouge with my mother for the night.

  That night I make two phone calls. One is to Lloyd LeBlanc. I tell him that even though I am against the execution of Pat Sonnier, that does not mean that I do not care about him and his family and what happened to his son. I ask him to please not hesitate to call on me if there is anything I can do to ease his pain and his terrible loss.

  He has a question.

  “Are you a Communist?”

  “A Communist?” I repeat.

  “No, Mr. LeBlanc, I am not a Communist.”

  “I didn’t think so,” he says. “That’s what some people are saying, with you defending this murderer, but I didn’t think so.”

  Then I make my second phone call. I call Sister Kathleen Bahlinger and ask her and Sister Lory to take care of Pat’s funeral arrangements. It has been one of Pat’s few requests — “Please don’t let me be buried here” — and I have promised that I won’t let that happen. This means getting a funeral home to perform the services, a suit of clothes for him to be buried in, a plot of ground.

  Kathleen and I talk about asking our religious community for one of our burial plots. We have been friends since childhood, attended the same high school. Many a night I fell asleep in the back seat of the family Oldsmobile as we came home from the Bahlingers’ (in distance, exactly one rosary from their house to ours). She had plenty of brothers, too, seven of them, which always made it exciting to go to her house.

  “And the prayer service, too,” I add, “will you and Lory take care of it? Pat is a Catholic. Maybe Bishop Ott will be willing to celebrate the funeral Mass. He’s opposed to capital punishment and he’s invested quite a bit of his time urging the governor to grant clemency to Pat.”

  Kathleen says she’ll ask him. She’ll also go to Goodwill to pick out a burial suit.

  “What size do you think he wears? How tall is he?” she asks.

  And I say, “He’s a good six feet and not thin. He’s a big man.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she says.

  I am silent then.

  And Kathleen says, “Perhaps we won’t need any of this.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  It is good to be back at Mama’s house at a time like this. Four more days until they kill Pat Sonnier. She comes into my room to sit by my bed and talk awhile and kiss me good night. I have drawn her into strange waters — murders and victims and plans for electrocution, pardon boards and governors — my face on the evening news, identified as “spiritual adviser to the convicted murderer.” She gets angry phone calls about her daughter’s “misplaced kindness.” Mother and child. What happens to one happens to the other.

  I wonder about Mrs. Sonnier. She doesn’t have a telephone and won’t get any threatening phone calls. But when she goes to the grocery store, if she glances over her shoulder can she see people whispering? Can she feel their eyes on her, fingers pointed toward the “mother of the murderers”? Or perhaps she doesn’t leave the house these days. Perhaps she waits out the days in seclusion in her two-room apartment. When Millard and I visited with her, she told us that she had unplugged her television. During Pat’s last brush with execution she had been watching television and had seen her son’s face and a picture of the electric chair flash on the screen.

  On Sunday, April 1, before I leave for the prison, Mama cooks up “some good, hot grits to stick to your ribs.” My sister, Mary Ann, who lives just a few houses down the street, comes over and joins us. Nobody in the family can quite grasp this situation — myself included. I cannot convince myself that Pat will be killed.

  At the prison I visit with Eddie first, before going to see Pat. I see him come toward me. He’s pale, and he tells me he is “holding up okay” except for his “tore-up” stomach and that it’s been “hard to get to sleep.” He looks around the visiting room, then quietly pulls a folded piece of paper out of his blue denim jacket and whispers, “Get this to the governor.” I look at it: a letter, written in his neat handwriting in black ballpoint pen on yellow, lined legal paper. “Please, Governor,” it says, “you’re about to kill the wrong man … I’m the one who killed the teenagers …”

  It is against prison rules for an inmate to bring written documents into the visiting room. It is against prison rules for a visitor who is not an attorney to ta
ke such documents out of the prison. But the governor must see this letter. Maybe if he reads these desperate words, he will ask to study the trial transcripts himself. Maybe he will meet with Millard Farmer. I rise from the table and show the letter to one of the guards. He knows about the pending execution. All the prison personnel know about the execution, and every guard in this visiting room knows that Eddie is Pat’s brother. They are watching Eddie carefully these days. One of the guards had said to me this morning, as I came through the visitor center, that the Angola “grapevine” had it that the “wrong brother was getting the chair.” Prison talk.

  “I can’t authorize your bringing this out,” the guard says, and he takes the letter and telephones for the captain. I wait. Perhaps I should not have given him the letter. Better to keep it in my hands. I look over at Eddie sitting alone at the table. He is smoking a cigarette and looking down at the ashtray.

  The visiting room, full of visitors, is buzzing as usual. Families sitting together talking. Children pattering over to the ice-cream concession. Over at one of the corner tables near the wall an inmate and his girl are kissing. A long kiss. If the kissing gets too passionate, a guard will walk up to the couple and tell the inmate to cool it. The captain appears and puts in a phone call to the warden and tells me the warden says it’s okay to take the letter out. I take a deep breath. The captain is not unkind. There is concern in his eyes, a gentle tone to his voice. Maybe he can put himself in the place of this man, trying to save his brother from death.