Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

“You got it right,” Marsellus says.

  After the telephone conversation with Roberts, Marsellus says, he knew what he had to do. The Board rendered its decision to uphold Baldwin’s death sentence.

  Marsellus says that a couple days after the Baldwin hearing, C. Paul Phelps, head of the Department of Corrections, came into his office to expedite the “deal” that had been worked out between the governor and Baldwin’s girlfriend. Her sentence was to be cut to time served, and Marsellus was to see that her case was “expedited” by the Board.

  “The way things went down,” Marsellus says, “Baldwin was executed, and his girlfriend was let out of prison. She’s out today. You can check it out.* But listen to this — and it was Phelps (then secretary of the Department of Corrections) who told me about this — he was there at these meetings between Edwards and Baldwin’s girlfriend that I’m telling you about now. See, you have to understand that, after Baldwin’s Board hearing, the press had been badgering the governor about Baldwin’s possible innocence and whether he was going to let him be executed. Under this pressure Edwards decided to double-check the testimony of Baldwin’s girlfriend.

  “The governor went in his helicopter to the women’s prison in St. Gabriel to meet Baldwin’s girlfriend, but when he met her, she had her lawyer sitting there at her side, and the lawyer told the governor to come back the next day because her client needed time to consult with her.

  “You understand, of course, the implications of that, don’t you?” Marsellus says. “The lawyer wanted to negotiate a reduced sentence for her client in exchange for the testimony she would give. So, the governor flew back to the Governor’s Mansion and then flew back the next day to talk with the woman again — Phelps was there both times — and this time she testified, as she had at the trial, that yes, Baldwin had committed the murder. Her testimony helped salve Edwards’s conscience. It’s what he wanted to hear — that the man about to die was guilty. But Edwards had to have known what was really going on and that in all probability the woman was lying to save her own skin, to get out of prison. To have the governor of the state come and this woman says to him, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow’? ‘Come back tomorrow’? Why would she need to prepare overnight to answer a question she had already publicly stated under oath was the truth?”

  I tell Marsellus that once, when I had talked to Governor Edwards, we had talked about Baldwin’s case, and Edwards said that he was convinced Baldwin was guilty.

  Marsellus is angry. “No way. No way. Edwards knew. He knew the real score. He may have said that to you to save face, but he was the one who worked out the deal with the woman. These deals were going on all the time.”

  He then explains to me the workings of the bribes-for-pardons scheme that went on until the time of his arrest.

  He says that when the Pardon Board met, there would usually be several applicants’ files marked “Expedite,” which meant a “deal” had been cut. The payments varied, Marsellus says, — “sometimes a few thousand, sometimes way up at $100,000 or more.”

  I ask who got the money, and Marsellus says, “Lawyers, state legislators. You figure it out. Only the governor can grant a pardon. Who do you think got the money?”

  He explains how the scheme worked. “Here’s a mother who wants her boy out of prison, so she goes to an attorney (who is also a legislator) and asks what it will cost and he tells her, say, twenty thousand dollars. Then, the legislator, not wearing his attorney’s hat now but his legislative hat, goes to the governor and presents the request for the pardon and the governor gets in return from him his commitment to pieces of legislation that the governor wants passed. The legislator gets his pardon and the governor gets endorsement for his legislative bills. That’s the deal.

  “Then, before our Board hearings, I’d get the word from the governor’s office about which deals would go down when the Board met. ‘The governor wants this one or that one,’ that’s what they’d say. Then at the Board hearing the legislator/attorney, representing his client — as an attorney now, not a legislator, so he couldn’t be accused of conflict of interest — would present the inmate’s case for pardon. Of course, it had already been worked out with the governor.”

  Marsellus says that there would be cases sometimes, where an especially heinous crime had been committed and some of the Board members would balk at giving the pardon, and he’d have to pull them aside and tell them the governor had already committed to the pardon and their task was to put it through.

  Driving home after Baldwin’s execution, Marsellus says, “down that dark, curvy road, my hands were shaking and the tears were running down my face and I said to my wife, ‘Why did I ever get out of education? How have I let myself get involved in all this horror?’ ” But then, he says, he had come back to the required loyalty. If he wanted to remain in his position, he would have to continue being a “team player.”

  I feel sorry for Marsellus. His boat got caught in a current and he went along. It must have been a terrible ordeal to know all the wheeling and dealing going on and yet sit there, time after time, and look into the faces of people about to die and then turn down their request for clemency. I ask him about this, about how he feels now, knowing he did this.

  He is crying, I can hear him choking out his words over the phone, and I think of St. Peter, an apostle of Jesus, who, legends say, cried until the end of his life because he had denied Jesus. Peter cried so much, the legend goes, that tears cut permanent furrows in his cheeks.

  “From day one I was doing political things that were morally wrong,” Marsellus says. “The whole administration was corrupt from the top down, but I chose loyalty above integrity.”

  He remembers Earnest Knighton. “He was another one I thought shouldn’t have died,” he says. “During a robbery he shot the storekeeper in the arm — in the arm — and the bullet entered the man’s heart and killed him. That’s not intent to kill, not when someone shoots a man in the arm.”

  “But Knighton was a black man who killed a white person and was tried by an all-white jury,”8 I remind him.

  Marsellus and the Board had upheld the death sentence for Knighton as they did all of the sentences of the six men who appeared before them, and my guess is that the faces of these condemned men will appear and fade and appear again before Marsellus for the rest of his life.

  “I did these things,” he says, “I sat in judgment on these men like that — the guilty and the innocent. But who was I to sit in judgment? It still bothers me. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  *I checked. Marilyn Hampton, Baldwin’s girlfriend, sentenced on October 18, 1978, to life imprisonment for first-degree murder, was released from prison on June 9, 1986.7

  CHAPTER

  9

  I dread hearing what Liz Scott is saying to me. She is telling me about her interview with the Harveys for the New Orleans Magazine article. “They’re pretty upset with you,” she says. “They thought that your visit with them before the Pardon Board hearing had brought you around to their way of seeing things. They feel that you used them, that you only visited with them so you could get ‘ammunition’ for the Pardon Board hearing. They call you and the other nuns who protest executions the ‘sob sisters.’ ”

  It was too much to expect, I tell myself, that I could be friend and comforter to the Harveys while opposing the execution of their daughter’s murderer. Intellectually I am not wavering. I am as convinced as I ever was that the execution of Robert Willie is a betrayal of human rights, but I feel guilty that I have added to the Harveys’ pain. Liz, good friend that she is, says, “You can’t win ‘em all.”

  And I am going back in my mind and clearly remembering sitting there in the car as I was ready to leave the Harveys after my visit, when Vernon had said that we were like two baseball teams that opposed but respected each other. Didn’t that mean he understood that we had opposing views? How could they think they had changed my position on the death penalty? Should I have been more explicit? Had I left them wi
th a false impression? Did I betray them?

  I decide the best thing I can do for the Harveys is avoid them.

  Shortly after the Pardon Board hearing, Robert Willie’s trial judge sets the date of execution for December 28. When I hear the date, I know it’s real. With Pat, I hoped a stay of execution would come. I did not expect him to die. But I know Robert is finished with the courts, with the Pardon Board, and certainly with the governor. This doesn’t make the experience easier but it does make it simpler. Robert will not be torn between life and death, wondering if the ring of the telephone in the death house brings news of a stay of execution. There is only death for Robert now, and waiting for death.

  I am now visiting him every week. I have also visited his mother, Elizabeth, and his aunt, Hazel. Robert has three stepbrothers, and Elizabeth says they will come with her on her next visit to see Robert. His aunt Hazel shakes her head sadly at the fate of her nephew. He had lived with her for a while but the boy just wasn’t stable, she says, and he and her son had often gotten into trouble together (amply substantiated, I remember, by the juvenile reports). Elizabeth seems to be holding up remarkably well, though she often cries when she talks about Robert. Mandeville, where she lives with her husband, “Junior,” and her sons, is a small rural town just across Lake Pontchartrain.

  “You know how people talk,” she says. “I feel like everybody’s watching me when I go into a store. Everybody knows who I am.” And she tells of standing near two women in the grocery store and overhearing one say that she “just can’t wait to hear that they have finally executed that monster, Robert Willie.” She had fled the store in tears. Her husband and children and close relatives seem supportive, and I am glad about that.

  Now, seeing Robert for the first time since the Pardon Board hearing, I notice that his demeanor is unchanged — the same jaunty walk and the little black hat.

  “Maybe I had a little hope goin’ in to the Board,” he says, “but I knew they were 0 for 3, and I didn’t really expect to do better than Sonnier, Baldwin, or Knighton.”

  He seems matter-of-fact. He seems to accept his fate.

  “Speakin’ of Tim Baldwin,” he says, “Warden Blackburn really liked that guy. I think it was hard on him to see him executed. Every single, solitary time Blackburn’d make a visit to the Row, he’d go on over to Baldwin’s cell and have a little chat. Baldwin was an easygoing dude. He never pushed nobody. But Blackburn always goes right past my cell, and when he does talk to me, he never does look me in the eye.” He shakes his head. “He doesn’t like me. He’s afraid of what I might do,” and he looks down at his wrists and I notice that his hands are cuffed tight in the black box, a solid, square device that holds the wrists rigidly in place. I have only seen it used when prisoners are transported from Angola — never, like this, in the visiting booth. “Some snitch,” he says, “must have told Blackburn I was plannin’ to hit the fence. I bet I know who it was, too, a dude who ain’t wrapped too tight, who’s always kissin’ ass with the authorities. Now, I admit I’ve been talking about gettin’ out of this place if I get half a chance — who wouldn’t — but” — and he brandishes the black box — “Blackburn sure ain’t takin’ no chances, is he?”

  I’m noticing how he is talking about Blackburn with a tinge of regret in his voice when he describes how the warden had a soft spot for Baldwin but not for him. Blackburn has a kind face and is, in my estimation, a gentle, fatherly figure as prison wardens go, and I sense that Robert would have liked to win his confidence. It makes sense. He’s never really had a father. His own father spent twenty-seven of his fifty-three years in Angola. Later, I am not surprised when Robert tells me that he has sent Warden Blackburn a Christmas card with the message, “I hope you and your family have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.”

  It makes me think of my own daddy. It has to be one of life’s most special feelings to know that your father is proud of you. I was my daddy’s scholar, his public speaker, his “pretty little girl,” his scribe who kept the travel diary on family vacations. He always had a special tone in his voice when he introduced me to friends and colleagues. And this is my little daughter, Helen. In the presence of strangers I would fall silent, standing close against him, my hand holding on tightly to his, my eyes not venturing past the huge, brightly shined black shoes (he never liked brown); and afterward, having emerged unscathed from the Encounter with the Towering Strangers, I would squeeze his hand tighter than ever and teem once more with chatter and questions.

  A kid can sail to the moon with that feeling of security from a father.

  But Robert Willie … Did Vernon Harvey have the facts right? Hadn’t he said that Robert’s father said his son deserved the chair and he’d be willing to pull the switch himself?

  I look across at Robert through the heavy mesh screen. I remember from his juvenile record that he once asked to be kept in jail because he had nowhere else to go.

  Robert says, indicating the black box on his wrists, “At first I had real bitter feelin’s about this, somebody snitchin’ on me, but I’m not really sure which one of ‘em snitched, so I was mad at all of ‘em and didn’t talk to none of ‘em for a while. But life’s too short to bear grudges, so, hey, I’m talkin’ to everybody now, all of ‘em.”

  Then he says he hopes he gets to see the football play-offs before he goes to the death house because he has two ice creams bet on Miami and he hopes he gets to bring his radio because he can’t make it through a day without music and he says how his life-style has changed since he came to the Row because now he’s in bed by 10:30 P.M., right after the 10:00 news.

  “The dude in the cell next to me will want me to watch some TV program and I say, ‘No, man, I’m goin’ to sleep.’ ” He laughs low. “They call me the Old man,’ ” he says, and then he describes how neat and fastidious he is and how he’s always asking for extra bleach and soap to clean his cell and how he’s spent about twenty dollars on toothpaste, shampoo, soap, deodorant — and how in summer when it gets so hot, he strips naked and pours cups of water over him and then uses the mop in his cell (“it’s just the mop part, the handle is sawed off”) to sop up the water from the floor.

  “Some dudes here don’t bathe and I tell ‘em, ‘Hey, man, there’s no sign sayin’ the shower don’t work. It’s not like you got to pay a quarter or nothin’.’ See, I got a sensitive nose, and I tell ‘em, ‘Man, you’re invading my privacy.’ ”

  I ask him if anything has come of the lawsuit on death-row conditions, and he says that the Department of Corrections has instituted a few changes: an extra TV on each tier, a few new food items from the canteen — peanut butter, jelly, and peppers — and approval for inmates to have two plastic containers to store food items, a radio/tape player, a small mirror, and drawing materials.

  “Probably just the threat of the suit was enough to win changes on this piddly stuff,” he says, “but eventually, for real, substantial changes, the suit will need to be reworked and pressed and it will have to be someone other than me ‘cause I’m not goin to be around.”

  He has a cigarette going, but with considerable difficulty because of the black box clamping his hands tight to the belt around his waist. He has to bend over almost double to reach the cigarette. “Whichever inmate takes on the task is gonna have his work cut out for him,” he says.

  I tell Robert I’ve been talking to his mother on the telephone and he says that now she’s his biggest worry. He can do it, he’s “ready to go,” but he doesn’t know what he’ll do if she starts “crying and breaking down” in the death house.

  That was what Pat Sonnier had feared most, his mother breaking down and causing him to lose emotional control.

  “You don’t always have to be this tough Marlboro Man,” I say to him. “Real men cry, you know.”

  He gives a little laugh, a nervous laugh, and I know he’s listening.

  “There’s another mother who’s suffering, Robert,” I say. “Elizabeth Harvey. She and Faith were ve
ry close. They used to talk to each other almost every night on the phone. They used to go shopping together. She had her brother come to dig her daughter’s jaw out of a body bag to do a dental check before she could accept that this daughter, whom she loved so much, was really dead. And she will live every day of her life knowing that her daughter died a terrible death — and alone. And, Faith — have you ever really faced her pain, felt it, taken it inside yourself? I’m saying all this to you because I’m your friend and I care about you and I just can’t see you going to your death and not owning up to the part you played in Faith’s death.”

  “I am sorry, I really am sorry about Faith,” he says, “I hope my death gives the Harveys some peace. I really do. Maybe my death will help them get some relief, some peace.”

  His head is down and his voice is soft, and when he says this I say to him, just as I said to Pat Sonnier, that his last words can be words either of hate or of love and maybe that’s the best thing he can offer the Harveys, a wish for their peace.

  The guard comes to tell us time’s up. As I am about to leave, I get a message that Major Kendall Coody wants to see me.

  The major. That’s top brass. This is the man in charge of death row who supervises inmates and guards. I brace myself. He probably wants to assess Robert’s seriousness about escaping. Maybe he wants to know if Robert has a “cyanide finale” or something like that planned.

  He asks me to pull the door behind me as I step inside his office.

  “How’s Willie doing?” he asks.

  “Okay,” I say, “I think he’s okay.”

  He’s seated behind his desk and I can’t tell how tall he is. I’d guess he’s in his late forties. He has a broad, square face, fair skin, and a thick brown mustache. His dark brown hair is neatly combed except for a thick shock that falls in the middle of his forehead. He has light brown eyes and wears glasses. He is a troubled man.

  “I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to keep doing this,” he says. “I’ve been through five of these executions and I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I’m dreaming about executions. I don’t condone these guys’ crimes. I know they’ve done terrible things. I don’t excuse what they’ve done, but I talk to them when I make my rounds. I talk to them and many of them are just little boys inside big men’s bodies, little boys who never had much chance to grow up.”