Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  Who killed this man?

  Nobody.

  Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job — the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. DA’s are fond of saying that criminals “put themselves in the chair.” Shortly before the execution in Louisiana of a convicted murderer, Tim Baldwin, on September 10, 1984, a guard in the death house whispered to him, “You gotta understand, Tim, this is nothing personal.”

  I think of the telephone conversation I had with head of Corrections C. Paul Phelps shortly before Pat’s execution. How had he phrased it? He wanted the execution to be carried out with dignity. Now that Pat has been killed and I don’t have to steel myself to carry on, I realize that Phelps’s cool, professional tone had terrified me.

  Phelps is a “good, Catholic man.” So the people in Catholic circles of Baton Rouge describe him. And with a master’s degree in social work, he is reputed to be one of the more humane, progressive heads of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. I’ve heard that he has confronted members of the Louisiana legislature and argued against their lock-’em-up-throw-away-the-key solution to crime, urging instead more intensive efforts with first-time nonviolent offenders to keep them out of prison.2

  Yet he supervises executions.

  In fact, he’s the one who designed the process.

  I plan to stay in Baton Rouge a few days and Phelps’s office is here and I decide to talk to him. I can’t say exactly why. Maybe it’s to confront the cool professionalism. Maybe it’s because I know he’s a social worker and a “good, Catholic man.”

  Back at Mama’s house I call Phelps and he readily grants me an appointment.

  “You were the only wild card, among the witnesses, the only one I wasn’t sure of,” Phelps says to me as we meet in his office and begin to talk. He’s in his mid-fifties, a tall man, his hair thinning. He’s soft-spoken, reflective. On the bookshelf behind his desk is a photograph of his family.

  “You were the only one I hadn’t talked to face to face before the execution,” he says, and he tells me how he had inquired about me to find out what I was like and how I might react seeing someone executed.

  “I’ve been wondering about you, too,” I say. And then I tell him what it was like to watch a man being put to death in such a premeditated, inexorable process and ask what he thinks has been accomplished by this execution.

  “Zero,” he says, “absolutely nothing.” Nor does he think that executions prevent crime, because in his view punishment, to be effective, must be “swift, sure and fair.” As he sees it, the criminal justice system produces the death penalty “when it is to the advantage of the prosecution.” He explains how D.A.s weigh a number of factors — the cost of the trial, the evidence, the expertise of the legal defense arrayed against them — and he points to a recent example in Baton Rouge in which a judge sentenced a man who had shot and killed four people to two life sentences. “The cost of the trial would have been fantastic,” he says, “so the D.A. offered a plea bargain and the defendant was willing to accept two life sentences. But some people are not given a chance to choose, especially if they kill somebody important. If you kill an LSU professor or a priest or any other highly respectable citizen, you’ll probably go to trial and they’ll push for the death penalty, but not if the person you kill is a nobody. By its nature the criminal justice system will always be somewhat arbitrary.”

  “Yet you played your part,” I say. “You don’t seem to believe that the death penalty is morally right, but here you are lining up the witnesses, designing the protocol. Do you experience any conflict of conscience between your personal religious beliefs and what your job calls you to do? If Jesus Christ lived on earth today, would he supervise this process?”

  Predictably, he explains that he didn’t make the law, he’s only following the law and, in fact, doing his best to make the “process” as “humane” as possible. He says that if something is required by law and is the fonction of a fonction, then it’s not “optional.” The personnel in the DOC, he maintains, “don’t have to take any personal responsibility for what they are doing. It’s their job. They are told to do it. They are told how to do it. They are told how long it’s going to take and what you do when you do it. It’s like a drill, like an exercise, so they have no personal responsibility.”

  I ask him what happens to his personal convictions in this process, and he says that when he is called on to speak in public, he never speaks from his personal convictions.

  There it is again, I can’t help but notice — the severance of personal values from public duty — just like Governor Edwin Edwards, who felt moral repugnance for the death penalty but who nevertheless allowed it to be carried out.

  Phelps is so reasoned, so soft-spoken, so professional. My heart weighs a hundred pounds.

  I ask him whether it isn’t ethically dangerous to submerge personal convictions so that they have no bearing on one’s work. What, I ask, if the law which a government uses to legitimize killing is itself morally wrong, as in Nazi Germany? Aren’t there, I argue, some rights fundamental to human beings — such as the right not to be tortured or killed — that everyone, including governments, must respect? Doesn’t the moral foundation of a society erode if its government is allowed to treat these fundamental, nonnegotiable rights as some sort of privilege, which they take on themselves to dispense for good behavior or withdraw for bad behavior? I point out that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which unequivocally endorses the right of every human being not to be killed and not to be subjected to torture or to cruel and degrading punishment — and the United States signed that declaration.3 If a policy or law is morally wrong and we know it’s wrong, aren’t we bound in conscience to oppose it? I ask him.

  He says that if he’s opposed to doing any part of his job he should quit or refuse to accept the job in the first place.

  Which I know is true, and the moral complexity deepens because a caring and intelligent man like Phelps can accomplish much good in this position. The head of Corrections sets the tone and affects the policies of what goes on in the prisons; and in Louisiana, which incarcerates such a huge number of its citizens, a man like Phelps goes a long, long way.

  I ask him to tell me about the execution process that he has designed, and he shows me a copy of Department Regulation Number 10–25, issued April 6, 1981. I glance at the document and notice headings: Purpose, Responsibility, Legal Authority, Incarceration Prior to Execution, Media Access, Time and Place of Execution …

  “From a personal standpoint it is very, very bizarre to design a process like this,” he says, “because you find yourself approaching an execution the same way you approach putting on a rodeo or any other special event.” Before designing the process, he says, he made field trips to talk to corrections officials in other states that use the electric chair, and he engaged the services of an electrical engineer — “he worked for free, he refused to be paid” — to devote his attention to “the technical aspects of the apparatus.”

  Inwardly I translate the terms, technical aspects of the apparatus, and I think of how silent it was there in the room as the guard screwed the rubber-coated wire to the top of the metal cap on Pat’s shaved head.

  Setting up the “process,” Phelps explains, involved hiring an executioner.

  “We hired a man, an electrician, who filled out a civil service application for the job. Frank Blackburn, the warden at Angola at the time, interviewed the prospective candidate for the job in some depth because we obviously wanted somebody who was screwed down pretty tight and very, very firm in his convictions, not just someone with a morbid interest. We were looking for — this may sound strange — somebody professional. We didn’t want a mafia-type executioner.” Blackburn, he says, gave him a name, “Sam Jones,” to p
reserve his anonymity. (Sam Jones had been governor in Louisiana in 1941 when the method of execution changed from hanging to electrocution.) He agreed to be paid $400 per execution. It was a verbal agreement, not written.

  I make a mental note of the anonymity of the executioner and the reluctance to sign a contract specifying fee for service. I log it alongside something that Phelps mentioned earlier: that the electrician who wired the chair refused to be paid — the intuitive recognition that this is “blood money,” this is “death for hire.”

  The fact that anonymity is granted to the executioner intrigues me. I’ve heard that in Utah, when Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad, blanks were inserted into one of the rifles so that those firing the guns would not know for certain if they killed the man. No doubt, the uncertainty helps diffuse responsibility.

  Phelps says that for him, the most “troublesome” aspect of the “process” has been the selection of witnesses. With the resumption of executions, some victims’ families asked if they might witness, and he says he “pondered” this a long time but “couldn’t think of a reason why they shouldn’t. Our position in the DOC is that I am not the ‘keeper of the morals’ but merely the enforcer of the law, and if there is no legal reason barring a victim’s family, I see no reason to deny them.”

  Phelps says that he emphasizes to all witnesses — victims’ families included — that during an execution there must be “no emotional outbursts, no obscenities uttered, no undignified behavior of any kind.” They have designed a process, he says, that “protects everyone’s rights,” including those of the one being executed. “They have a family too. A circus atmosphere is not in anyone’s interest.”

  I am listening to all this and I keep picturing Pat’s dead body in the chair, the fingers of his right hand curling upward, the doctor’s light shining into vacant eyes.

  I say that I disagree that the rights of the man being killed are protected because the witnesses to his death are expected to be polite.

  “Pat Sonnier was tortured, Mr., Phelps,” I say. “I’m not sure what he felt physically when the nineteen hundred volts hit him, but certainly he agonized emotionally and psychologically — preparing to die, anticipating it, dreaming about it. Amnesty International defines torture as an extreme physical and mental assault on a person who has been rendered defenseless. That is what happened to Patrick Sonnier, isn’t it, Mr. Phelps?”

  Phelps nods. “People these days want revenge, and that’s what revenge is — ‘eye for an eye,’ pain for pain, torture for torture.”

  I can tell he doesn’t agree with this bent toward revenge. I know that at heart he’s a social worker.

  “Will you attend an execution and witness for yourself the end result of this process?” I ask.

  “Never in a million years,” he says.

  Which doesn’t surprise me. I have a hunch that if this man were to remove the bureaucratic gauze and see with his own eyes this killing laid bare, he’d quit this job.

  I rise to leave and reach out to take his hand. I thank him for his time. Outwardly I’m poised but inwardly I’m devastated. It’s the fact that a man as obviously good as this is participating in this process that is most disturbing. Phelps is the fourth public official I have met — before him the governor, the warden, the chairperson of the Pardon Board — who, despite his personal reservations about the moral rightness of state executions, nevertheless plays his part in carrying them out. It all seems so intractable. I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time — after how many executions? — people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year. In time, perhaps, people will realize that executions do not deter violent crime.

  Pat is dead now, I tell myself, and I know that I did everything I could for him, and there is peace in that. But for me there will be no more involvement with death-row inmates. The end. No more death-row pen pals. No more visits. Except Eddie. I’m the only steady, caring lifeline that he’s got. I can see his life solidifying. In the prison welding shop he’s becoming a productive worker, and his disciplinary write-ups have ceased.

  My sister, Mary Ann, has agreed to go with me to St. Martinville to see the Sonniers and to deliver Pat’s possessions. The clothes are all washed and dried and smelling clean and folded neatly in the boxes — gray sweat pants and white T-shirts, jeans, socks, underwear. It’s about a two-hour drive to St. Martinville from Baton Rouge. We leave in late morning and stop for a sandwich in a little snack shop once we get there. Pat has been dead for four days now.

  We drive up to Gladys Sonnier’s little project apartment. It’s a small one-story red brick building. It has a small yard. The grass has been cut recently. She grows a few vegetables. There’s a heavy, sweet smell in the air. Must be ligustrum bushes nearby. I take a deep breath. The last time I was here I was with Millard and Pat was still alive. Houses, when you look at them, always look different when you know someone associated with them has died. This little red brick house looks different now.

  When I greet Gladys Sonnier, she hugs me briefly, then turns away, wiping her eyes. There are deep circles under her eyes and her body seems leaden, sagging. She’s barely sixty but she looks very, very old.

  In her kitchen Gladys has brewed a fresh pot of coffee for us. Her hands shake as she hands me my cup. She asks us to serve ourselves. Marie, her daughter, is here, and Joan, her sister, and Glenda Ann, Joan’s daughter.

  Glenda and Marie express their distress about how the press “misrepresented” their family. Glenda tells me that one story said the family had “refused” Pat’s body and so the body had to be “turned over to the nuns.” Marie says another story said Pat’s family was “too poor” to bury him. “We would have found a way to bury him if he had only asked us,” she says. And Glenda says that the media said there was no one from the family with him at Angola at the end, “but they don’t say that we weren’t there because Pat wanted it that way.” And she tells how she had written Pat and offered to come and be with him in the death house and so had her mother, but he had refused, saying he didn’t want to “put us through it.” And Marie says that one newspaper article said that the flowers on Pat’s coffin had been donated by the funeral home, but it was the family who had bought the wreath. “And one account mentioned Eddie as the only family member present at the funeral Mass. They didn’t even mention that there were fifteen of us there and it was all family members who were the pallbearers,” says Marie.

  “Will you write a letter to the editor and present our side?” Marie asks me.

  I promise them that I will, right away, and I’ll send them a copy.

  I tell Mrs. Sonnier about Pat’s last moments and how strongly he had urged me to convey his love to her. I tell her how Bishop Ott had remembered her in his prayers at the funeral Mass. I am very brief. I know she can’t take very much. Then I talk about Eddie. I suggest that if she wants to visit Eddie, I could drive her to Angola. Transportation is a problem for her. Mrs. Sonnier shuts her eyes tight and shakes her head from side to side and says that she doesn’t know if she can ever “set foot inside that place again.” Maybe, after some time has passed, perhaps we can talk about it again, I suggest.

  The boxes of Pat’s things have been sitting on the floor and I mention them now, but Mrs. Sonnier turns away from the boxes, and Marie offers to sort through the clothes to see who might be able to use them.

  On the morning after the execution, Mrs. Sonnier tells us, she had found a dismembered cat on her front porch.

  “People are so cruel,” she says.

  I think of the Bourques and the LeBlancs. Lloyd LeBlanc, I hear, cannot sit behind teenagers in church because he cannot bear to look at the back of their heads.

  Back now in Baton Rouge I pack my things. It is time to return to Hope House. Sister Lilianne has been carrying a double load, coveri
ng for me at the Adult Learning Center. Time to head back. Am I the same person I was before? I had learned as a child from my Catholic catechism that some sacraments like baptism leave an “indelible” mark on the soul, a mark that can never be erased. Does witnessing an execution also leave an “indelible” mark?

  The thought of working with students appeals immensely to me. I picture the large classroom at Hope House and how the breeze ruffles the curtains as it comes through the tall windows, the mimosa trees blooming outside. It will be good to be in the flow of normal life again. I am glad to step out of this surreal landscape. I figure I will never be going to death row or an execution chamber again.

  Back in St. Thomas a stack of newspaper clippings and letters is waiting for me on my bed. Sister Lilianne says, as she helps me unpack, that the letters to the editor about Pat’s funeral in the Times-Picayune have been running “hot and heavy.” The Picayune had run the AP story on Pat’s burial with the headline: “Executed Killer Blessed with Burial for the Elite,” and the article had said that this executed murderer “received in death what few Catholics ever achieve — a funeral Mass conducted by a bishop and burial within the shadow of graves of other bishops.” There is no mistaking the thrust of the article — Pat Sonnier was buried as a hero.

  Over the next six weeks that becomes a theme of outrage in the letters to the editor of the Picayune and the Daily Iberian and in personal letters sent to me:

  My husband and I have supported the church all our lives, sent our children to Catholic schools, and what happens? We see a criminal getting buried in the place reserved for nuns and bishops!