Authors: Helen Prejean
“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, the 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.
We chat like this for about thirty minutes. Marsellus agrees with everything we say.
“I’ll study the petition very carefully,” he promises, “and I’ll see that each member of the Board does the same. See you tomorrow.”
We thank him and leave the building, but once back at the car we cannot contain our excitement. Marsellus could not have been more sympathetic.
“I feel so
go-o
d” (two Georgian syllables), Millard says.
I let out a whoop.
Millard and Joe’s analysis is that Edwards does not want to execute people, but he must protect himself politically, so he has appointed a pro-clemency Pardon Board, who will make recommendations to him which he will then follow, thus giving himself “cover.” We are all buoyed up.
Later Marsellus will serve time in a federal prison for rigging pardons and accepting bribes while serving as chairperson of this board. When he gets out of prison, he will weep as he tells me how he betrayed his deepest ideals by trying to be a “team player” for the governor by protecting him from difficult clemency decisions.
On the morning of the thirty-first, the day of the Board hearing, I get up early to pray. I sit in the rocking chair in my room where I always begin the day. I face the crucifix and the small burning flame of an oil lamp.
Just this space, this time now, not yet in the rapids, not yet in the fire of debate, the points and counterpoints. Only me here and, you, God of truth, God of life, give me words, essential words, words to pierce the conscience, to turn the heart
.
I am awed at the power invested in these five human beings on the Board. How can they possibly assess the facts, nuances, ambiguities, testimony, countertestimony, politics, race, class, and legal arguments all bundled into the case of this man? Or, maybe their lines of decision-making are much simpler. Perhaps they do not see it as their role to question the judgment of the courts. Maybe their position will be like Edwards’s: if they do not see a gross miscarriage of justice, they will go for death. They know that the law and the public mood demand this death. If anyone is opposed in principle to the death penalty, he or she is not sitting on this board.
I have spoken before in public. But I have never pleaded for someone’s life.
In my journal the night before the hearing I list a few basic points:
I’ll acknowledge the evil Pat has done and make very clear that I in no way condone his terrible crime, but I’ll try to show that he is not a monster but a human being like the rest of us in the room: that he deserves punishment but not death.
I’ll speak of mercy being stronger and more God-like than vengeance, and that this man can live the rest of his days productively at work behind the walls at Angola. He will pay for his deed and the public will be protected.
The next day I dress in my navy blue suit and white blouse and look with new meaning at my little silver crucifix before kissing the figure of the Executed Criminal and slipping the chain around my neck. I go to Mass with the Sisters in St. Alphonsus church, eat some Cheerios, and drive to Baton Rouge.
There I meet Millard and the others and we go to a little hamburger place for lunch. I find myself taking extra-deep breaths. I know I am doing all I can do and there is peace in that. I know that
Millard Farmer is at the helm and I trust that. I keep asking God to bring these efforts to good.
At one-thirty we head to the building on Mayflower Street where the hearing will take place. As we enter we are asked to sign a book, a kind of registry, and we must state which “side” we’re on — the state’s or the defendant’s. People are beginning to come in, mill around, drink coffee. I see some of the Sisters from my religious community. I had called them and invited them to come, and we stand in a little cluster and talk. Sisters Kathleen Bahlinger and Lory Schaff are here — good, reliable friends who work among the poor in Baton Rouge. They will play a crucial role in events over the next five days.