Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  At five minutes to four Lloyd drives up. “You made it,” he says, “I’m glad you’re safe, you know those highways,” and I introduce him to Louie. The chapel is warm and close and filled with silence and the smell of beeswax. Lloyd and I kneel on the prie-dieux. He takes his rosary out of his pocket. Louie, in the pew behind us, already has his rosary in his hands.

  We “tell” the beads, as the old French people used to say. One at a time — Hail Mary, Holy Mary, Hail Mary, the mysteries of Christ and our own, life and joy, suffering and death — we round the beads one by one, a circle and round we go, dying and behold we live, the soul stretched taut, the soul which says: No more, I can take no more. Hail Mary, Holy Mary, breathed in and breathed out, linking what eyes cannot see but what the heart knows and doubts and knows again.

  Holding a rosary is a physical, tangible act — you touch and hold the small, smooth beads awhile and then let go. “Do not cling to me,” Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene. The great secret: To hold on, let go. Nothing is solid. Everything moves. Except love — hold on to love. Do what love requires.

  We pray the sorrowful mysteries. Jesus agonizing before he is led to execution. Jesus afraid. Jesus sweating blood. Were there beads of sweat on David’s brow when he realized the mortal danger? Was it when the kidnappers turned the car down a road that he knew ended in a cane field? Was it when he was told to lie face down on the ground? His mother had bought him a new blue velour shirt that he was wearing that night. Standing by the kitchen sink, he wrapped his arms around himself and patted the new shirt and said, “Mama, this is going to keep me warm at the game tonight.”

  And Loretta … her last evening of life at a football game … She had seen friends there, laughed and talked and cheered her team, safe in the globe of stadium light, unaware of the dark road soon to be hers.

  Lloyd LeBlanc has told me that he would have been content with imprisonment for Patrick Sonnier. He went to the execution, he says, not for revenge, but hoping for an apology. Patrick Sonnier had not disappointed him. Before sitting in the electric chair he had said, “Mr. LeBlanc, I want to ask your forgiveness for what me and Eddie done,” and Lloyd LeBlanc had nodded his head, signaling a forgiveness he had already given. He says that when he arrived with sheriffs deputies there in the cane field to identify his son, he had knelt by his boy — “laying down there with his two little eyes sticking out like bullets” — and prayed the Our Father. And when he came to the words: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he had not halted or equivocated, and he said, “Whoever did this, I forgive them.” But he acknowledges that it’s a struggle to overcome the feelings of bitterness and revenge that well up, especially as he remembers David’s birthday year by year and loses him all over again: David at twenty, David at twenty-five, David getting married, David standing at the back door with his little ones clustered around his knees, grown-up David, a man like himself, whom he will never know. Forgiveness is never going to be easy. Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Since the publication of this book in 1993 the states of Kansas (1994) and New York (1995) have reinstated the death penalty and Congress has enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994), which expands federal crimes punishable by death to about 60 offenses.

  * Georgia, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia. For New Mexico, the option offered was thirty years before the possibility of parole instead of twenty-five. See note 21 to chapter 5.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Dorothy Day established soup kitchens and shelters for the poor in New York City. With Peter Maurin she published a newspaper, The Catholic Worker, (Current address: 36 East First Street, New York, New York 10003). Her life story is told in The Long Loneliness (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1952).

  2. Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 110th ed., Washington, D.C. 20402: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988.

  3. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong? (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), p. xiii.

  4. The Louisiana Weekly (New Orleans), a black-owned newspaper, told of the U.S. Department of Justice survey in an article by Jeff White, “Black Leaders React to Police Brutality Survey,” May 30, 1992.

  Also see Kevin Bell, “Black Males: Police Abuse Common,” Times-Picayune, January 7, 1993, and the companion article in the same issue by Sheila Grissett and Scott Aiges: “Officers Defend Marsalis Arrest.” Branford Marsalis, bandleader of The Tonight Show, was stopped for speeding by New Orleans police, frisked, handcuffed, and brought to jail, even though he says that he cooperated fully with police and signed the speeding ticket. Marsalis, speaking of the incident before a national audience on The Tonight Show (January 4, 1993), attributed his abusive handling by police to the fact that he is black.

  Also see Art Harris, “New Orleans’ Poor Blacks Fear Police Brutality,” Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge, June 14, 1981.

  5. Langston Hughes, “Warning,” The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1989).

  6. Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections, P.O. Box 94304, Capitol Station, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70804; “Probation and Parole, 1990,” Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, November, 1991, Washington, D.C.; Marc Mauer, “Americans Behind Bars: One Year Later,” February 1992, The Sentencing Project, 918 F Street NW, Suite 501, Washington, D.C. 20004, (202) 628–0871; William J. Chambliss, “Trading Textbooks for Prison Cells,” June 1991, National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, 635 Slaters Lane, Suite G-100, Alexandria, Virginia 22314.

  7. Marc Mauer, “Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System: A, Growing National Problem” (the Sentencing Project, February 1990).

  8. Jason DeParle, “A Matter of Life and Death,” Times-Picayune, April 7, 1985, p. 14.

  9. Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment (enacted December 18, 1865): “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

  10. James S. Liebman, “More than ‘Slightly Retro’: The Rehnquist Court’s Rout of Habeas Corpus Jurisdiction in Teague v. Lane,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 18: pp. 537–635, p. 541.

  Hugo Adam Bedau notes that from 1967–1982 over 2,000 death sentences were vacated on constitutional grounds. See The Death Penalty in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 68.

  11. “We never held that prisoners have a constitutional right to counsel when mounting collateral (federal or state post-conviction litigation) attacks to their convictions [and we] decline to so hold today”: Pennsylvania v. Finley, 481 U.S. 551 (1987). This Supreme Court decision was reaffirmed in Coleman v. Thompson, 111 S. Ct. 2546 (1991).

  12. After deliberating upon the sentence for Elmo Patrick Sonnier for some time, the jury requested information about Sonnier’s eligibility for work release if he were given a life sentence. In fact, regulations of the Department of Corrections stipulated that inmates convicted of murder were ineligible for such programs, but the judge did not have a copy of the regulations, and from his instruction the jury ascertained that if they sentenced Sonnier to life imprisonment he might possibly qualify for work release. The Louisiana Supreme Court determined the judge’s instruction “incomplete and misleading” and remanded for resentencing January 28, 1980, State v. Sonnier, 379 So. 2d 1336 (La. 1980).

  13. The time sequence of the Sonnier trials and retrials was as follows:

  April, 1978 Elmo Patrick Sonnier tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

  September, 1978 Eddie Sonnier tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

  1979 Eddie Sonnier’s death sentence overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

  January, 1980 Elmo Patrick Sonnier’s death sentence overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court and remanded for a new sen
tencing trial.

  March, 1980 Elmo Patrick Sonnier resentenced to death.

  14. Arthur S. Miller and Jeffrey H. Bowman, Death by Installments: The Ordeal of Willie Francis (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1988).

  15. Glass v. Louisiana, 471 U.S. 1080 (1985), pp. 1086–1087.

  16. Dr. Hillman’s affidavit was presented as part of a defense brief in Sawyer v. Whitley, 772 F. Supp. 297 (U.S. District Court, E.D., Louisiana, 1991).

  17. “Reflections on the Guillotine” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 225–226. All subsequent references to Camus’ work are from this essay, in this translation, and are cited by page number in the text. Reprint of the 1961 edition published by Knopf, New York.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Two books published by The Center for Louisiana Studies (P.O. Box 40831, Lafayette, Louisiana 70504), give a graphic account of Angola’s history. They are Anne Butler and C. Murray Henderson’s Angoh — The Louisiana State Penitentiary: A Half Century of Rage and Reform (1990) and The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana Burk Foster, Wilbert Rideau, and Ron Wikberg, eds. (1991).

  Rideau, an Angola inmate, and Wikberg, recently released from prison, coauthored Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars (New York: Times Books, 1992).

  2. Ron Wikberg, “Death Watch: The Horror Show,” The Angolite 15 no. 5, September/October, 1990): p. 36. (Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, Louisiana 70712.)

  3. C. Murray Henderson, warden at Angola from 1968–1975, says, “Usually murder is committed in the heat of passion and discharges something in the psyche, with the result that the individual rarely repeats the offense … Surprisingly, murderers … have the lowest rate of recidivism of any group of offenders” (Butler and Henderson, The Wall Is Strong, p. 51).

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation gives no estimate of murders of “passion.” The term is ambiguous and hard to measure. In its 1989 Uniform Crime Report the FBI estimated that 54 percent of murders were between family or acquaintances, 13.1 percent between strangers, and 33.1 percent unknown.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. Source: The Loyola Death Penalty Resource Center, 210 Baronne St., Suite 608, New Orleans, Louisiana 70112, (504) 522–0578.

  2. With permission from the mother of Robert Wayne Williams, photographs of his charred body were published by the prison magazine. Ron Wikberg, “Death Watch: The Horror Show,” The Angolite 15 no. 5, (September/October, 1990) (Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, Louisiana 70712).

  3. Trial Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Elmo Patrick Sonnier, Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, No. 63293, vol. 7, pp. 1205–1206.

  4. Of the 3,829 executions under state authority in the United States from 1930 to 1980, 2,307 (60 percent) occurred in Southern states. See Hugo Adam Bedau, The Death Penalty in America, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 58–61.

  5. Jill Smolowe, “Must This Man Die?” Time, May 18, 1992, pp. 40–44; Peter Applebome, “Execution Stirs Up Troubling Questions,” New York Times, May 22, 1992.

  6. Keeney v. Tamayo-Reyes, 112 S. Ct. 1715 (1992); see Peter Applebome, “Indigent Defendants, Overworked Lawyers,” New York Times, May 17, 1992.

  7. Marcia Coyle, Fred Strasser, and Marianne Lavelle, “Fatal Defense: Trial and Error in the Nation’s Death Belt,” The National Law Journal 12, no. 40 (June 11, 1990): pp. 30–44. To research this special report The National Law Journal conducted a six-month, six-state investigation of capital defense in the South, poring over 100 trial transcripts and interviewing 150 attorneys, judges, prosecutors, and experts in capital law. The following instances of ineffectiveness of counsel are among those documented in the report:

  In a postconviction affidavit, the defense attorney’s investigator said he witnessed his boss, Emmett Moran, shoot up with cocaine during trial recesses and use speed, alcohol, Quaaludes, morphine and marijuana after court sessions. The trial judge found no “credible evidence” of intoxication and ruled that Mr. Moran was not ineffective. Five Florida Supreme Court justices upheld the conviction. Moran’s client, Jerry White, is on death row.

  In October 1989, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to call inadequate this twenty-nine-word defense by counsel Jon Wood at Jesus Romero’s sentencing trial in San Antonio: “You are an extremely intelligent jury. You’ve got that man’s life in your hands. You can take it or not. That’s all I have to say.” The court said: “Had the jury returned a life sentence the strategy might well have been seen as a brilliant move.”

  In Lee County, Alabama, at 6:00 P.M., just after the jury in the capital murder trial of James Wyman Smith returned a guilty verdict, the judge asked if prosecution and defense were prepared to proceed with the penalty phase. The following exchange is recorded in the trial transcript:

  Thomas E. Jones (Defense Counsel): No, sir, we are not. Court: I hate to send the jury back to a motel another night. What do you lack being ready?

  J. Michael Williams (Defense Counsel): Judge, I haven’t even read the statute about it.

  At 7:00 P.M. the judge then recessed the trial until 8:30 the next morning, at which time Mr. Smith was sentenced to death.

  8. In February 1992, New Orleans public defender Rick Teissier, whose caseload tops 700 clients a year, filed a motion in state court arguing the state’s public defender program was unconstitutional. See Keith Woods, “Impoverished System Poor Defense,” Times Picayune, February 24, 1992; also Richard Lacayo, “You Don’t Always Get Perry Mason,” Time, June 1, 1992.

  The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section’s Project on Death Penalty Habeas Corpus found “the inadequacy and inadequate compensation of counsel at trial the principal failing” of the administration of capital punishment. See Ira P. Robbins, “Toward a More Just and Effective System of Review in State Death Penalty Cases,” American University Law Review 40 (Fall, 1990): pp. 1–296.

  9. The stringent standard for ineffective assistance of counsel was set in the 1984 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Strickland v. Washington (466 U.S. 668).

  “Effective Assistance: Just a Nominal Right?” Coyle, Strasser, and Lavelle, “Fatal Defense,” p. 42.

  10. Michael T. Kroll, “Louisiana Execution Moves State Back to the 19th Century,” Pacific News Service, week of May 14–18, 1990.

  11. Racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty for rape is patently clear. Of the 455 persons executed for rape in the United States, 405 were black. The overwhelming majority of the executions — 443 — took place in the South. In Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 992 (1977), the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty for rape unconstitutional. See Hugo Adam Bedau, The Death Penalty in America, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) pp. 58–61.

  12. In Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “equal protection of the laws” of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the prosecutor from excusing potential jurors simply on the basis of race. But instances of black defendants facing an all-white or nearly all-white jury continue with some frequency. An example comes from the area surrounding Columbus, Georgia. The “Chattahoochee Report,” an extensive study of the effects of race in death-penalty trials in the Chattahoochee Judicial District of Georgia, revealed that from 1976 to 1990, in eight of the ten cases where blacks were convicted in capital cases, the “impartial” jury they faced were all white or nearly all white (one black juror). See Fig. 6 of “Chattahoochee Judicial District: Buckle of the Death Belt,” published in July 1991 by the Death Penalty Information Center, 1606 20th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20009, (202) 347–2531. (This report is also cited in chapter 11.)

  13. State of Louisiana v. Gaskin, 412 So. 2d 1007 (La. 1982).

  14. David C. Baldus, George G. Woodworth, and Charles A. Pulaski, Jr., Equal Justice and the Death Penalty: A Legal and Empirical Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990).

  15. McCleskey v. K
emp, 107 S. Ct. 1756 (1987). The U.S. Government’s General Accounting Office (GAO) scrutinized over two dozen studies of racial bias in capital sentencing and found them to be “remarkably consistent” in their conclusion that killers of whites are more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of blacks. The GAO found the correlation of race present “at all stages of the criminal justice process,” including the prosecutor’s decision to charge a defendant with a capital offense or the decision to proceed to trial rather than plea-bargain. The research projects they reviewed took into account factors such as prior criminal records, heinousness of the crime, and the number of victims.

  See the GAO Report to Senate and House Committees in the Judiciary, “Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Pattern of Racial Inequalities,” GAO/GGD 90–57, February 1990. Copies of the report may be obtained from the U.S. General Accounting Office, P.O. Box 6015, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20877, (202) 275–6241.

  16. Coyle, Strasser, and Lavelle, “Fatal Defense,” pp. 32, 38.

  17. After the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 42 executions took place by May 1985, and, of these, 36 (85 percent) occurred in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida. Of the 179 executions taking place by June 30, 1992, 114 (63.7 percent) occurred in these four states. Source: Death Row, USA, June 1992, NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Suite 1600, 99 Hudson St., New York, NY 10013, (212) 219–1900.