Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  If Pat is to be killed, then Eddie has visited with him for the last time. Eddie tells me how, two weeks ago, he was awakened by a guard at three-thirty in the morning and told to dress. He was not told where he was going but was directed, hands and feet shackled, into a prison vehicle and driven to the front of the prison. There, in the death-row visiting room, he had been allowed to visit Pat for two hours.

  It was the second such visit of the brothers in the four years they have been at Angola. Prison rules prohibit brothers’ being assigned to the same camps or visiting each other. Brothers, natural allies, might team up against other inmates or plot escape.

  Ross Maggio, the warden, had given special permission for the brothers’ recent visit. Shortly after receiving the April date of execution, Pat had written the warden and requested a visit with his brother. No answer. Once again he wrote, requesting the visit. No answer. Then one day when he was out of his cell for his “hour,” Pat reached up and grasped one of the water pipes above his head and said to the guards, “Go tell Warden Maggio I want to talk to him about my brother, and I’m not moving from here until I see him. If any of you try to force me — see this pipe? I’ll rip it loose, and you may get me but I’m going to take a lot of you with me.”

  The guards immediately radioed the warden. It would have been easier for them to subdue the prisoner if he had been inside his cell. They could then have used regular procedure — several guards, protected by face masks and body shields, would move in on him with tear gas, mace, and billy clubs.

  In ten minutes Maggio had arrived on the scene.

  Maggio was called “Cowboy” because he had come to Angola to “straighten out” a few things, and inmates are quick to acknowledge that the prison is safer because of his reforms. The most recent tale circulating about the tall, good-looking warden is of his rescue of his mother from two escaping inmates who had abducted her from his house within the prison compound. Holding a screwdriver to her throat, the inmates ordered the warden to drive them in a truck out through the front gate. But on reaching the gate, Maggio rammed the truck into an iron post, leaped out, grabbed a gun from a guard, and shot one inmate dead and wounded the other.

  Now Warden Maggio had come on the tier to confront Patrick Sonnier. He told him that before they could talk, he would have to get back into his cell. If he did that, the warden promised to “be fair.” Pat had complied and the two men had talked and once again Pat had asked to see his brother.

  “Maggio kept his promise. I got to see Eddie,” Pat told me, and he took a certain pride in having brought it off. He had also appreciated that the warden had not charged him with a disciplinary infraction. “He knew I was desperate to see my brother.”

  With the letter to the governor tucked into the pocket of my suit, I leave Eddie around 11:00 A.M. and head to the death house to see Pat. Eddie tells me as I am leaving, “Talk to the warden, and ask him please, please, not to put me in lock-down.” He wants to stay in “population” with his friends around him and be able to go to work and stay busy. I promise him I will ask the warden.

  A guard drives me in one of the prison vehicles to the death house. I talk to the driver. I always talk to the guards when I visit the prison. I ask them about their work and their families and what they do to relax. (Most fish or hunt.) Their minds, what happens to their minds, I wonder, all day long, all night long, just watching other people. They are not allowed to read on duty. One of the guards has told me that in their training they are discouraged from sharing their “personal” lives with inmates. Their relationship to inmates is based on distrust. They expect that inmates will try to con them. I’m thinking that must make their job doubly costly — not only boring but isolating as well.

  “It’s a steady paycheck,” one guard said to me. His father has worked here, and his grandfather, and I soon discover that’s a prevalent pattern — families working here for two, three, four generations.

  I’ve talked to women who work in the towers located near the front gate and the main yard. Into the tower they go at five o’clock every morning. They lock the door behind them and climb the steps. The tower is glassed all around at the top. In the middle sits a toilet, unseen from the ground. A radio. A telephone. A rifle. And twelve hours to go. Watch the empty yard when inmates are at work inside, the yard stripped of all trees and bushes, with only the fence to break the horizon. Watch the inmates when they come out for recreation. Watch if any cluster together. Watch if any huddle by the fence. Watch. Watch and think, maybe listen to music on the radio. Twelve hours. Look forward to the tray of food that will come to you around eleven o’clock and then at four. Memorize the menu. Know on what day red beans come and cornbread and mustard greens and especially, fried chicken.

  What saves their sanity, some women tell me, is the telephone. They call each other and talk. But this is against the rules. They have a code to alert each other about unannounced visits of supervisors.

  Riding along in the van now, I refocus my mind on my destination. It is a rainy, blustery day. I see a dark line of trees on the edge of the horizon. Behind the trees is the Mississippi. The river figures prominently in escape stories told around here. Most escaping prisoners meet one of two fates: the bloodhounds sniff them out in the swamps surrounding the prison, or they drown in the river. A few have made it to the other side only to find a search posse waiting for them. Not many successful escapes from this place. On foggy days no inmates are allowed outside.

  My driver stops and parks in front of a green cinder-block building, an ordinary building except for the large generator to the left. Across the front of the building in four neatly painted cans are geraniums, brilliant red. Just across the road, ducks swim in a lagoon. In front of the glass doors at the entrance sits a blue-uniformed guard with a rifle across his lap.

  Before I enter the building, the guard asks me to empty my pockets. He runs the metal detector over my body, front and back. Just inside the door in a small foyer another guard sits on a metal folding chair. He has one of those fresh-scrubbed baby faces and a .357 magnum strapped to his side. It’s unusual to see guns like this. Inside the prison you never see a firearm, except for the guards on horseback who carry rifles out in the fields, or the guards at the front gate who have magnums holstered at their sides.

  I look around to see what I can of the building. Straight ahead are two small offices: one, the major’s office, with a desk and telephone and filing cabinet; the other a place where there’s a coffee percolator and some cabinets and a long table and chairs. To the left is a visitor room, rather large. You can see it through the glass paneling which separates it from the foyer. In it are several tables and chairs and a drink machine. To the extreme left of the visitor room is a white metal door with no window. I know that this door is always kept locked. Behind it is the electric chair. Everything is very clean. The tile floors are highly polished. The paint on the walls looks fresh.

  I turn to my right out of the foyer into a small hallway. Straight ahead through the glass exit door I can see a cement walkway and the buildings of Camp F. Brown sparrows hop on the walkway outside the door. To the right of the exit door is a white metal door with a window of heavy mesh screen that leads onto the tier. Behind it, his hands and feet shackled, sits Patrick Sonnier.

  I have been calm until now, but seeing him here in this place, I feel my stomach muscles tighten.

  Looking past Pat, I see a row of four cells. A guard stands at the end of the row watching Pat. His shift over, another guard will take his place. Guards will be observing Pat now until his death. There is a television set on a metal can on the floor opposite the first cell, where Pat sits on a plastic chair. Everything is painted green. The floor is unpainted cement. On the wall next to Pat’s cell is a telephone. He is allowed to make collect phone calls.

  “I don’t want Mama or anybody from the family coming to this place,” Pat tells me. “Mama couldn’t stand it.”

  That means I’m all he’s got.
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br />   I pray, Please, God, don’t let him break down. I don’t know what I will do if he starts to sob or shake or struggle against the guards. I remember in the newspaper account of his arrest that he had urinated on himself from fright.

  I try to be upbeat.

  I tell him about Eddie’s letter to the governor and that I know a reporter at the Times-Picayune who might be able to get the letter published. I take him step by step through the Pardon Board hearing — what Millard said, what Brad Fisher said — but he interrupts me. He is angry about the Pardon Board hearing. “Why wasn’t I there?” he asks me.

  Why wasn’t he there? I don’t know why. He wasn’t there because Millard said he shouldn’t be. I have been following without question whatever recommendations Millard makes. Did he fear that Pat’s being in the presence of the victims’ families would produce too charged an atmosphere? Did he think that Pat would not express himself well and might sound too self-serving?

  Pat has his own letter he wishes to write to the governor. His hands are shackled, so he dictates it and I write it for him:

  Dear Governor Edwards,

  I feel that the so-called hearing before the Pardon Board yesterday was done unjustly because I was not allowed to appear and speak for my own life. The victims’ families were all there and that was bound to influence the Board, but I was deprived of being able to meet them face to face.

  I ask you, as Governor of this state, to uphold my right to appear before this Board which is deciding whether I live or die.

  Thank you for hearing this request.

  I think: not being at your own hearing that decides whether you live or die. I can’t imagine ever being so powerless. I think of Camus’ description of the condemned: everything goes on outside of him … He is no longer a man but a thing waiting to be handled …

  Such powerlessness before his executioners is one thing, but in the hands of his attorneys too? I feel terrible that I followed Millard’s judgment without question. I haven’t practiced blind obedience like this since the old days of convent life, when I obeyed my superiors unthinkingly.

  It has begun to rain heavily outside. You can hear the water splashing on the walkway outside the glass door. The sparrows have gone. There is only the sound of the rain. Pat is smoking one cigarette after another and drinking black coffee. Visitors are not allowed food of any kind in the death house. I drink coffee, too.

  Over and over in my mind I calculate the days. It is Sunday, April 1; tomorrow, Monday, April 2; then Tuesday, April 3; then Wednesday, April 4; and that night, just after midnight, death. The guard watching Pat shifts from foot to foot. Another guard comes to replace him. I am told to step away from the door while the guards change.

  Around two-thirty I am told that visiting time is over. I promise Pat to come back tomorrow. “You’re all I’ve got,” he says, and manages a smile. I leave him some passages in the Bible to meditate on if he wants to. I stand at the door and put my hand against the mesh screen. He stands up too. I pray, asking God to give him courage, to strengthen his faith, to help him take each day at a time. I pray that God will give Millard and the team the wisdom they need to persuade the courts to grant a stay of execution. I pray for the governor’s heart.

  Once outside the prison, I use a public pay phone to call Millard in New Orleans. “We need you to come in for a strategy meeting,” he tells me. It means a three-hour drive. I stop at a café near the prison for a sandwich and a coke. I eat in the car as I head to New Orleans 120 miles away.

  I get to Sam Dalton’s office at six o’clock. Millard and the others have been working round the clock drawing up the petitions that Bill Quigley will file in the courts tomorrow morning. They have decided to include Pat’s affidavit stating the circumstances which led him to make his confessions. They are throwing everything they can think of into the petitions. This is Pat’s last shot in the courts.

  I show them Eddie’s letter to the governor and we decide to get the letter over to James Hodge, a friend of mine at the Times-Picayune. At this point, Millard says, press attention can’t hurt.

  I tell Millard that Pat is upset that he was not allowed to be present at his hearing before the Pardon Board. Millard, I can tell, has his mind on other things. “It was a judgment call,” he says. “It’s hard to know what’s best, you know what I mean?”

  Everybody looks pretty ragged. I suspect they have been working most of the night. I am pretty tired myself, though I am not attending much to how I feel. I am developing a cough and my lungs don’t feel right. I am allergic to smoke and Pat has been smoking one cigarette after another.

  Early Monday morning I head back to Baton Rouge, bringing Eddie’s and Pat’s letters to the governor. I go to Fran Bussie’s office and turn the letters over to her. She’s a friend of Edwards’s and had arranged for our meeting with him.

  While at Fran’s I call Sister Lory Schaff on the phone. She puts Kathleen on, who wants to talk about funeral arrangements, but just before she does this, she reminds me of something: “I know you’re doing everything you can with the attorneys and the others to save this man from dying,” she says to me, “but as his spiritual adviser you’re the one who has to help him die. Don’t be so absorbed in fighting for him to live that you don’t help him die.”

  She is right, of course. I thank her for helping me to keep on course. Thank God for the sisterhood.

  Kathleen tells me that the leadership of our community has met and we can probably use one of our own burial plots and she’s found a funeral home willing to donate its services. She’s still got to go to Goodwill to get the suit coat, but she can get a shirt and tie from one of her brothers.

  That morning I drive to Angola.

  As I enter the death house I can hear the television near Pat’s cell. A basketball game is on. As I approach the visitor door I see that the guard stationed to watch Pat has moved down closer to the TV to catch the critical play. Pat is inside his cell. A moment, a silence, the snap of the ball, and the two men cheer. They could be two friends in somebody’s den on a Saturday afternoon. But then the guard moves back to the end of the tier and assumes his position.

  Pat seems to be holding up well. He is getting letters from his young pen pals and he reads parts of the letters to me. “It’s a good thing we don’t have hanging as a method of execution here in Louisiana, or Mark would feel bad, because look what he says in his letter: ‘hang in there’ ” and he laughs. It’s bravado, of course. “They’re not going to break me,” he says to me again and again. “I just pray God gives me strength to make that last walk.” He says he didn’t read the Bible last night. Instead, he says, he talked a long, long time with the guards on duty. Reading, he says, might make him sleepy and he’s not too keen on sleeping. He’s staying conscious and in control as much as he can.

  I tell him that his letter to the governor has been delivered. I tell him that Bill Quigley is filing the petitions in the courts this morning, and that Millard is making his move to see the governor in private.

  “Look,” he says, “I appreciate all the efforts to save me, but me and God have squared things away. I’m ready to go if it comes down.”

  And I can see that he does have strength and resilience and this gives me courage too. I think of Kathleen lining up the burial plot, the coat from Goodwill. But with Pat I am in a circle of light and strength. I learn to stay in this space of the present moment and not to think to the future, not to think past today to Wednesday night at midnight. Today is Monday and Pat is alive and I am alive and we are here talking together.

  Outside it is another rainy, gray day, the third in a row. Pat sees the stormy weather as a bad omen. And he adds another: “They’ve already executed two blacks — Williams and Taylor — it’s time for a white; the governor is under pressure to get a white.”

  Captain John Rabelais comes to the door where Pat and I are visiting. He is captain of Camp F and the death house falls under his jurisdiction. He asks Pat if he wants a lunch tra
y. Pat shakes his head no. The rules prohibit him from offering me one. I am drinking coffee and canned drinks from the machine in the lobby. I look up at this man, Rabelais, with the long, lined, hangdog face. In his 60’s I’d guess, and a paunch hangs over his belt, but unmistakably the brown eyes are friendly. He offers to get me a cup of coffee and I accept.

  Later in the day, when Pat is inside his cell to use the toilet, I get a chance to talk to Rabelais.

  “What’s a nun doing in a place like this?” he asks. “Shouldn’t you be teaching children? Do you know what this man has done, the kids he killed?”

  “What he did was evil. I don’t condone it,” I answer. “I just don’t see much sense in doing the same to him.”

  He looks at me and I look at him, and I am thinking that if circumstances were different, I could be sitting at this man’s kitchen table, eating jambalaya and swapping stories. I like the man.

  “You know how the Bible says ‘an eye for an eye,’ ” he says to me, but it’s like a gentle pitch in softball, slow and big and easy.

  “And you know,” I say back to him, “that Jesus called us to go beyond that kind of vengeance, not to pay back an ‘eye for an eye,’ not to return hate for hate.”

  He smiles, puts up his hand. “I ain’t gonna get into all this Bible quotin’ with no nun, ‘cuz I’m gonna lose.”

  Making my way back to Pat, I pause to talk awhile to the guard sitting inside the door. I comment on the rain and he looks outside and says, “Yup, just don’t seem to want to stop.” And I say something about how it must get pretty tiring just sitting here all day, and he couldn’t agree with that more. “Borrrrring,” he says, and he drops his voice and I bend down lower to him and he whispers, “I don’t particularly want to be here, you know what I mean, doing this, being part of this, but it’s part of the job. I got a wife and kids to support.”