Authors: Helen Prejean
Millard leans over close to the screen and says, “Wish I could shake your hand, Pat, so nice to meet you.” Pat knows the score, that he’s facing certain death.
Millard is calm, systematic, competent. I clear everything else from my mind and take out a piece of paper and take notes as he talks to Pat. In the car on the way to the prison Millard had said that I ought to go over the trial transcripts and learn all I can about Pat’s case. He’s a team player. “We need everybody’s eyes and mind and heart looking at this case,” he had said. “Sometimes it’s the nonlawyers who catch something we miss.”
Millard tells Pat to think of every legal issue as a rock, and that he wants to go over his case thoroughly with him and for him not to leave out anything, even if he thinks it insignificant. “We want to load as many rocks as we can into our wagon,” he says.
He explains one of the issues — the Clark issue — that they plan to litigate in the appeal. The Louisiana criminal code, he says, specifies that a person cannot be convicted of first-degree murder unless he personally possessed the intent to kill, and also that a
person who is considered a principal in the crime, who aids and abets in a first-degree murder, cannot be convicted of first-degree murder unless he or she specifically intends for the victim to be killed.
27
“But your transcript,” Millard explains, “shows both the prosecutor and the judge instructing the jury that regardless of who pulled the trigger, you or Eddie, both of you were in concert and so could be held to be principals and guilty of first-degree murder. That instruction is clearly against the Louisiana criminal code because it relieves the state of its burden to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you possessed the specific intent to kill. The judge in his instruction clearly omitted this part of the code, and so this instruction made it easier for jury members to convict you of first-degree murder, especially those who might be entertaining doubts about which of you was the triggerman.
28
“The good news for you is that this exact issue has been raised in the Clark case and he was granted a new trial by the Fifth Circuit.”
29
I am beginning to feel relieved and picture a substantial boulder being hoisted into Pat’s wagon. This is new to me, that the Louisiana code requires intent to kill. I had always thought that if two people were involved in a felony that led to murder, the very fact that they were present during the crime made both equally guilty.
Millard reminds me of a surgeon.
“But the bad news,” Millard says, and his voice drops, “is that your attorney, when he presented your habeas appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court, must not have known about the Clark case because he failed to raise this issue, and now we are going to have a tough time getting a rehearing. They will probably say that we’re abusing the writ, that your attorney should have raised this issue earlier. We’re going to argue that you should not die while Clark is allowed to live solely because of the disparity of legal skills in attorneys. We are going to appeal to their sense of fairness and reasonableness.”
I know when I hear this that this rock is far from being in the wagon.
Pat brings up his confession, his and Eddie’s mixed-up plan to confuse the authorities, his fear that he was going to be beaten if he didn’t confess, but Millard shakes his head,
“Impossible to prove. Not a rock for the wagon.”
Millard asks how often Pat’s attorneys conferred with him before trial. Was there any written correspondence between them?
“Nothing written,” Pat says, and then tells how he was in jail nine months before he met his trial attorney and then only once on the day before trial, and that he had gone before the judge in pretrial procedures three times without an attorney.
30
He says that at his trial his attorney called Eddie up as a witness to testify against him without having interviewed Eddie beforehand.
“I saw that in the transcript,” Millard says. “I couldn’t help but notice that the attorney introduced himself to Eddie there on the stand.” He shakes his head, but he’s staying upbeat with Pat, I can tell. He tells him that they are planning to raise ineffectiveness of counsel in the petition and “every other issue we can, the big ones and the little ones.”
Pat keeps saying, “Thank you, Mr. Millard, thank you for going to all this trouble for me.”
When Millard’s conversation with Pat is over there isn’t one rock in the wagon.
On the way home Millard clears his throat and grips the steering wheel and says to me, “I’m going to be very, very honest with you. Pat has no ‘net’ in the courts.” Then he lays out his strategy: Edwin Edwards is soon to be inaugurated for his third term as governor. “From what I know of Edwards,” he says, “I believe he is a reluctant supporter of capital punishment, and Pat will be his first confrontation with execution.” He explains that what we have to do is to mobilize religious leaders and people close to Edwards to appeal to him to grant clemency, and we will need to arrange a private meeting with him — no media present — where we can talk to him about Pat as a person and appeal to his deepest moral instincts.
“No doubt about it, he has the power to save this man’s life,” Millard says. “He can commute the death sentence to life or he can grant a reprieve, which is only temporary, but it will keep Pat from dying.”
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.”