When I get back to Hope House I sit down with Sister Lilianne Flavin, who is on staff, and ask her to come with me to visit Stanley Ott, the Catholic bishop in Baton Rouge. Lilianne — devoted to the poor — is a kindred soul.
On February 6 Lilianne and I drive to Baton Rouge to meet with Bishop Ott. He is a cordial, kind man. He will do anything he can, he tells us, to help save Pat’s life. We ask him to talk to Governor Edwards. Reverend James Stovall, head of the Louisiana Interchurch Conference, also present at this meeting, commits himself as well to talk to the governor.
On February 21, Pat’s thirty-fourth birthday, the U.S. Supreme Court denies his petition. On March 5 the trial judge, C. Thomas Bienvenu, Jr., issues the third date of execution: April 5, 1984.
I am visiting Pat and Eddie often these days. “Keep hope alive,” Millard is telling me. “Death-row inmates look at me all the time, words unspoken, their eyes asking the question: ‘Am I going to die?’ Keep hope alive.” And that is what I am trying to do with Pat and Eddie. I tell them in detail of all the efforts being made. I don’t have to fake the hope. I believe that somehow, from somewhere, against all odds, Pat will not be executed.
On March 17 en route to the prison I stop at a little store along Highway 66 to telephone Archbishop Philip Hannan, Catholic archbishop of New Orleans. For days I have been trying to telephone him to ask him to intercede with the governor on Pat’s behalf. While waiting for him to come to the phone I look at bottles of ketchup and cans of pork and beans. I am in one of these old-time country stores with rusted gas pumps out front, the ones that have the round glass tops. I notice there’s dust on the necks of the ketchup bottles. The merchandise must move slowly here. A woman sits on a stool behind the counter. She has the radio on. Normal life. The way life ought to be. People at their jobs listening to the radio.
At last the archbishop comes to the phone. I make my request in simple terms. It’s a short conversation, maybe five minutes. He asks a couple of questions but doesn’t ask for any documentation on the case. Yes, he’ll contact the governor and request clemency.
Yet, this is the same archbishop who has sent two priests to the death-penalty trial of an indigent black man, Willie Watson, to counter the testimony of a Jesuit priest, George Lundy, who urged the jury to vote for life. In other death-penalty trials preceding Watson’s, Lundy and other Jesuits, quoting from the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ statement in opposition to capital punishment,31 had convinced some juries to vote for life. This had so dismayed the pro-death-penalty Catholic D.A. of New Orleans, Harry Connick, Sr., that he asked Archbishop Hannan “as official spokesman for the Catholic Church” to give his position on the death penalty in writing. The archbishop had obliged him, setting forth a pro-capital-punishment position and assuring Catholics that they “can in good conscience endorse capital punishment.” In the letter, which Connick brings to first-degree murder trials and reads to jurors, the archbishop also asserts that “the position of the U.S. Catholic Bishops does not express the official position of this archdiocese.”32
At the Watson trial, where the archbishop’s representatives had countermanded Lundy’s testimony, the jury returned a death verdict. Afterward the state prosecutor remarked that the archbishop’s position had certainly “helped” their case. But Willie Watson’s mother offered a different view: “Ain’t nobody who’s of God want anybody killed.”33
Several weeks before his execution on July 24, 1987, Watson wrote a letter to Archbishop Hannan saying that it was “wrong” for him to have sent the “two old priests” to argue for the death penalty, and he asked the archbishop to urge clemency on his behalf before the Pardon Board. The archbishop sent a letter urging the Board to spare Watson’s life.
Archbishop Hannan is a perplexing man.
The prospect that a person will be killed according to the policy he promulgates prompts the archbishop to urge clemency, an incomprehensible position logically. But, despite his strong views on capital punishment, he does not try to silence those who disagree with him, as some church prelates do. I respect him for that.
Millard, in preparing for the meeting with the governor, has been talking a lot these days about Brad Fisher, a clinical psychologist and an expert in prisoner classification whom Millard has recruited to evaluate Pat. It’s important, Millard says, to show the governor that this man will make an ideal lifer at Angola.
Fisher’s assessment of Pat’s “prison adjustment potential” could not be more positive.
In his affidavit he points out how Pat in twelve years of incarceration has never had one disciplinary report; how he functions well in a structured environment; how his past work experience indicates that he will be a good worker; how, in the “thousands of cases” he has reviewed, “not a single inmate has promised to be more of a constructive element in the prison environment” than Pat Sonnier.
You can’t get a more positive evaluation than that.
It gives me hope.
On Tuesday, March 27, at 2:00 P.M. we are scheduled to meet with Governor Edwin Edwards at the state capitol building. There will be about eight of us: Bishop Stanley Ott; Rose Williams, mother of Robert Wayne Williams, executed in December; Brad Fisher; Millard; Kimellen; Joe Nursey, an attorney on Millard’s team; and myself.
We expect to be ushered into the governor’s office for a private conversation. Instead, we are directed into a large room. There are TV cameras, bright lights, reporters, a long conference table. I take a seat almost directly opposite the governor.
Obviously the governor intends to make public his policy on executions. That must mean his mind is already made up. I sink inside.
Governor Edwards is coming to this meeting with us right after lunch with the Catholic Bishops in which he sought to clear up a “misunderstanding” about his belief in the resurrection of Jesus. He had gotten into trouble for a public statement he made which seemed to doubt Jesus’ resurrection, and he begins by announcing that he and the bishops have met and “cleared up this matter of the resurrection,” (the press chuckles) and an image of the governor’s appointment calendar flickers across my mind: Tuesday, March 27: noon, resurrection; 2:00, execution. Inverse order exactly of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
We each make our statements and the governor makes his.
Millard talks about Pat’s inadequate legal defense and the arbitrariness of a system which gives one brother life, the other death.
Rose Williams talks about her son’s execution and says that Christians should forgive, not seek revenge.
Bishop Ott says that the death penalty is a simplistic solution to a complex moral issue and that executions signal to society that violence is an acceptable way of dealing with human problems.
Brad Fisher points out Patrick’s excellent disciplinary record at Angola.
And I say that Pat is a good worker and could be productive in Angola serving a life sentence, and though I in no way condone his crime, what will we accomplish by killing him?
The governor encourages us to introduce legislation to abolish the death penalty. “Now’s maybe the time,” he says, “because there have been two executions in recent months [Johnny Taylor followed Robert Wayne Williams] and maybe the public could be persuaded that the death penalty does not deter crime.” But he stresses that we must understand, “I’m the governor and represent the state and must carry out the laws and must submerge my own personal views to carry out the expressed will of the people.” He is hesitant, he says, to express his own personal views on the subject, saying he fears provoking another controversy like the one on the resurrection. And he clearly delineates his position: yes, he’ll look carefully at the case, but unless there is “some clear, striking evidence for innocence and gross miscarriage of justice” he will not “interfere” in the process.
He moves to collect his papers. Television lights are being shut off. Some are already beginning to rise and move from the table.
I call to him, “Governor.”
He looks up at me.
I say to him, “I am Pat Sonnier’s spiritual adviser. If he dies, I will be with him. Please don’t let this man die.”
“Can you do that?” he asks me. “Can you watch that?”
There is concern on his face. I notice how shiny his forehead is from sweat. Maybe it’s just sweat from the TV lights.
“I promised him,” I say and plunge ahead. “Governor, there are two brothers involved in this case, they’re indigent and had terribly ineffective legal defense, and I have real questions whether Pat is truly guilty of first-degree murder.”
“I’ll give the case careful consideration,” he says.
I realize that the governor has found a moral niche in this process, a position from which he can make decisions and still lay his head on the pillow at night and go to sleep. He is a public official. His job is to carry out the law. He subordinates his conscience to the “will of the people.” The law speaks for itself: if it is the law, it must be right, it must be true. Edwards is not “personally” responsible if he simply “does his job” within the law.
Several years later we will have a long talk, the governor and I. When we talk, he will have “presided” over thirteen executions in his third term of office, Patrick Sonnier’s being the first, and he will tell me how, as governor, he tried to distance himself as much as possible: “I tried to get the legislature to remove the whole process from the governor, but I recognize that in the final analysis some one person has to have the authority to stop an execution, even though you don’t have to take an affirmative action to make it happen. The whole process is in the judicial system; then, all of a sudden, in the last thirty days to have it sitting on the heart and mind and soul of one man is a very difficult position to be in.”
In 1978 he transferred responsibility for signing death warrants from the governor to the sentencing judge, a task that in most other states remains with the governor.
Edwards tries to put the death process as far from himself as possible. Still, he can’t escape the red telephone in the corner of the death chamber, where a call from him, even at the last minute, means life for the man being strapped in the chair and silence means death.
John Maginnis, a Louisiana political writer, calls this pardon power of the governor the last vestige of the power of kings, the last of the life-and-death choices bestowed upon individuals in a democracy.34
Politics plays its part. In the recent gubernatorial election campaign Edwards’s Republican opponent, David Treen, had put up billboards across the state and run TV ads citing the number of pardons Edwards had granted criminals in his previous term of office. “Soft on crime,” “coddler of criminals” — Treen’s accusations had hit Edwards hard. Now Edwards gives serious thought to the political fallout should he commute a death sentence. Plus, he knows that behind Pat Sonnier stands a line of other condemned men. If he commutes Sonnier’s sentence, what about the others? Dare he risk his political career to save the lives of a few condemned criminals? What’s a governor to do?35
There is silence in the car as Millard, Kimellen, Joe, and I drive back to New Orleans. They will now be working around the clock to prepare for the Pardon Board hearing and to file appeals in the courts. “Let’s not give up on the courts,” Millard says. “We still might hit pay dirt with one of the issues.” Millard is the “heart” man, always injecting hope. Joe is the “head” man. At will, he can pull from a file in his head the names and dates of court decisions of the past hundred years.
Sam Dalton, an attorney in New Orleans, has lent Millard’s team the use of his office and equipment. With great care they set about preparing for the Pardon Board hearing. Kimellen quickly learns Sam’s word-processing program and begins typing. Millard asks me for a picture of Pat and he gets it color-copied to go on the first page. The papers for the hearing are being put into a neat black binder with tabulated sections — Personal Background, Prison Adjustment, Facts of the Crime, Prior Legal Proceedings — and several appendixes of court records and the statement of the U.S. Catholic Bishops on the death penalty.
In obedience to Millard I cart home the seven volumes of trial manuscripts and read through them at night when the day’s work is done.
The transcripts are powerful and evoke the trial vividly. Some of it is tedious. All of it is painful. I can only guess the horror that must have gripped the victims’ families sitting there in the courtroom listening to the terrifying details of the abductions and murders.
There are thousands and thousands of words, and I read them all. There are a few discoveries.
I find that Eddie in his first confession had claimed that only Pat, not he, had raped the girl, but later he admitted that he had lied, that he too had sexually assaulted her. Pat’s most insistent point with me has been that he did not rape the girl.
Which leads to the autopsy report. The bodies had been discovered six to eight hours after death and the autopsy was performed shortly afterward. Semen was found in the vagina of Loretta Bourque, but there was no report of semen identification.
Was the blood-matching test omitted?
Was the test lost or misplaced?
Was it suppressed?
Isn’t this a serious omission in the state’s prosecution of a rape/ murder case?
If, in fact, semen identification had revealed that Pat had not raped the girl, would it not discredit Eddie, who claimed that Pat had raped her? And if Eddie was lying about the rape, was he also lying about the murders?
Then this discrepancy: When he confessed to the police at the scene of the crime, Pat had pointed out where he had stood while firing — some eight feet away, maybe more, from the victims — and he had said that he had shot back and forth from one victim to the other. But the pathologist testified that the small circumference of the wounds indicated that the shots had been fired at close range with the muzzle of the weapon against the skin. But how do you get wounds in such a small circumference from a gun alternating from one victim to the other and fired from eight feet away?
I examine Eddie’s testimony on the stand with great care.
At times he is hard to believe.
He says that his brother had told the kids to lie face down so he could take their photographs for identification purposes. He asserts that he had seen the suffering on the boy’s face after he was shot, although he has already said that the boy was lying face down. He asserts that he had heard the boy moaning “for several seconds or more” after he had been shot (the pathologist had testified that he believed death to be instantaneous).
None of this now matters legally. The opportunity for arguing evidence is long past.
At some point Millard decides that Pat should not attend the Pardon Board hearing. Several weeks ago Millard, Kimellen, and I had traveled to see Pat’s mother. Millard judges that the hearing would be more than she can handle. She writes a letter appealing to the Board to spare the life of her son. Pat’s sister, Marie, who lives in Tennessee, and Pat’s aunt, his mother’s sister, also write letters to the Board.
I am not privy to the decision that Pat should not attend the hearing, but I trust it. Brad Fisher, Millard, and I will speak at the hearing.
This will be the first clemency case for Edwards’s newly appointed Pardon Board. “Our job,” Millard says, “is to convince them that they do not have to kill this man. The D.A., of course, and probably members of the victims’ families will try to convince them otherwise.”
Bill Quigley, a local attorney from New Orleans, joins us. He is a close friend whom I met when I first came to St. Thomas. In the late seventies he and his wife Debbie had worked at Hope House, he a seminarian, she a nun. They had fallen in love and married, incorporating into their wedding vows a commitment to serve the poor. That led Bill into a legal practice, which he describes as “raising money for my family one half of the day and raising hell in the other half.” Which means representing the causes of poor people — public housing residents, prisoners, th
e homeless, death-row inmates.
It comforts me to know he will be part of this effort. I am often a visitor in the Quigley household. Patrick, seven years old, is always eager for my stories, jokes, and the few magic tricks I have mastered. Bill and Debbie’s bathroom wall is plastered with sayings from Dorothy Day and Gandhi, and behind the toilet is a Catholic prayerbook.
In Sam Dalton’s office Bill tells us about a recent conversation with Patrick.
He was sitting by Patrick’s bed until his son fell asleep, (a protection against “monsters”) and was leafing through the materials on Patrick Sonnier’s case that Millard had given him. Patrick had asked what he was reading and Bill told him, and Patrick had asked why people wanted to kill Mr. Sonnier.
“Because they say he killed people,” Bill had answered.
“But, Dad,” Patrick had asked, “then who is going to kill them for killing him?”
“Sign this kid up on our team,” Millard says.
The Pardon Board hearing will meet in Baton Rouge on Saturday, March 31.
On the morning of Friday, March 30, Joe Nursey visits Pat in Angola. Soon afterward Pat is moved to the death house. Four more days: one more Saturday, that’s March 31, then Sunday, April 1, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. That’s it. Wednesday night just after midnight. No more Thursdays for Pat.
Millard puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “He’s not going to die. I’m not sure how it will happen, but he’s not going to die.”
In the afternoon of March 30 we file the petition with the Pardon Board. Inside the office we meet Howard Marsellus, chairperson of the Board, who offers us a cup of coffee. He certainly is friendly enough, a black man who has had to work his way up in life, he says, and he seems extremely open to the issues we raise about the death penalty.
Millard says that in the South nine times out of ten when the death penalty is sought it’s because the victim is white, even though blacks are most often the victims of violent crime. Marsellus agrees with that. And Millard says that capital punishment as practiced in the United States is a poor man’s punishment and Marsellus enthusiastically agrees, adding, “You’ll never see a rich person coming before this board.” And Joe adds that you won’t see a rich person not because rich people never commit terrible crimes but because the expert legal counsel they hire know how to “play the system.” This gives Millard a chance to give a brief history of the kind of legal representation Pat has had and how, if he and his team had taken his case from the beginning, this man would never have gone to death row. Marsellus nods. I talk about who Patrick Sonnier is as a person, hoping that Marsellus can sense from my words the reality of this man, the goodness in him despite his part in such a heinous deed. He listens intently, kicked back in the chair behind his desk, looking me straight in the eyes. I tell a bit of my experience of living and working in St. Thomas and how I came to be involved in the struggle for this man’s life.
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