Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  He tells me that he talks to each inmate on the Row almost every day. In his job, that could be a serious occupational hazard — getting to know inmates personally, finding the little boy inside the man — dangerous territory indeed, for a man whose duty is to oversee their execution. One of the personnel at the prison had once told me about the orientation of guards at Angola, and that’s the first rule they are taught: never relate on a personal level with inmates.

  Coody tells me that he also serves on the “Strap-down Team,” the guards who accompany the prisoner to the electric chair. That means he’s not insulated from the “final process.” He’s not like the other guards who work day in and day out on death row, feeding men, talking to them, supervising their showers, delivering their mail — but never seeing the green room with the brown wooden chair. But five times now this man has been in the execution chamber at night and then back here on the Row for business as usual the next morning. He’s never had to strap them in the chair, he says, but he’s walked them to the chair and sometimes been the one to gather up their personal belongings — clothes, toilet articles, books — from the holding cell after they’re dead.

  “I get home from an execution about two-something in the morning and I just sit up in a chair for the rest of the night. I can’t shake it. I can’t square it with my conscience, putting them to death like that.”

  What a spot to be in. Major Coody is not like the governor, the head of the Department of Corrections, the warden, and most of the other guards around here. He can’t persuade himself that he’s just doing his job. My heart goes out to him, and I tell him how I felt watching Pat Sonnier die, and I say that it seems to me that he is someone who is unable to shield himself by rationalization and it may mean that he will need to find another job.

  It is not a very long conversation.

  “I respect you, Major Coody. I’ll pray that you follow where your heart and conscience lead,” I say to him as I am leaving, and his eyes look into mine as he reaches out for my hand.

  It is the last time I see him alive.

  I do not run into him again over the next weeks prior to Robert’s execution, nor do I notice if he is one of the guards surrounding Robert as he walks to the chair. A couple of months after Robert’s execution I hear that he has been transferred to another part of the prison, and then I hear that he has asked for early retirement, and then I hear that he has died of a heart attack.

  I wish that before he died he had had a chance to participate in the public debate on capital punishment. I would have liked to see him square off with one of the D.A.s or the academics who lay out such clean, logical arguments for the necessity of executions. My hunch is that he would say something like: Look, no matter what reasons you give to justify killing criminals, when you’re there and you see it, when you watch it happen with your own eyes and are part of it, you feel dirty. You’re killing a man who can’t defend himself and that is just as wrong as what he did.

  November has turned into December and the rusty, furry needles on the cypress trees are dropping in clumps now, and everything is getting that sparse, stripped winter look. Robert asks me for a big box of Christmas cards. He says he wants to send a card to everyone he knows.

  I tell him that I respect his need for privacy and when he goes to the death house, if he prefers to be alone or just with his family, I won’t be offended. I don’t want to impose my presence on him. I’ve only known him a couple of months.

  “Yeah, yeah, you be there, ma’am, if it won’t put you out too much,” Robert says. “I’m gonna want someone to talk to and be with right up to the end. I don’t believe in being chummy with the guards who’ll be helping to kill me. I’ve read stories of inmates having these little intimate conversations with the guards in the death house like they’re big buddies or something. Not me. I’m only talking to those people when I have to. I don’t need no favors from them people. No way.”

  And he tells me of his recent encounter with one of the prison chaplains and that I had come up in the conversation. “Chaplain Penton was telling me that this Sister Prejean stirs up emotions in the inmates, that’s how he put it — ‘stirs up emotions’ — and that maybe I’d prefer him instead to be there with me in the death house, and I said to him, ‘Look, man, you get your paycheck from these people, you work for these people, and you go along with the death penalty. I don’t particularly need your kind of help, man.’ ”

  I remember Penton and our conversation there in the death house while Pat was getting his head shaved, when he had told me to prepare myself for the “visual shock.”

  “It’s hard to resist policies of an organization when you’re on its payroll,” I say.

  “Like biting the hand that feeds you,” he says.

  And it makes me glad that I do work I really want to do and that I’m free to take moral positions I believe in.

  Robert whispers that at first he was afraid to die but he’s not afraid now. He’s been preparing himself to look death in the eye. “I’ve had a pretty fulfilled life — women, drugs, travel, rock and roll, school, football — about everything there is.” He is scheduled to die five days before his twenty-seventh birthday.

  Some inmates, he says, have confided to him that they hope they can go out like him.

  He is beginning to give media interviews, lots of them. He seems to enjoy talking to reporters.

  To a reporter for NBC news he says he’d like to talk with the executioner face to face and say, “Hey, man, you shouldn’t be killing people for no four hundred dollars. You shouldn’t be killing people for the government,” and wonders out loud if he’d shake hands with the executioner to show he wasn’t afraid of him, but decides, “Nah, I wouldn’t want to touch his hand.”

  To local newspaper reporters he bristles when someone suggests that his family life was not all it should have been. He insists that he had a “good family” and that his family is “not to blame for nothin’.” He says he admires Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro because they were “leaders” and “got things done,” although he admits that Hitler “maybe went a little overboard with some of his policies.” But he thinks “Hitler was on the right track about Aryans being the master race” and says he joined the white supremacist group, the Aryan Brotherhood, when he was in the federal penitentiary in Marion.

  He also says the U.S. government does “evil things” through the CIA — “trying to assassinate political enemies like Castro in Cuba, Allende in Chile, and Sandinistas in Nicaragua through the Contras. I don’t trust the U.S. government any further than I can throw ‘em, man. They shouldn’t be given power to execute nobody. They’re too corrupt, man.”

  When a reporter asks about changes he might make in his life if he had it to live over again, he says he’d join a terrorist organization and bomb government buildings — “not the people, just the buildings” — and he’d rob banks because the government insures banks and it would cost them money and “money is the only language they understand.”

  When asked if he’s scared to die he says, “The electric chair don’t worry me, man. I haven’t read much about it but I know electricity will fry your ass. I’m going willingly. I’ll hold my head up. I’ve got pride. I don’t run from nothin’.” He brags about coming out of Marion, “the maximum securiti-est penitentiary in the country” where he “established” himself as a “man and as a convict,” and he “doubts that 99 percent of the dudes here at Angola could make it in Marion.” He summarizes his life in a few deft strokes: “I’m an outlaw. I’ve been an outlaw most of my life. If I had it to do all over again, I’d be an outlaw.”

  On Christmas Eve Robert is moved to the death house. He had told me he wanted to make the move “sooner rather than later” because he wanted to “get his thoughts together,” and “meditate.”

  I go into Baton Rouge to be with my family as I usually do on Christmas Day. I telephone Warden Blackburn, and ask if I might wish Robert a merry Christmas by telephone, but he refuses. I
had given Robert Mama’s telephone number and told him to call on Christmas, but throughout the day I am moving between her house and my sister Mary Ann’s, and I miss his call.

  The next day I drive to Angola to see Robert. I haven’t been back in the death house since Pat’s execution, and here I am, counting on my fingers again: Wednesday, December 26; Thursday, December 27; Friday, December 28. Thursday night, that’s it. Robert won’t see much of the twenty-eighth — just about ten minutes, because they come for him at midnight. Two more days to live. The twenty-eighth is the feast in the Catholic Church of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the infants slaughtered by King Herod.1 Vernon Harvey’s been telling the press about how he’s going to sit in the front row at this execution and that he had put in his request to the trial judge to set the date of execution for the twenty-eighth because Faith was murdered on the twenty-eighth of May. I am sure he would consider the commemoration of Innocents a highly appropriate day on which to exact retribution for the death of his stepdaughter.

  Along this road now as I get closer to the prison I can feel the fear mounting, and it feels just the way it does before a hurricane — swooping blasts, then eerie calm and the sense of waters rising. Jesus, help him, help me, and I’m back to saying essential prayers.

  I wonder how Robert the Outlaw is holding up now in the quiet green holding cell just a few short steps away from “Gruesome Gerty,” which is what the inmates call the electric chair. He’s got a tougher hide than anyone else I know if he’s been speaking the truth in these media interviews, and he had sent me a copy of a poem from “Crazy Dave,” a fellow inmate from the federal penitentiary in Marion:

  Gruesome Gertie she waits for a Rebel

  Robert Lee Willie is his name.

  She visits him in his dreams at night.

  She tries to drive him insane.

  But Robert Lee Willie is a Rebel

  and I know his mind is strong.

  And even if you do end up with him

  in our hearts he will always live on!

  I arrive at the front gate of Angola. It’s Wednesday, a regular visiting day, and a cluster of people are here in the visitor center and the prison bus is waiting to take them back to the camps. A white van is sent to pick me up to bring me back to the green building with the generator outside and the little red geraniums growing in the front. I know the route.

  I will be the only one to visit Robert today. He has told his mother not to come until tomorrow. He says he knows his mother couldn’t take two days in the death house. Tomorrow will be hard enough. She’ll have the boys, Robert’s stepbrothers, with her and maybe that will help. Mickey is eighteen, Tim, sixteen, and Todd, eleven.

  I notice some differences when we arrive at the death house. No geraniums, no guard with a rifle at the front door, and no armed guard inside the door. They’ve executed five people now and realize they were overprepared, that a man with hands and legs chained and surrounded by eight to ten guards isn’t going very far.

  I should feel more prepared for what is coming than I was six months ago with Pat Sonnier, and the title of a film — After the First — flashes across my mind. The film tells the story of a young boy who goes on his first deer hunt with his father. When the boy looked at the beauty of the deer poised in the early morning, its antlered head raised above the bushes, he had hesitated, then shot; and as father and son looked down together at the dead deer, the father had said, “After the first it won’t be so hard.”

  But it is hard. It freezes my heart just to step into this place with the cold polished tiles.

  I’ve brought my Bible with me and a guard takes it and thumbs through the pages and then passes the metal detector over me. I empty the pockets of my blue suit for the guard to inspect.

  “I’m ready for you this time, young lady. I’ll have dinner for you,” Captain Rabelais says. I haven’t seen him since Pat’s execution.

  It’s hard to believe where I am and what is going to happen here. The sun is shining in through the front glass door and it’s Wednesday, the day after Christmas. I feel glad to see Captain Rabelais. I like the man. But I avoid friendly banter. This is the death house and Captain Rabelais is part of the group of people who are going to kill Robert Willie. I walk up to the familiar white metal door with the mesh window where I had waited out the last hours with Pat Sonnier. Robert is out of his cell and seated on the other side of the door, his hands and feet shackled. And there’s the guard standing at the end of the short four-cell tier, part of the “death-watch” team which will keep Robert under twenty-four-hour surveillance until he is executed.

  “Merry Christmas,” I say to Robert.

  “I tried to call you yesterday at your mother’s,” he says.

  “I asked the warden to put in a call to you here but he wouldn’t,” I say.

  “They don’t put calls through. This ain’t exactly the Holiday Inn,” he says, and he smiles. I see he has on his jeans and a long-sleeved blue denim shirt with a white T-shirt underneath and the black knitted hat, and I am glad he has the little hat because when they shave his head maybe he can wear it and his head won’t be cold. Would they let him wear it to the chair? No, probably not. The guards will not want to deal with any extra clothing to be removed when they get their prisoner in the chair.

  All my energies move now to this man behind the screened window of the white metal door. I’ll be here with him all day and I take a deep breath and ease in. He’s glad to see me, I can tell.

  “Were you able to sleep much?” I ask.

  “I did,” he says. “It’s weird, it’s a lot quieter here than on the Row. Yeah, I slept. Funny, but I’ve told the truth about what happened and, like the Book said, the truth sets you free. I used to always think that the truth could hurt you, but I feel free now, kind of innocent even, knowing it, knowing the truth.”

  This leads to a special request.

  “Look,” he says, “maybe you can’t do this and maybe it’s too expensive or whatever, but if you can do this for me, I would really appreciate it. I want to take a polygraph test because I want my mother to know that I didn’t kill Faith Hathaway. I don’t care if nobody else in the whole world believes me, I just want my mother to know.”

  A polygraph test. The quickest I could get it for him would be tomorrow. No chance of getting it lined up for today. I weigh it in my mind. There is a question of money. I estimate it’ll cost a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred dollars, and I tell him yes, I’ll make a phone call from here, from Captain Rabelais’s office, because as a matter of fact I happen to know someone in Baton Rouge who administers these tests and maybe we can pull it off.

  This leads me to ask him about a discrepancy in the physical evidence of his case that’s been bothering me. I had read it in the transcripts of the trial and Farmer had brought it up during the Pardon Board hearing. Robert claims that Vaccaro, positioned behind Faith Hathaway, her head in his lap, suddenly began stabbing her, and he, Robert, kneeling in front facing her, had held her hands. But the victim’s body was found with her arms above her head and her legs up, knees bent, feet on the ground. To hold her hands, then, Robert would have had to reach across her body, blocking Vaccaro from stabbing her.

  The pathologist had testified that the victim’s hands and feet had to have been held in spread-eagled fashion before she died.

  “When we left her, her hands were laying on her stomach and her legs were down flat and her knees together,” Robert says.

  He states it simply and without remonstrance and exhaustive explanation. That’s all he says.

  There are three possible explanations that occur to me:

  Faith was not dead when Robert and Vaccaro left her, and she moved her limbs into the position in which she was found.

  Someone else moved her arms and legs into the position before pictures were taken at the scene of the murder.

  Robert is lying.

  But if Robert is lying, why this last-minute, privately administered po
lygraph test for his mother? And why, after arrest, the offer to take a polygraph test for the authorities?

  “So, what’s all this I hear about you admiring Hitler and wishing you could come back as a terrorist and bomb people?” I say to him, referring to the stories appearing over the last couple of weeks.

  “Not the people, just the buildings,” he protests. “I didn’t say I’d bomb the people. I don’t have any love for the U.S. government. The CIA goes around thinking they can assassinate anybody they damn well please, anybody that doesn’t agree with their ideology, and look at the death penalty. You never see rich people on death row. They can buy government officials off because the almighty dollar determines what kind of justice you get here in the good ole USA.”

  I tell him I can agree with some of his criticisms of the U.S. government, but that his violent response is no solution. Our Sisters serving as Latin American missionaries have urged us to write letters to congresspersons protesting U.S.-backed militarist policies in Central America, and I had visited Nicaragua in 1983 and talked to too many people who had had innocent loved ones killed by the Contras — children, women, teachers, health-care workers — to trust U.S. government officials who called such terrorists “freedom fighters.”

  “So how is bombing buildings going to change anything?” I ask. “That’s a pure testosterone solution if ever I heard one.”

  And he argues that the destruction of government buildings will “at least get the government’s attention and they’ll have to put a lot of money out to rebuild and money is all they understand.”

  And I say that if our government is doing things we disagree with that it’s only we, the people, that can hold them accountable and demand that they change because we’re a democracy, and democracy is hard work, a lot harder than the one-act shoot-’em-up solution he’s suggesting.