Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  I look into the face of Elizabeth, Robert’s mother, middle-aged, in blue polyester pants and a white sweater. Her hair is short and sitting rather flat on her head. She has deep circles under her eyes. I had met her briefly a few days ago when Marcia and I helped her prepare for this hearing. I put my arms around her. She says, her voice quivering, “I don’t know what I’m going to say. I just don’t know what I can say to these people.” Marcia and I sit on either side of her. “Don’t worry about the words,” I tell her. “You’re here. You’re his mother and you’re here, that’s everything.” But the words don’t seem to help much. She smokes one cigarette after another. Her hands are trembling.

  I leave Marcia and Liz with her and make my way over to the Harveys. “So, we meet again,” I say to Vernon as I shake his hand. Elizabeth looks pretty in her long-sleeved blouse and skirt. Vernon has on a tan polyester suit, a white shirt and a dark tie. I go with small talk — the drive, the weather. Vernon points slyly toward the Board members (there are three black members of the board and two whites) and says, “They outnumber us, but maybe we’ll still win.” He lowers his voice when he says this, using that confidential tone that people use with a trusted friend.

  Remembering Marsellus, the black chairperson, and the way he had voted with the others to uphold Pat’s death sentence, I tell Vernon that I don’t think the race of the Board members will make a difference.

  I see Robert, legs and hands cuffed, coming into the room with guards on either side. His hair is nicely combed. No black knitted hat. Even with the leg irons scraping across the tile floor, he has that cocky spring in his walk. He is smiling. I tell Vernon maybe I’ll get to see them afterward, and I move back to Robert’s “side.”

  The guards escort Robert up to the defense table and remove his handcuffs. They remain standing nearby. For the moment, John has stepped away and Robert is at the table alone. I go up to him and greet him and ask if he’d like a cup of coffee. He nods and says, “Thank you, ma’am,” and I bring the coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

  The prosecution takes its place at its table; two men, District Attorney Marion Farmer and Assistant William Alford, Jr.

  The Board members begin taking their places at the front table. Two television cameras from local stations are mounted on rolling tripods on the side aisles. Chairperson Marsellus announces the procedures and rules. He says that there is no need to give lengthy speeches because the Board has received copies of the presentations and has already studied them. He encourages everyone to be brief and to the point.

  John Craft goes first. He says that despite the court proceedings, “serious issues remain unsolved, which cast doubt upon the constitutionality and fairness of the proceedings” which have sentenced Robert Willie to death. And then he ticks them off, every one of them I’ve read and studied in the writs and appeals: the inept attorney, the prejudicial pretrial publicity, the failure of the defense to present documentation of Robert’s substance abuse during his sentencing trials. He adds that to his knowledge he knows of no other prisoner who has been turned over by federal authorities for state execution. He ends with a quote from Dostoyevsky, that famous quote about how a society is judged not by how it treats its upstanding citizens, but by how it treats its criminals.

  Robert’s mother is called to testify. She comes to the table and sits by her son and does not look at him. He doesn’t look at her either; nor does she touch him. They both look at a spot on the table in front of them. The television moves in. Cameras flash. Anyone with an eye for drama knows this is a special moment: the mother pleading for her son. But Elizabeth can only blurt out a few words. She says that Robert had had a hard life, that … She stops and her eyes fill with tears and she puts her head down into her hands and tries to continue, “but he was a good boy,” and bursts into irretrievable sobs. Her head is down and Robert’s head is down, and John Craft gets up and takes Robert’s mother by the arm and leads her out of the room. I know that John needs to be with Robert, so I get up and go out to be with Elizabeth. All I can do is hold her in my arms and let her sob. She keeps saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” and I try to comfort her, saying that I am sure her tears are a far more eloquent testimony for her son than any words could ever be.

  When I return to the room, Robert is already into his statement. He is sticking strictly to what he has prepared. His voice is calm and clear. His arms lie alongside either side of his typed pages. Sometimes he looks up toward the faces of the Board, but mostly he looks down at his typed pages.

  Listening to Robert, I struggle to stave off fierce feelings of futility. Maybe by some miracle the Board will vote to spare Robert’s life. Please, God, help me, I pray. My heart is pounding in my ears. I am the last from the “red chairs” to speak.

  I sit next to Robert and put my hand on his blue-denimed arm stretched out on the table. I bring the microphone close. The same feeling of strength and calmness that I had in the death house with Pat comes upon me now. I take a deep breath and look up at the five faces. One day, I feel sure, all the death instruments in this country — electric chairs and gas chambers and lethal injection needles — will be housed behind velvet ropes in museums. But not now.

  “I come before this Board of Pardons today to plead for the life of Robert Willie. You’ve met me before. I was spiritual adviser to Elmo Patrick Sonnier, and I came before you last spring to plead for his life. He is dead now, executed on April 5, 1984.”

  I speak in a quiet, steady stream.

  I tell them about Pat’s death in the electric chair, the result of a decision made like this one today. I tell them of his funeral and his devastated family. I tell them of the guards in the death house who pulled me aside to say that they didn’t want to be part of the killing but it was part of their job and they had families to support.

  I tell them about my visit to the Harveys and how they have shared their terrible pain with me, a pain and a loss that no parent should have to bear, and that in no way do I condone or excuse the violence that has been done to Faith Hathaway and her parents.

  I tell them that yes, Robert Willie is responsible for his actions and needs to pay society for his deed, and that he should live in a restricted prison environment so that he cannot hurt other people again.

  I know, I say, that when the prosecuting attorney stands before them he will say that the courts of appeal have scrutinized Robert’s case and found no evidence of ineffective counsel, but, if we are honest, we must admit that in our courts there are two systems of justice — one for the rich, who can afford expert counsel, and one for people like Robert Willie — and that is why only poor people will ever appear before this board. I ask them to consider that if their own son or daughter had received the kind of defense Robert received, would they not protest strenuously? Will you dare, I ask, to condemn the unfairness inherent in the judicial system which metes out one brand of justice for the rich and one for the poor? Or (and I know this is the heart), as a body whose mandate is to dispense compassion, will you simply stand behind the court’s decision and approve this man’s death? I trace for them the bureaucratic process designed to distance them from the killing about to take place, and I call on them to take personal responsibility for the role they are playing in the killing of this man if they uphold his death sentence.

  When I finish speaking, Mr. Marsellus says that I have to understand that the Board members have not made the death-penalty law, nor do they enforce it. They only offer a recommendation to the governor and in no way can they be held personally responsible for anyone’s execution.

  “What would happen, Mr. Marsellus,” I ask, “if each time a condemned man appeared before you, the members of this board began recommending life, not death? What if you shared with the governor that you find the death penalty so morally troubling that you cannot bring yourself any longer to give your vote of approval to these executions? What would happen then, Mr. Marsellus?”

  Some members of the Board look fidgety. Th
ere is the rustling of papers. Marsellus declares a short break before the state presents its case.

  I rise from the table to go back to my place.

  “Thank you, ma’am, for what you said,” Robert says, looking up at me.

  The prosecution’s presentation is much shorter than ours. Very short. Very effective. And in part, very true — that Robert lacks remorse and tends to blame everybody but himself.

  Marion Farmer reviews the heinous details of Faith Hathaway’s murder. He shows the Board the pictures of her nude, decomposed body and the results of the autopsy report. He says that Robert Willie has done many, many horrible things but that he always blames his accomplice or his lawyers. He says that Robert is arrogant and has shown no remorse, and that even here today he is still arrogant, saying that he is not here to beg for his life. He enumerates all of the courts that have reviewed Robert’s case and points out that he had not one but two sentencing trials, and that both times the juries saw fit to sentence him to death. He asks the Board to give Robert the same consideration that he gave Faith Hathaway when he and Vaccaro led her nude into a cave and raped her and stabbed her seventeen times in the throat and then let her bleed to death and rot in the woods. “Robert Willie has basically given up his right to live on this earth,” Farmer says. “He did these things. He should point the finger to himself. It was his own choice.”

  Then Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey speak. Vernon says that all the chances Robert Willie has been given in the past have been futile, that he deserves to die for what he did, not only to Faith, but to … and he begins to cry. Elizabeth tells the Board that it has been a long, hard four years, waiting on the endless court proceedings and appeals. It’s been, she says, a long wait for justice, but now, finally, if the Board offers no interference, now at last, justice can be done. Her daughter’s life was cut off while she was still young and she never really got much of a chance to live it, never got the chance to join the Army, which she had planned to do because she loved her country and felt she had a debt to pay for the freedoms and way of life she enjoyed here. She concludes by saying, “Please don’t let him live to take another life because even after taking Faith’s life, he tried again. There is really only one way we can be absolutely sure that he will never kill again. I wish my daughter was here to further enjoy her life, but she isn’t. I would like Mr. Robert Lee Willie’s life to end here.”

  The hearing has lasted about two hours. Marsellus announces that the Board will retire to make its decision.

  I know it won’t take them long.

  After twenty minutes of deliberation Marsellus announces the decision to Robert: “The Pardon Board unanimously recommends to the governor that your sentence stand.”

  Robert gives a cocky smile when he hears the verdict. The guards come up right away to put the handcuffs on, ready to take him back to his cell. When I go up to him, he says in a whisper, “I think it was Mrs. Harvey’s patriotic speech about America there at the end that did me in. I think I was winnin’ before that little part of her speech.”

  I am amazed at his naïveté. He thought he had a chance.

  When he leaves the room to return to his cell, he looks around and smiles and walks with his jaunty little walk.

  His mother sits in a heap in the chair.

  I look across the room to the Harveys. Friends are patting them on the back, hugging them.

  I talk with Elizabeth, Robert’s mother, for a while and confer with John Craft about next steps, and when I turn to leave, I see that the Harveys have already gone.

  A Conversation with Howard Marsellus

  On September 12, 1991, I finally get a telephone call through to the home of Howard Marsellus in Rowlett, Texas. It has taken some doing to find him. I had heard that he had moved to Texas, but I wasn’t sure where, and the only leads I had were not panning out. But I read an article about Marsellus in the prison magazine, The Angolite,5 and through it I have been able to locate him. I ask him what he thinks now, in retrospect, of his role on the Louisiana Pardon Board. He seems eager to talk.

  A little more than a year ago he was released from the federal correctional institution in Fort Worth, where he served eighteen months for accepting bribes while serving as chairperson of the Louisiana Pardon Board.6

  In 1986 a state undercover agent had caught him accepting a five-thousand-dollar payoff for an Angola inmate’s pardon. The Angolite’s article recounts how he is trying to reconstruct his life and get back into public-school education, where he had worked for twenty-eight years (successfully, I hear) before his appointment as chair of the Pardon Board by Governor Edwin Edwards. It’s hard now, he says, to get a job. It’s been a little more than a year since his incarceration and he still hasn’t gotten work. “So, I’m still paying for what I did,” he says. “When people hear I’ve been to prison, they get scared off, especially education supervisors and administrators.”

  I think of the Board members in the sleek pale-yellow Cadillac pulling up to the entrance of the penitentiary before Robert Willie’s hearing. I think of the conversation that Millard Farmer, Joe Nursey, and I had with Marsellus before Pat Sonnier’s hearing and how he had so readily agreed with us that the death penalty was biased against poor people and people of color and then voted to uphold Pat’s death sentence. (During Marsellus’s term on the Board every request for clemency of condemned murderers was denied.)

  I think of the last words I heard this man say to me at the end of my testimony at Robert Willie’s hearing: that the members of the Board hadn’t made the law and they were not personally responsible for this man, or any man, dying in the electric chair.

  Marsellus now talks about how good it is to sleep at night with a clean conscience, how blessed he is to have a wife and two daughters who love him, and how glad he is to be out of all the politics, all the corruption.

  “I did it. I was wrong. I confessed to my crime and I paid for it,” he says.

  The Angolite article told how in 1984 Marsellus had been considering a bid for the state legislature when a “high-ranking” politician in the Edwards administration had offered him a deal: if he would agree not to run for the legislative seat, he would be appointed chairman of a top administrative board. It was well understood, he explains to me, that accepting chairmanship of the Pardon Board required something in return from him. That something was “loyalty.” He said he had promised that he would be a “team player.”

  I tell him that I had heard that while on the Board he had once asked to witness an execution. Was that true?

  “Yes,” he says “Tim Baldwin. I asked to witness his execution [September 10, 1984]. I wanted to see what we as a board were voting to uphold, and I had grave misgivings about Baldwin’s guilt.”

  Bill Quigley had presented Baldwin’s case before the Board. I had been at that hearing and watched Bill ask a number of questions about Baldwin’s case that pointed to his innocence. Bill had listed each argument in neat black letters on large white charts (he is a teacher as well as an attorney), and after presenting each argument, he would say, “No court, no jury except you has ever heard this information.”

  Baldwin had been convicted of bludgeoning to death Mary James Peters, his child’s eighty-five-year-old godmother, while robbing her home. He had protested his innocence, even when offered a chance for a life sentence in return for a guilty plea.

  There were two crucial but conflicting pieces of evidence at the center of the case. One was Baldwin’s alibi that he could not have committed the murder because he was at a motel some distance away and could not have made the drive from the motel to the scene of the murder in the time proposed by the prosecutor. The second was the testimony of his girlfriend and codefendant, Marilyn Hampton, that he had committed the murder. Hampton received a life sentence for her involvement in the crime.

  “I tended to believe Baldwin’s alibi and not his girlfriend,” Marsellus says, “but the D.A. claimed he had sent an investigator to make the drive from the motel to
the scene of the crime and Baldwin could, in fact, have made the drive and committed the murder. But the D.A.’s version didn’t satisfy me. I’ve seen — you wouldn’t believe — the games that some of these D.A.s play. But I’ll tell you about this loyalty thing and what it exacted from me and how I let it compromise the deepest moral values I had. When we left the hearing and went behind closed doors to decide Baldwin’s fate, I just couldn’t convince myself that the man was really guilty and deserved to die, and right there from the room where we were meeting I called the governor’s office. His chief legal counsel, Bill Roberts, came to the phone, and when I told him about the case — I was upset, I was crying — I said that if our job was to dispense mercy, that this seemed as clear a case for mercy that I had yet seen, but Roberts told me that I knew the governor did not like to be confronted with these cases and wanted us to handle it.”

  “ ‘Handle it’ — what does that mean?” I ask.

  “That’s the loyalty bit. That’s the team player bit. Roberts told me, ‘Why do you think we appointed you, Howard? This is why you’re chair of this committee. If you can’t hack it, we’ll just have to replace you with someone who can.’ He wasn’t saying this in a mean or nasty way, he was just reminding me of the loyalty required of me when I took the job.”

  I want to make sure I understand.

  “Are you saying that if the Pardon Board recommends the death sentence, then the governor has something to stand behind and can say that he’s only following the recommendation of the Board, and that way he doesn’t have to face the political fallout of commuting a sentence? Is that the way it worked?”