… have you witnessed the VICTIM being raped, stabbed, shot, not to mention the agony of the family left behind? You only think of the killer’s plight, who will not be tortured or suffer, just instant death.
So the state finally executed this poor murderer. Terrible. Why didn’t you hold his beautiful hand with the blood on it when they executed him? May God send him to hell for all eternity!
Your professed Christianity leaves a lot to be desired when one learns that in all of your misguided attempts to make Elmo your martyr of the Catholic Church, you failed to communicate even the smallest gesture of compassion, kindness, or comfort to the innocent, life-long Catholic families who did nothing to deserve the horrifying brutality inflicted on them … you are not the first wolf to hide in sheep’s clothing …
I have before me a copy of the Vatican City report banning priests and nuns from engaging in political activities … I suppose [Sister Prejean] would use the trite phrase “violation of human rights” in reference to the death sentence … But what else can you expect from a bunch of naive, frustrated women who know nothing of the real world …?
I let the outrage come. I have no desire to write a letter to the editor to defend my actions. I regret that so many people do not understand, but I know that they have not watched the state imitate the violence they so abhor. Only one criticism causes me anguish — that I did not reach out to the Bourques and the LeBlancs when I first began visiting Pat. But there are, I decide, a couple of steps I can take on their behalf. I call Bishop Gerald Frey’s office in Lafayette, the diocese in which the Bourques and LeBlancs live, and urge him to visit them. Perhaps his visit can help heal their hurt. He promises to see them soon and he keeps his promise. I also talk to Nancy Goodwin and encourage her to pursue her plan to engage the Catholic community in victim advocacy. With Nancy’s help over the next several months the Catholic Diocesan Office of Lafayette will inaugurate a special Mass, with the bishop officiating, to be celebrated every year for victims of violent crime. The diocese also helps to organize a support group for victims of violent crimes.4
One day I receive two letters. One is from Patrick Sonnier. It’s an Easter card, the kind the prison chaplains give to inmates. It must have been in limbo for a while on some chaplain’s desk. On the front of the card is a bouquet of flowers and inside is a quote from the Gospel of St. John about eternal life. Pat had written: “I can’t begin to express how much your friendship means to me. But I thank the good Lord above for sending you into my life.”
The other piece of mail is an article published in the Picayune on May 2, less than a month after Pat’s execution. Father Joseph Doss, an Episcopalian priest, has sent the article to me with the comment: “Amazingly similar to the Sonnier crime.”
The article describes the abduction at gunpoint of a teenage couple from a shopping center near Hammond, Louisiana, on April 21 (about two weeks after Pat Sonnier’s execution) by a man who forced the couple to drive down a rural road where he then robbed them and shot them in the back. The boy had died at the scene. The young woman was described as being in “serious but stable condition” in a nearby hospital. The article also mentions two other recent robbery abductions of young people at gunpoint.
It would be difficult to prove, I realize, that media coverage of the Sonnier crime, which was extensive (Hammond is near New Orleans and Baton Rouge), had triggered a “copycat” abduction-murder, but, it’s clear that Pat Sonnier’s execution did not deter the perpetrator of a similar crime. And the incident makes me wonder if state executions — which legitimize killing — incite violence rather than deter it. Some studies show an increase in homicides immediately after publicized executions, although as yet the evidence of such “brutalization” is inconclusive.5
But evidence that executions do not deter crime is conclusive. In the U.S. the murder rate is no higher in states that do not have the death penalty than in those that do.6 In Canada, the homicide rate peaked in 1975, the year before the death penalty was abolished, and continued to decline for ten years afterward. And the first major report on capital punishment prepared for the United Nations in 1962 concluded: “All the information available appears to confirm that such a removal [of the death penalty] has, in fact, never been followed by a notable rise in the incidence of the crime no longer punishable by death.”7
In the fall of 1987, immediately after the state of Louisiana executed eight people in eight and a half weeks, the murder rate in New Orleans rose 16.39 percent.8
A 1991 CNN/Gallup Poll shows that only a small percentage of Americans — 13 percent — believe that capital punishment deters future criminals, in contrast to 59 percent in 1977.9 Nor do the majority of Americans now seem to think that increasing the number of executions is the way to reduce crime.10
A week after arriving back at Hope House I get a telephone call from Joseph Larose, the editor of the Clarion Herald, the New Orleans Catholic newspaper. He tells me he’s been reading the “mean” letters to the editor about me and he’d like to send out one of his reporters — Liz Scott — so I can express “my side.”
“Sure,” I say, and the next afternoon Liz comes to Hope House and we sit on the front porch on the green wooden bench and begin what will prove to be a lasting friendship. Later, Liz will confess to me that she had come to the interview highly suspicious of me, figuring I must be “some kind of nut” to get myself involved with murderers on death row.
Liz is pretty. She’s funny. She writes a humor column for New Orleans Magazine. She went to a Catholic high school, “Celibacy Academy,” as she calls it in her humor column. She has six children, but they’re mostly grown and so she can pursue her writing. Her husband, Art, is a dentist, but she always wanted to be a writer and she couldn’t be just a dentist’s wife, she says, dressing up like a giant tooth to visit kindergarten classes, as some wives of dentists do.
I hadn’t known that some dentists’ wives paraded around like giant teeth. I have to laugh.
I tell her the story of how I came to St. Thomas, how I came to know Pat, and what I’ve learned about the death penalty and victims’ families. She has a tape recorder and takes careful notes. I am thinking how pleasant it is to be sitting here on this bench and talking. It is May and the air is drenched with the sweetness of the pink mimosa blossoms and there is a cool breeze coming off the river. On the sidewalk in front of us gaggles of chattering children meander home from school, and I know that one of the gifts I have now, after the death house, is to know how precious life is and how I want to savor it and taste it and use my powers to the fullest and not niggle them away.
Liz’s article about me appears soon after the interview. The headline reads: “Controversial Nun Takes Christ’s Directive Literally.” Controversy was one of the things Liz and I had talked about. It is proving to be one of my main surprises: get involved with poor people and controversy follows you like a hungry dog. (If you work for social change, you’re political, but if you acquiesce and go along with the status quo, you’re above politics.)
Back into the stream of events at Hope House, I am working with students and publishing a newsletter and a book of residents’ poetry. The image of the death house with its polished tiles and gleaming oak chair is fading. I turn my attention to where life is. Although I have decided that I will not be going to death row again, I cannot bear to think that there are some men there now who are facing death alone with no spiritual adviser to befriend them. I also now know that inadequate legal representation can get a man killed and so, somehow, whatever it takes, I must see that every death-row inmate has a decent attorney for his appeals.
What I’ll do, I decide, is talk with Tom Dybdahl in the Prison Coalition office to see whether we could conduct a training session for people interested in becoming spiritual advisers to death-row inmates. We’ll have to recruit them, of course, but I know some people to invite and Tom knows some people, too.
And so I sit down with Tom and we hatch some plans.
I telephone Millard Farmer in Atlanta and tell him about our proposed training session and ask him if he will give a presentation on the legal system. I have not talked to him since Pat died. And here he is with that gravelly Georgian voice, saying once again that he’ll “hep” us. He asks me how I’m doing and he says, “I heard a little rumor that you are taking on another guy on death row as his spiritual adviser.”
“Unh-unh, Millard, you heard wrong,” I say, and punch wrong.
The training session goes well. Tom, who knows all the death-row inmates, matches volunteers with inmates.
After the training session Millard, Tom, and I sit down at the table in the Hope House kitchen and talk about legal representation for death-row inmates. Poor Tom is tired. For two years now he’s been ministering to the needs of all prisoners in Louisiana, an impossible job in itself, not to mention all the needs of death-row inmates. The executions have drained him. What we need, Tom says to Millard and me, is a legal office just for death-row inmate appeals. Millard has some suggestions: recruit an attorney who has a “passion for this issue,” someone willing to work for $12,000 a year for two years, maybe someone just getting out of law school, raise about $25,000, and we’re in business. “Our office will work with the attorney and give our expertise,” Millard says.
This plan of Millard’s is exactly what we do. Tom and I enlist Martha Kegel, director of the Louisiana branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Bill Quigley, and some folks who have money, and we put the office into operation in September 1984.11
It’s time to make my yearly retreat — a time to sit on the riverbank and take a look at where I’ve been and where I’m going. Time to get in touch with the “soul of my soul.”
I pack my suitcase and go to our motherhouse in New Orleans for a week. All I need is a room, some food, silence. The silence I both long for and resist. I have made enough retreats to know that silence almost always entails at least one soul-sized wrestling match. The writers of the Christian Gospels talk about Jesus being led into the desert of solitude to be “tempted” by the devil. Not all sweetness and light, this silence.
The first few days of retreat are all calmness and soft light. No blinding flashes. Quiet waters. I float. I sleep. But one afternoon, several days into the retreat, I come into my bedroom and find a newspaper clipping on my bed placed there by one of the Sisters. I see Bishop Ott’s picture, taken as he appeared before the Criminal Justice Committee of the Louisiana legislature to speak in favor of a bill to abolish the death penalty. The accompanying article recounts how the bill was defeated in committee: thirteen to two. I see that Dracos Burke, the assistant D.A. who prosecuted Pat’s case, is there to speak against the bill. Noting that opponents of capital punishment are saying that executing criminals may not deter crime, Burke says, “If it doesn’t, all we’ve lost is the life of a convicted criminal.”
As if some among us — not-as-human-as-you-and-I — are disposable. And who selects and eliminates the disposable ones?
Government.
For the last year or so I’ve been reading and studying Amnesty International’s investigation into the death penalty as it is practiced by governments around the world. Amnesty has found that ten countries — China, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa,* the former USSR, and the United States — account for eight out of ten executions worldwide. And six countries — Iran, Iraq, Bangladesh, Barbados, Pakistan, and the United States — have, for the last decade, led other countries in juvenile executions despite a worldwide trend setting eighteen as the minimum age for execution.12
The Amnesty reports include photographs: in China two young men atop a flatbed truck en route to their deaths by firing squad, their crimes — “thief,” “rapist” — on signs above their heads; in Nigeria an elderly father touching the face of his son, tied to a post, about to be shot by firing squad for armed robbery; in Egypt, a woman, her face contorted with fright, about to be hanged for murdering her husband; in Saudi Arabia two decapitated bodies in a public square, people huddled, staring.
Amnesty’s investigation into the judicial processes of the hundred or so governments that impose the death sentence (the United States and Turkey are the only NATO countries that continue to execute)13 has revealed that without exception, the penalty of death is disproportionately meted out to “the poor, the powerless, the marginalized or those whom repressive governments deem it expedient to eliminate.”14
No government gets it right.
Most of the governments that execute, Amnesty points out, do not deny that imposing death is cruel; they simply argue that executions are necessary.
But the U.S. Supreme Court denies the cruelty.
In Furman v. Georgia in 1972 the Court found the practice of the death penalty to be constitutionally unacceptable, not because it considered killing criminals inherently cruel, but because it thought the penalty too “arbitrary” and “capricious” in its implementation. The Court found that, lacking specific guidance, the imposition of the death penalty by juries was frequently based on race or random luck. The court also found the infrequency of the punishment problematic. “When a country of more than 200 million people inflicts an unusually severe punishment no more than 50 times a year, the inference is strong that the punishment is not being regularly and fairly applied,” wrote Justice William Brennan, concurring in the majority opinion.15
In response to Furman, state legislatures quickly set about redrafting capital statutes that were supposed to provide specific trial guidelines so that juries might apply the death penalty more even-handedly.
In Gregg v. Georgia, (1976) the high court ruled that Georgia’s “guided discretion” laws for capital sentencing effectively removed the randomness from death sentencing. Other state legislatures, using Georgia’s reformed statutes as a model, passed legislation reinstating the death penalty.16
The Court in Gregg17 expressed its satisfaction that such reformed guidelines, coupled with “meaningful appellate review,” would effectively eliminate capriciousness in death sentencing: “… no longer can a jury wantonly and freakishly impose the death sentence.”
So, the Court reasoned: death evenly handed out to criminals was not cruel. Then it gave further arguments why killing criminals was not in violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” provision of the Eighth Amendment:
“The imposition of death for the crime of murder has a long history of acceptance … It is apparent from the text of the Constitution itself that the existence of capital punishment was accepted by the Framers …”
A large proportion of American society consider the death penalty “appropriate and necessary.”
The death penalty is an “expression of society’s outrage at particularly offensive conduct.”
The death penalty is justified even though its deterrent effects are “inconclusive.”
Even if it could be demonstrated that life imprisonment as punishment for murder is as effective as the death penalty in deterring crime, capital punishment is, nevertheless, justified. Quoting Furman, the Court said, “… we cannot ‘invalidate a category of penalties (death) because we deem less severe penalties (life imprisonment) adequate to serve the ends of penology.’ ”
Pressing its argument further, the Court ruled that in some instances death as a punishment not only is allowed, it is demanded:
Indeed, the decision that capital punishment may be the appropriate sanction in extreme cases is an expression of the community’s belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death [emphasis mine].
At the heart of the Eighth Amendment is the concept that human beings are not to be subjected to cruelty and torture because they possess an inherent dignity. But in Gregg the Court reaffirmed what Furman had determined: retribution — even in its most extreme form, killing, is not “inconsistent with our respect for the dignity of men.”
Given such a moral climate in the judiciary, Dracos Burke is not ethically far afield when he argues before the Criminal Justice Committee of the Louisiana legislature that the loss of life of a “convicted criminal” is no loss at all.
Burke’s words ignite me into action. I realize that I cannot stand by silently as my government executes its citizens. If I do not speak out and resist, I am an accomplice. Here I see Bishop Ott calling for abolition, standing up for what he believes. Here he is and here I am and what am I going to do?
After retreat, I call Bill Quigley and he invites me to a meeting in New Orleans of attorneys, civil rights leaders, and religious leaders. At the meeting about eight of us sit around a table in Julian Murray’s office. (Julian is an attorney representing Earnest Knighton, a Louisiana inmate facing imminent execution.)
Bill says that he believes it’s time to take the issue of the death penalty directly to the people. All other avenues of recourse, he points out — the governor, the legislature, the courts — are closed. It is time, he says, for public witness, public education, a grass-roots campaign.
Barbara Major, a black woman who knows about marches and their role in history, says, “Let’s walk. Let’s walk big-time. From here to Baton Rouge.” And it’s a spark and it catches and everybody starts throwing in pieces of kindling and a little fire sputters and builds.
We open up calendars and set a date: October 26 to 28. Bill, Barbara, and I will serve as steering committee. Everybody commits to raising fifty dollars. There are flyers to be printed. Invitations to be sent across the state. Permits to be secured for marching on state highways and city streets. Food, lodging, and transportation to be solicited. A whole swarm of things to be done.
We know that this public action is only the first step, that the task of informing people in schools, churches, and civic groups is the real work. There will need to be brochures printed, speakers trained, educational videos produced.
Dead Man Walking Page 15