Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  And here we go again, we are doing this all over again, with Blackburn, not Maggio, this time coming to the door at midnight with the full squad of the “Strap-down Team,” saying, “Time to go, Willie.”

  He is already standing. He is ready.

  I step back as the guards bring him out and surround him. As we walk, I read to him from the Gospel of John, and if he can hear, if he can take in the words at a moment like this, he hears the words of Jesus about laying down his life in order to take it up again, and as I read the words I look up and see that Robert is walking with the same little jaunty walk, up on the balls of his feet, the only way I have ever seen him walk.

  As we approach the death chamber the guards direct me to a chair with the other witnesses. I see Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey on the front row. They are serious, silent, looking straight ahead. The lights are very bright, the dark oak chair gleams, the big clock on the wall behind the chair says 12:07.

  Robert says his last words:

  “I would just like to say, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, that I hope you get some relief from my death. Killing people is wrong. That’s why You’ve put me to death. It makes no difference whether it’s citizens, countries, or governments. Killing is wrong.”

  He sits in the chair and the guards begin to strap him in. He watches as they strap his arms and legs. They put the metal cap on his head and the electrode on the calf of his left leg, and they are ready to put on the chin strap and the mask over his face when Robert takes one more look around the room at the world he is leaving. He looks at me and winks, and then they strap his chin, lower the mask, and kill him. This time I do not close my eyes. I watch everything.

  CHAPTER

  10

  I walk into a blur of television camera lights outside the prison.

  Vernon Harvey pours himself a drink and smiles, and says to the clutch of reporters that he’s sorry every victim doesn’t have the satisfaction of watching a murderer die. But he says Willie died too quickly, and he wishes Willie could have had the same kind of painful death that Faith had, and he hopes he fries in hell for all eternity. When asked if he’s happy, Vernon Harvey says, “Do you want to dance?”

  Elizabeth Harvey says Willie’s unrepentant attitude made her want to witness his execution and that she’s glad he’s dead and won’t be able to kill any other people.

  Fourteen-year-old Lizabeth Harvey, who was not permitted to view the execution because of her age, has been waiting outside the gates with friends and supporters. Inside the family van, she has helped to make posters supporting capital punishment. A picture of her smiling and hugging her mother and a family friend after the execution will make its way into a two-page spread in Life magazine. She tells reporters that this has been the “best Christmas” she has had in a long time, knowing the man who had killed her sister was finally executed. “That ought to tell murderers that if they kill somebody, they’re going to face the electric chair.”

  When reporters turn to me, I say, “What have we accomplished by killing Robert Willie? Now two people are dead instead of one, and there will be another funeral and another mother will bury her child.”

  Reporters ask me if Willie showed any remorse. I tell them of his last words to the Harveys, that he hoped his death would give them peace.

  For a second, in the glare of the lights, Vernon Harvey and I look across at each other. It is only for a moment. Then he disappears among his supporters, their signs bobbing under the glare of the lights: “Just Revenge,” “Remember the Victims,” “Murder in La. and Die.” And I, with the Sisters, head to the waiting cars in the parking lot.

  When the jolts hit him, the way he was strapped to the chair, his body didn’t move much. He lifted somewhat in the chair and his chest pushed against the straps and his hands gripped the edges of the chair, but there wasn’t much movement. Three times the current hit, and I couldn’t see his face. I had prayed out loud, “God, forgive us, forgive all who collaborate in this execution.”

  The morning after the execution I awake at Mama’s, thinking of Robert’s words — he had said not to mourn him but “maybe now and then go and pour a beer on my grave.” He had not gone to the chair in his boots. He had gone in white terry-cloth slippers.

  The phone is ringing. Mickey, Robert’s stepbrother, calls to say the funeral will be held tomorrow at the Brown-McGeehee Funeral Home in Covington, with burial in the family plot in nearby Folsom. The warden’s office calls to tell me that they have Robert’s boots and I can come pick them up. Friends and supporters call, including some who had participated in the anti-death-penalty prayer vigil last night in front of the Governor’s Mansion; and they describe how their prayers kept mingling with the merriment of Yuletide revelers who had come to admire the governor’s forty-foot Christmas tree there on the lawn.

  By afternoon I feel the fierce desire to do something normal, and I’m in jeans and an old sweatshirt washing the car when the call comes from ABC Evening News in New York, asking if I will consent to an interview about Robert Willie’s execution with Peter Jennings. I wipe the back of my wet hand on my pants and weigh the invitation. I look at my watch. It means changing into my suit and heels and getting to the television station now. The shortness of time is a good excuse to say no, and I want to stay in this protected, private space and finish washing the car. Besides, this is national television and live, and I need my wits about me, and I know that I am tired and wrung-out.

  “I’ll be there,” I tell them.

  I know I have to be there because it’s an opportunity to talk about the death penalty, and I always make it a rule to say yes to such invitations if I’m able.

  I change clothes and drive to WBRZ, the ABC affiliate station in Baton Rouge.

  As soon as I arrive, a technician, working quickly, hooks the microphone onto the lapel of my coat, hands me a small hearing device to insert into my ear, and in a few short moments I am hooked up to New York. Before we go on the air, Peter Jennings practices saying “Prejean” — “Pray-zshawn.” He recognizes that it’s French and wants to make sure he pronounces it correctly. To tell you the truth, he tells me, they want my viewpoint because they are featuring the Harveys and they don’t want to present only one side of the issue. It’s unusual, he says, for a state to allow the victim’s family to witness an execution, and that’s what sparked their interest in this story in the first place. The technician advises me not to look at the monitor when I speak because the picture is a second behind the audio and it can be confusing.

  The story opens showing the Harveys outside the prison after the execution. Someone is holding a sign that says “Have ‘Faith’ in the Justice System.”

  Vernon says he wishes every victim could have the opportunity he had tonight. Lizabeth says that since Robert Willie saw Faith die, her parents should see him die. Warden Blackburn is shown announcing that Robert Willie was pronounced dead at 12:15 A.M. and then Robert’s last statement is read. Then they go back to Elizabeth and Vernon Harvey, and Vernon says he feels it was too easy and quick for Willie, “he didn’t suffer no pain, and my daughter had to.”

  Jennings asks me what purpose is served by letting the victim’s parents attend the execution.

  I say that Louisiana officials feel that if any people have a right to witness, it should be the parents of the victim, but I feel that this merely emphasizes that an execution is an act of personal vengeance.

  “Are people there for vengeance?” Jennings asks.

  Yes, I say, they are, out of their deep pain, and I sympathize with them in the loss of their daughter.

  Jennings asks if I feel it would be a good thing for people to be exposed to executions, and I say yes, because then they would see the violence unmasked and this would lead them to abolish executions. I say that an execution is a brutal and horrible thing, and that I heard Mr. Harvey say Robert experienced no pain, but that the pain came every time he looked at his watch, knowing that in a few days, a few hours he would die.

&nbs
p; Jennings thanks me and turns to George Will, the political commentator, and asks whether he thinks people should be able to witness executions.

  George Will says the American people favor capital punishment, not primarily because they believe it’s an effective deterrent, but because it satisfies a deeply felt moral intuition that there are some crimes for which death is the only proportionate punishment, and this murder certainly seems to be one of those crimes. That is what the American people feel, he says, and he thinks they’re right and that vengeance, far from being shameful, can be noble.

  Jennings presses the original question of whether people, if allowed to witness executions, would be repelled by capital punishment.

  Will says he thinks that’s arguable and that some people who see it as a deterrent say we ought to show it on television and make it as grisly as possible, but he believes that would have a “very bad coarsening” effect on the country. Capital punishment, he says, can be done in private and still perform the essential function of expressing the community’s vengeance, not just for the loved ones but for the whole community of Louisiana, which, he believes, was expressing itself last night.

  That’s it. That wraps up the death-penalty segment of the evening news. I look up and see that a small group of WBRZ staff has assembled to watch the encounter. I guess this is a pretty big occasion, for a local affiliate to be featured on national news like this. One of the technicians remarks to me, as he unthreads the microphone wire from the sleeve of my coat, that for national prime-time television, that was a “large hunk” of time I was given. Usually, he says, it’s a forty-five-second or one-minute spot, especially when it’s live. But all I can think is that George Will said that the expression of vengeance in an execution is not shameful, but noble.

  Noble?

  Yet, he was quick to add that only a very few people in a private setting should witness an execution because public exposure would have a “coarsening” effect on society.

  How, I wonder, does a noble act coarsen society?

  Another death-penalty advocate, Walter Berns, author of For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty, concurs with George Will on the necessity of restricting the number of witnesses at executions. He, too, fears that public viewing of such events would have a “coarsening” effect upon the populace: “No ordinary person can be required to witness [executions], and it would be better if some people not be permitted to witness them — children, for example, and the sort of persons who would, if permitted, happily join a lynch mob. Executions should not be televised, both because of the unrestricted character of the television audience and the tendency of television to make a vulgar spectacle of the most dignified event”1 [italics mine].

  But it’s not the presence of television cameras or the composition of the crowd or even whether the crowd acts politely or not that makes the execution of a human being ugly. An execution is ugly because the premeditated killing of a human being is ugly. Torture is ugly. Gassing, hanging, shooting, electrocuting, or lethally injecting a person whose hands and feet are tied is ugly. And hiding the ugliness from view and rationalizing it numbs our minds to the horror of what we are doing. This is what truly “coarsens” us.

  I think of the moment when Warden Ross Maggio stood at the microphone to announce the time of Pat Sonnier’s execution. His eyes happened to meet mine, and he lowered his eyes. It was instinctive. He had helped kill a man. There was nothing noble about it.

  Camus held that executions are performed in secret because they are shameful deeds. State governments, he said, who wish executions to continue, know to keep them hidden from view, not only physically but also symbolically in the euphemistic language used to describe them (p. 176).

  When the death penalty is talked about, a strange lexicon of euphemisms emerges:

  Mob vengeance, when enacted by government officials, is called noble.

  The torture and killing of a convicted prisoner is commensurate with his or her dignity.

  Death by lethal injection is humane.

  Ronald Reagan voiced this last euphemism in 1973, when, as governor of California, he advocated lethal injection as a method of execution: “Being a former farmer and horse raiser, I know what it’s like to try to eliminate an injured horse by shooting him. Now you call the veterinarian and the vet gives it a shot and the horse goes to sleep — that’s it.”2

  Surely, the reasoning goes, lethal injection is a far more “humane” method of execution than methods practiced in times past (and not-so-past — the last four methods on the following list are current): poisoning, stoning, beheading, crucifying, burning, casting from heights onto rocks, pouring molten lead on the body, starving, sawing into pieces, burying alive, impaling, drowning, drawing and quartering, crushing with heavy weights, boiling, throwing into a pit with reptiles, giving to wild animals to be eaten alive, disemboweling, garroting (strangulation), beating to death, breaking on the wheel, stretching on the rack, flaying, hanging,* electrocuting, shooting, gassing.4

  Witnesses will be “bored,” Deputy Warden Richard Peabody, who supervises executions at Angola, said when Louisiana switched in 1990 from the electric chair to lethal injection. “About the only thing that witnesses may observe is that during the injection of sodium pentothal, the man may gasp or yawn. There doesn’t seem to be any other activity that’s going to be physically seen.”5

  Louisiana became the nineteenth state to use lethal injection to kill prisoners since the state of Oklahoma inaugurated its use in 1977. The method is preferred because it virtually eliminates visible, bodily pain. There is only the “uncomfortableness” of a needle prick into a vein. There remains, however, one dimension of suffering that can never be eliminated when death is imposed on a conscious human being: the horror of being put to death against your will and the agony of anticipation. As if, when they strap you down on the gurney, your arms outstretched, waiting for the silent deadly fluid to flow — the sodium pentothal, which comes first to make you unconscious so you do not feel the pancuronium bromide when it paralyzes your diaphragm and stops your breathing and the potassium chloride which causes cardiac arrest and stops your heart — as if you feel the terror of death any less because chemicals are being used to kill you instead of electricity or bullets or rope?

  There is an elaborate ruse going on here, a pitiful disguise. Killing is camouflaged as a medicinal act. The attendant will even swab the “patient’s” arm with alcohol before inserting the needle — to prevent infection.

  Admittedly, when executions were public, it was not a pretty sight. People sensed blood, drama. They came in droves, in the thousands sometimes — men, women, and teenagers, and some children too. Some came early to get a “good seat” right up under the gallows. Some packed lunches and ate in the shade of trees and waited for the big event — “There’s gonna be a hanging.” Some cheered. Some taunted. Some were silent. All watched. When a black person was executed, the racism was not disguised. “Whooie, niggah boy, they’re gonna hang your ass now.” It was awful to see, and fascinating. And visible. It was truthful. They didn’t call it “noble” or “dignified” or say they were putting a person to “sleep” like a horse. It was cruel. It was unusual. And it was obviously punishment. It was death. Forcible, violent, premeditated death. And the people knew it, and the people came to watch because it was death, because death, when you can see it happening in front of your eyes, is always something to watch.

  These public executions were called “vulgar” spectacles, which meant not that the execution itself was vulgar, but that the people witnessing it did not act in a seemly or dignified manner.

  Then, the “coarsening” effect of executions on people was clear. Now, with executions hidden, the “coarsening” effect is more subtle. But there are symptoms:

  We stand by as the Supreme Court dissolves Eighth Amendment protection against cruelty and torture.*

  Some of us openly acknowledge that even though the death penalty is rac
ially biased and unfairly imposed upon the poor we nevertheless approve its practice.6

  Some of us say that even if innocent people are sometimes executed along with the guilty, we support the death penalty anyway.7

  If the innocent are executed?

  A two-year study of capital punishment in the U.S. by Hugo A. Bedau of Tufts University and Michael L. Radelet of the University of Florida documents that in this century 417 people were wrongly convicted of capital offenses and 23 were actually executed.10

  In recent years cases have surfaced of people sent to death row in error and later released.

  Randall Dale Adams (released in March 1989, Texas)

  The subject of the acclaimed documentary The Thin Blue Line, Adams was sent to death row in 1977. Prosecutors manufactured evidence to convict Adams and relied on the perjured testimony of the man who actually murdered the police officer. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously set aside his conviction in 1989.11

  William Jent and Earnest Lee Miller (released in 1988, Florida) Convicted and sentenced to death in 1979 by prosecutors who withheld exculpatory evidence. A federal judge in 1988 ordered a new trial within 90 days. Instead, the state offered to free the innocent men in exchange for a plea of guilty to second-degree murder.12

  James Richardson (released in 1989, Florida) Originally sentenced to death in 1968 for poisoning his children. Numerous examples of misconduct by the prosecutor finally led the Miami State Attorney’s office to undertake a complete examination of the facts of the case, an examination which concluded Richardson was innocent.13

  Henry Drake (released in 1987, Georgia)

  Sentenced to death in 1976, Drake was granted a new trial by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 1985. At his second trial the jury could not reach agreement. At his third trial he was again convicted but sentenced to life. Six months later he was totally exonerated by his alleged accomplice, and the parole board set him free.14