Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  We know we have our work cut out for us, aware as we are that the vast majority of U.S. citizens say they favor capital punishment. A 1966 Gallup Poll showed 42 percent of the population in favor of the death penalty; a 1991 CNN/Gallup Poll showed support at 76 percent.18 Clearly, the public’s fear of escalating violent crime has fueled the recent fervor for capital punishment. Between 1960 and 1976, the number of reported murders in the United States more than doubled — from 9,060 to 18,780 — and between 1960 and 1980 the rate of “index crimes”* listed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation rose by more than 230 percent.19

  Despite high pro-death-penalty sentiment, however, public support seems stronger in the abstract than in the concrete. Most juries, for example, faced with actually imposing death in capital trials, choose life imprisonment, even in “Death Belt” states;20 and a growing number of public opinion surveys show that it is protection from criminals rather than executions that most citizens want. A 1986 Gallup Poll reveals that while 70 percent say they favor the death penalty, if they are given new data that show that capital punishment does not deter crime and are offered the alternative of life imprisonment without parole, support for executions drops to 43 percent.21

  In Furman, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that “informed public opinion” about the death penalty was, in fact, anything but informed: “… the American people are largely unaware of the information critical to a judgment on the morality of the death penalty … if they were better informed they would consider it shocking, unjust and unacceptable.”

  In 1975 Austin Sarat and Neil Vidmar, fellows at Yale Law School, empirically tested the “Marshall hypothesis” and found it to be correct. Their study found most subjects ignorant of the way the death penalty was imposed and of its effects and less inclined to favor it once they received even minimal information about it.22

  Soon after the meeting in Julian Murray’s office I find myself looking around the room at a Hope House staff meeting. There are about sixteen people on the staff now, many engaged in adult education. But no one in the entire state of Louisiana is working full-time to talk to the public about the death penalty.23

  I will do this.

  The decision unfolds like a rose.

  I ask to meet with the regional coordinator of my congregation. If I am to devote myself to this work, I need the confirmation of my religious community. They readily give their blessing.

  My decision to work for abolition of the death penalty does not include offering myself as spiritual adviser to another death-row inmate. But one day in October, six months after Pat Sonnier’s execution, Millard Farmer comes over for lunch and asks for my help. He says he is representing two death-row inmates in Louisiana and he would like me to become their spiritual adviser.

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “Because they are facing death and your care will make a great difference to them.”

  It takes only a moment to answer. I cannot protect myself by refusing to go back to the horror of death row when here before me is this man going back again and again, and he is not thinking of protecting himself.

  “I’ll do it,” I say to Millard. “But only one person at a time. I couldn’t handle two. Who needs me first?”

  “His name is Robert Lee Willie,” Millard tells me.

  *Since February 1990, executions in South Africa have been suspended.

  *”Index crimes” are eight offenses used by the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the FBI to measure U.S. crime rates: murder, aggravated assault, rape, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Millard fills me in on Robert Willie’s crime. On May 28, 1980, he and Joseph Vaccaro killed eighteen-year-old Faith Hathaway. The young victim’s mother and stepfather live nearby in Covington. The stepfather is named Vernon Harvey.

  My heart sinks. I have heard of Vernon Harvey. Many people in the New Orleans area know of him. In recent months he has given interviews to the press, saying that he can’t wait to see Robert Willie “fry,” that he can’t wait to see the “smoke fly off his body.” He has said that he and his family and friends will go to the gates of the prison on the night of the execution to show support for capital punishment. Not visiting the Bourques and the LeBlancs had been a grave mistake, one I am determined not to make again, and I know I must reach out to victims’ families even if they reject my offer, and that includes Vernon Harvey. I shudder. It’s frightening to picture how Harvey might respond to someone who opposes Willie’s execution. Who knows if such an encounter might push him over an emotional edge? What if he gets violent?

  Millard explains that Willie’s case is far along in the courts. There may not be much time. I decide I’d better write Robert right away. But I think, maybe he won’t want a spiritual adviser, maybe he’ll turn down my offer. Now, there’s a thought … which, I readily admit, brings a feeling of relief. I had reached out to Pat Sonnier not knowing what to expect. Now I know.

  Millard tells me about the crime. It sounds straight out of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

  Willie and Vaccaro had gone on an eight-day rampage that left Faith Hathaway dead, another teenage girl raped, and her boyfriend paralyzed. Shortly after the killing of Faith Hathaway, Willie and Vaccaro had kidnapped a teenage couple and taken turns raping the young woman in the back seat of the car as they drove across several states. The eighteen-year-old Hathaway girl had been brutally raped and stabbed and left to die in the woods.

  Prior to these crimes, Willie had been involved in two other murders: the drowning death in 1978 of Dennis Buford Hemby of Missouri in a scuffle over drugs, and the shooting death in 1979 of Louisiana Parish Deputy Sergeant Louis Wagner II. In the Wagner murder, Willie had been a participant with several others in a robbery which occasioned the confrontation with the young deputy, although even the law enforcement officials agreed that Willie had not fired the fatal shot.

  “Robert’s had a long, long history of run-ins with the law from an early age,” Millard says. “Plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, you know what I mean? He takes pride in being tough. He even smart-mouthed the judge at his trial.”

  Millard explains that after they were arrested for the kidnapping of the young couple, Willie and Vaccaro pled guilty in federal court and were each sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. However, Louisiana authorities, concerned that federal jurisdiction would preempt state jurisdiction and allow Willie and Vaccaro to serve life sentences in a federal prison, thereby escaping Louisiana’s electric chair, had prevailed in getting Willie and Vaccaro to stand trial in state court.

  “The two were tried in the same courthouse at the same time, on separate floors,” Millard says. “Robert got death and Vaccaro got life. Both had indigent defenders.”

  Mentally I’m doing a body count while Millard is talking. Three people dead, one paralyzed, a young girl traumatized by abduction and rape … No wonder Vernon Harvey is outraged. How could he not be? My heart freezes at the prospect of a relationship with someone who sounds as if he might be criminally insane.

  Millard, reading my face, says, “I know. These are terrible crimes, and God knows I don’t condone them, but you’ll see when you meet him — there’s a child sitting inside this tough, macho dude.”

  The next day I write to Robert Lee Willie. I tell him not to feel under pressure to say yes, but if he would like me to be his spiritual adviser I’m here for him. It is a sober, contained letter. No picture of me on a pony. No friendly enthusiasms.

  “Sure, come on,” Willie’s pert letter says in reply just one week later. “Never been inclined much to church and religion but I wouldn’t at all mind the visits.” His handwriting is a tender scrawl and some of the words are misspelled.

  But I find out from Bill Quigley, who has recently met Frank C. Blackburn, the new warden under the Edwards administration, that some “pretty bad things” are being said about me at the prison — that I was “emotionally involved” with Pat Son
nier and that I had caused “a lot of trouble” with the “fainting episode.” Bill suggests! that I go to see Blackburn to talk things over.

  “The way things stand now,” Bill says, “I think he’ll oppose your visit with any inmate.”

  My heart tightens. I have never been accused of anything like this before. My defensive juices rise. I feel my neck redden. It makes me yearn for earlier, simpler ministries when I taught children, coached the eighth-grade volleyball team, conducted Bible classes, counseled novices. I hate conflict. True, I have my principles. But while part of me raises the lance and charges into the fray, another part frantically looks for shelter. E. M. Forster’s observation, uttered when he was a child, says it for me exactly: “I’d rather be a coward than brave. People hurt you when you’re brave.” I am not looking forward to confronting this warden.

  Bill tells me that prisoners have a constitutional right to the spiritual adviser of their choice. It’s a good thing to know, because it soon becomes evident that the prison wants to block women from serving as spiritual advisers to death-row inmates. Sister Lilianne Flavin, my friend and coworker, has recently been denied her request to counsel a death-row inmate. I find out that the two Catholic priest chaplains at Angola are the ones seeking to block me and other women from death-row prisoners. One of them has reportedly said that I was so “naive” and “emotionally involved” with Sonnier that I was “blind” to the fact that Pat may have “lost his soul” because he had not received the last rites of the Church during the final hours of his life. Women, they are saying, are just too “emotional” to relate to death-row inmates.

  I recall very clearly Pat’s response in the last hours, when I reminded him that the priest was there for him if he wished to receive the last rites. He said that Millard and Bill and I were there with him — we who had shown him love and fought hard to save his life. Our love, he said, was his “sacrament.” And he said that he had already confessed his sins and received communion, and he didn’t see the point of “doing it all over again.”

  I run the fingers of my conscience along the fabric of this accusation and feel for the hard knots and tears that guilt brings. Had I been blind, naive? Had I jeopardized a man’s spiritual well-being?

  No. The fabric feels smooth and whole and sound.

  I find myself searching for an explanation for the chaplains’ antagonistic behavior. Maybe they feel threatened because Pat had asked me and not them to be with him at the end. The movies always show a “man of the cloth” raising his hand in blessing to the mar on the scaffold. Maybe they feel that if they allow me in, others will follow and they will be displaced.

  I call the prison and make an appointment to see the warden.

  Driving to the prison, I picture once again the warden’s office. I remember its quiet businesslike atmosphere. Now, with a change in governors, Maggio has been replaced by Edwards’s appointee, Frank C. Blackburn. Tom Dybdahl at the Prison Coalition has told me that Blackburn seems to be a decent man. He’s a psychologist and lay minister in the Methodist Church and has come out of retirement to take on the job of warden.

  Blackburn rises from behind his large desk to greet me as I come into the office. He is short, stocky, in his early sixties with a square face and a thick gray mustache. He is smoking a cigar. I sit in one of the brown leather chairs opposite him and he sits behind his desk. He starts right in: “I’ve been hearing some disturbing things about you.”

  “That I was emotionally involved with Patrick Sonnier and so did not fulfill my function as spiritual adviser?”

  “That’s right. And so emotionally distraught that you fainted in the death house and caused a lot of commotion for the personnel.”

  I’m ready for this, sure of my moral ground. I let the warden say what’s on his mind.

  He has a heavy responsibility as warden, he explains to me, and doesn’t “relish” having to carry out executions, but it “comes with the job,” and one responsibility which he takes “very, very seriously” is that condemned inmates get good spiritual counsel and a chance to “get straight with God” before they die. In fact, on becoming warden he initiated a seminar for death-row inmates to be conducted by “a top-notch Christian preacher.” Naturally, he explains, no inmates are forced to attend, but the opportunity is there for them if they want it.

  I say that the way I understand it, the Constitution provides a prisoner with the right to a spiritual adviser of his choice. Blackburn agrees with me, adding, “The only way we can bar a spiritual adviser from the prison is if we deem them a threat to prison security.”

  I’m relieved that we see the constitutional right of inmates the same way.

  I say, “I am, as you know, completely opposed to the death penalty, and when I leave this prison I work for its abolition, but inside this prison I abide by your rules. I never bring contraband in or take contraband out. I am not a threat to prison security.”

  I am saying all this and he is looking at me and listening and taking long, slow puffs on his cigar. He seems a reasonable man. He does not interrupt when I speak.

  I tell him that, yes, I cared for Patrick Sonnier. Despite his terrible crime, he was a human being and deserved to be treated with dignity and, yes, I was emotionally distraught watching him die. “Who wouldn’t be,” I ask him, “watching someone killed in such a cold, calculated way right in front of your eyes? You and the others are part of a process that shields you from natural, human emotions. The raw truth is that you’re killing a fellow human being whose hands and feet are tied, and who wants to admit he’s doing that?”

  There is silence for a short moment, and then Blackburn says, “We can’t let feelings dominate our actions or we couldn’t carry out our responsibilities. I keep close tabs on the guards who work on death row because they have the closest daily contact with the inmates. There have been a few who have let this thing get next to them. When this happens, I offer them an assignment in another part of the prison.”

  I challenge him: “But you’re a Christian, a minister in your church, a man who professes to follow the way of life that Jesus taught. Yet you are the one who, with a nod of your head, signals the executioner to kill a man. Do you really believe that Jesus, who taught us not to return hate for hate and evil for evil and whose dying words were, ‘Father, forgive them,’ would participate in these executions? Would Jesus pull the switch?”

  The blue-gray smoke from the cigar is intensifying around Blackburn in a cloud. I am beginning to feel as if I’m talking to the Wizard of Oz.

  “Nope,” he says, “I don’t experience any contradiction with my Christianity. Never thought about it too much, really. Executions are the law, and Christians are supposed to observe the law, and that’s that.” And then he adds, “My wife, she’s a good Christian woman, and she supports the death penalty, and believe me, you can’t find a better Christian woman than my wife.”

  How is it, I wonder, that the mandate and example of Jesus, so clearly urging compassion and nonviolence, could so quickly become accommodated? Over the centuries “lawful authorities” — supposedly in God’s name and with God’s blessing — have hanged, shot, guillotined, drawn and quartered, burned, gassed, electrocuted, lethally injected — criminals. Over the years the crimes meriting death might change, but, for the most part, the blessing of God on retaliatory punishment has been unquestioned. Of course, those who justify retaliation can cite as authority numerous passages in the Bible, where divine vengeance is meted out to guilty and innocent alike: the Great Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the slaying of the firstborn sons of the Egyptians (God’s “lesson” to a recalcitrant Pharoah), to mention just a few examples. Even the Pauline injunction “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay” can be interpreted as a command and a promise — the command to restrain individual impulses toward revenge in exchange for the assurance that God will be only too pleased to handle the grievance — in spades. That God wants, to “get even” like the rest of us does
not seem to be in question.1

  One intractable problem, however, is that divine vengeance, (barring natural disasters, so-called acts of God) can only be interpreted and exacted by human beings. Very human beings.

  I can’t accept that.

  First, I can’t accept that God has fits of rage and goes about trucking in retaliation. Second, I can’t accept that any group of human beings is trustworthy enough to mete out so ultimate and irreversible a punishment as death. And, third, I can’t accept that it’s permissible to kill people provided you “prepare” them with good spiritual counsel to “meet their Maker.” Camus had argued that for people who believe in life after death, capital punishment is more easily rationalized, since death is a mere “temporary” punishment (only eternal life is considered final). But there is, Camus maintained, one, firm, unbreachable solidarity that human beings have — solidarity against death and suffering. On this common ground, he believed, all human beings — religious or atheist — must unite (pp. 222-225).

  The swath of violence cut by Christians across the centuries is long and wide and bloodstained: inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, persecutions of Jewish “Christ-killers.” Now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, U.S. government officials kill citizens with dispatch with scarcely a murmur of resistance from the Christian citizenry. In fact, surveys of public opinion show that those who profess Christianity tend to favor capital punishment slightly more than the overall population — Catholics more than Protestants.2 True, in recent years leadership bodies of most Christian denominations have issued formal statements denouncing the death penalty,3 but generally that opposition has yet to be translated into aggressive pastoral initiatives to educate clergy and membership on capital punishment. And the U.S. Catholic Bishops in their “Statement on Capital Punishment,” while strongly condemning the death penalty because of the “unfair and discriminatory” manner in which it is imposed, its continuance of the “cycle of violence,” and its fundamental disregard for the “unique worth and dignity of each person,” nevertheless uphold the “right” of the state to kill.4 But if we are to have a society which protects its citizens from torture and murder, then torture and murder must be off-limits to everyone. No one, for any reason, may be permitted to torture and kill — and that includes government. Before prisons existed, executions might have been justified as society’s only means of defense against crazed, violent killers. But today in the United States, following the example of other modern industrialized countries, we can incapacitate violent criminals through long-term imprisonment.