Authors: Helen Prejean
Sorting through papers in manila folders, I see a stack of disciplinary reports on Eddie. Pat must have requested these. Or maybe Eddie sent them to him on his own.
The man who owned the things in the boxes is dead. I have to keep reminding myself of that. I think of the scene from George Bernard Shaw’s
Saint Joan
and what Chaplain Stogumber had said after he witnessed Joan of Arc’s execution. No one had been more eager than he to see her die. So eager that he had physically pushed her into the arms of the executioner and urged him to light the fire quickly. He couldn’t wait to see her die. But then he had watched and in the epilogue says: “I tell my folks they must be very careful. I say to them, ‘If you only saw what you think about you would think quite differently about it. It would give you a great shock.… I did a very cruel thing once because I did not know what cruelty was like. I had not seen it, you know. That is the great thing: you
must see it. And then you are redeemed and saved … it was not our Lord that redeemed me, but a young woman whom I saw actually burned to death. It was dreadful: oh, most dreadful. But it saved me. I have been a different man ever since …”
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But that was when the torture was visible. Witnesses could see the flames lick the flesh. They could hear the cries of agony. But this death … with witnesses behind the square of Plexiglas like that, it was like a framed scene, death in the movies, death in celluloid, death under glass. There he was, saying his last words. There he was, walking to the chair. There he was, being strapped in. Three clangs of the switch. No smell of burning flesh (the Plexiglas shields witnesses from the smell). No sight of his face (the mask conceals his face, his eyes). And with his jaw strapped shut like that, he could not cry out.
Who killed this man?
Nobody.
Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job — the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. DA’s are fond of saying that criminals “put themselves in the chair.” Shortly before the execution in Louisiana of a convicted murderer, Tim Baldwin, on September 10, 1984, a guard in the death house whispered to him, “You gotta understand, Tim, this is nothing personal.”
I think of the telephone conversation I had with head of Corrections C. Paul Phelps shortly before Pat’s execution. How had he phrased it? He wanted the execution to be carried out with
dignity
. Now that Pat has been killed and I don’t have to steel myself to carry on, I realize that Phelps’s cool, professional tone had terrified me.
Phelps is a “good, Catholic man.” So the people in Catholic circles of Baton Rouge describe him. And with a master’s degree in social work, he is reputed to be one of the more humane, progressive heads of the Louisiana Department of Corrections. I’ve heard that he has confronted members of the Louisiana legislature and argued against their lock-’em-up-throw-away-the-key solution to crime, urging instead more intensive efforts with first-time nonviolent offenders to keep them out of prison.
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Yet he supervises executions.
In fact, he’s the one who designed the process.
I plan to stay in Baton Rouge a few days and Phelps’s office is here and I decide to talk to him. I can’t say exactly why. Maybe it’s to confront the cool professionalism. Maybe it’s because I know he’s a social worker and a “good, Catholic man.”
Back at Mama’s house I call Phelps and he readily grants me an appointment.
“You were the only wild card, among the witnesses, the only one I wasn’t sure of,” Phelps says to me as we meet in his office and begin to talk. He’s in his mid-fifties, a tall man, his hair thinning. He’s soft-spoken, reflective. On the bookshelf behind his desk is a photograph of his family.
“You were the only one I hadn’t talked to face to face before the execution,” he says, and he tells me how he had inquired about me to find out what I was like and how I might react seeing someone executed.
“I’ve been wondering about you, too,” I say. And then I tell him what it was like to watch a man being put to death in such a premeditated, inexorable process and ask what he thinks has been accomplished by this execution.
“Zero,” he says, “absolutely nothing.” Nor does he think that executions prevent crime, because in his view punishment, to be effective, must be “swift, sure and fair.” As he sees it, the criminal justice system produces the death penalty “when it is to the advantage of the prosecution.” He explains how D.A.s weigh a number of factors — the cost of the trial, the evidence, the expertise of the legal defense arrayed against them — and he points to a recent example in Baton Rouge in which a judge sentenced a man who had shot and killed four people to two life sentences. “The cost of the trial would have been fantastic,” he says, “so the D.A. offered a plea bargain and the defendant was willing to accept two life sentences. But some people are not given a chance to choose, especially if they kill somebody important. If you kill an LSU professor or a priest or any other highly respectable citizen, you’ll probably go to trial and they’ll push for the death penalty, but not if the person you kill is a nobody. By its nature the criminal justice system will always be somewhat arbitrary.”
“Yet you played your part,” I say. “You don’t seem to believe that the death penalty is morally right, but here you are lining up the witnesses, designing the protocol. Do you experience any conflict of conscience between your personal religious beliefs and what your
job calls you to do? If Jesus Christ lived on earth today, would he supervise this process?”
Predictably, he explains that he didn’t make the law, he’s only following the law and, in fact, doing his best to make the “process” as “humane” as possible. He says that if something is required by law and is the fonction of a fonction, then it’s not “optional.” The personnel in the DOC, he maintains, “don’t have to take any personal responsibility for what they are doing. It’s their job. They are told to do it. They are told how to do it. They are told how long it’s going to take and what you do when you do it. It’s like a drill, like an exercise, so they have no personal responsibility.”
I ask him what happens to his personal convictions in this process, and he says that when he is called on to speak in public, he never speaks from his personal convictions.
There it is again, I can’t help but notice — the severance of personal values from public duty — just like Governor Edwin Edwards, who felt moral repugnance for the death penalty but who nevertheless allowed it to be carried out.
Phelps is so reasoned, so soft-spoken, so professional. My heart weighs a hundred pounds.
I ask him whether it isn’t ethically dangerous to submerge personal convictions so that they have no bearing on one’s work. What, I ask, if the law which a government uses to legitimize killing is itself morally wrong, as in Nazi Germany? Aren’t there, I argue, some rights fundamental to human beings — such as the right not to be tortured or killed — that everyone, including governments, must respect? Doesn’t the moral foundation of a society erode if its government is allowed to treat these fundamental, nonnegotiable rights as some sort of privilege, which they take on themselves to dispense for good behavior or withdraw for bad behavior? I point out that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which unequivocally endorses the right of every human being not to be killed and not to be subjected to torture or to cruel and degrading punishment — and the United States signed that declaration.
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If a policy or law is morally wrong and we know it’s wrong, aren’t we bound in conscience to oppose it? I ask him.
He says that if he’s opposed to doing any part of his job he should quit or refuse to accept the job in the first place.
Which I know is true, and the moral complexity deepens because a caring and intelligent man like Phelps can accomplish much good in this position. The head of Corrections sets the tone and affects
the policies of what goes on in the prisons; and in Louisiana, which incarcerates such a huge number of its citizens, a man like Phelps goes a long, long way.
I ask him to tell me about the execution process that he has designed, and he shows me a copy of Department Regulation Number 10–25, issued April 6, 1981. I glance at the document and notice headings: Purpose, Responsibility, Legal Authority, Incarceration Prior to Execution, Media Access, Time and Place of Execution …
“From a personal standpoint it is very, very bizarre to design a process like this,” he says, “because you find yourself approaching an execution the same way you approach putting on a rodeo or any other special event.” Before designing the process, he says, he made field trips to talk to corrections officials in other states that use the electric chair, and he engaged the services of an electrical engineer — “he worked for free, he refused to be paid” — to devote his attention to “the technical aspects of the apparatus.”
Inwardly I translate the terms,
technical aspects of the apparatus
, and I think of how silent it was there in the room as the guard screwed the rubber-coated wire to the top of the metal cap on Pat’s shaved head.
Setting up the “process,” Phelps explains, involved hiring an executioner.
“We hired a man, an electrician, who filled out a civil service application for the job. Frank Blackburn, the warden at Angola at the time, interviewed the prospective candidate for the job in some depth because we obviously wanted somebody who was screwed down pretty tight and very, very firm in his convictions, not just someone with a morbid interest. We were looking for — this may sound strange — somebody professional. We didn’t want a mafia-type executioner.” Blackburn, he says, gave him a name, “Sam Jones,” to preserve his anonymity. (Sam Jones had been governor in Louisiana in 1941 when the method of execution changed from hanging to electrocution.) He agreed to be paid $400 per execution. It was a verbal agreement, not written.
I make a mental note of the anonymity of the executioner and the reluctance to sign a contract specifying fee for service. I log it alongside something that Phelps mentioned earlier: that the electrician who wired the chair refused to be paid — the intuitive recognition that this is “blood money,” this is “death for hire.”
The fact that anonymity is granted to the executioner intrigues me. I’ve heard that in Utah, when Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad, blanks were inserted into one of the rifles so that
those firing the guns would not know for certain if they killed the man. No doubt, the uncertainty helps diffuse responsibility.
Phelps says that for him, the most “troublesome” aspect of the “process” has been the selection of witnesses. With the resumption of executions, some victims’ families asked if they might witness, and he says he “pondered” this a long time but “couldn’t think of a reason why they shouldn’t. Our position in the DOC is that I am not the ‘keeper of the morals’ but merely the enforcer of the law, and if there is no legal reason barring a victim’s family, I see no reason to deny them.”
Phelps says that he emphasizes to all witnesses — victims’ families included — that during an execution there must be “no emotional outbursts, no obscenities uttered, no undignified behavior of any kind.” They have designed a process, he says, that “protects everyone’s rights,” including those of the one being executed. “They have a family too. A circus atmosphere is not in anyone’s interest.”
I am listening to all this and I keep picturing Pat’s dead body in the chair, the fingers of his right hand curling upward, the doctor’s light shining into vacant eyes.
I say that I disagree that the rights of the man being killed are protected because the witnesses to his death are expected to be polite.
“Pat Sonnier was tortured, Mr., Phelps,” I say. “I’m not sure what he felt physically when the nineteen hundred volts hit him, but certainly he agonized emotionally and psychologically — preparing to die, anticipating it, dreaming about it. Amnesty International defines torture as an extreme physical and mental assault on a person who has been rendered defenseless. That is what happened to Patrick Sonnier, isn’t it, Mr. Phelps?”
Phelps nods. “People these days want revenge, and that’s what revenge is — ‘eye for an eye,’ pain for pain, torture for torture.”
I can tell he doesn’t agree with this bent toward revenge. I know that at heart he’s a social worker.
“Will you attend an execution and witness for yourself the end result of this process?” I ask.
“Never in a million years,” he says.
Which doesn’t surprise me. I have a hunch that if this man were to remove the bureaucratic gauze and see with his own eyes this killing laid bare, he’d quit this job.
I rise to leave and reach out to take his hand. I thank him for his time. Outwardly I’m poised but inwardly I’m devastated. It’s the fact that a man as obviously good as this is participating in this
process that is most disturbing. Phelps is the fourth public official I have met — before him the governor, the warden, the chairperson of the Pardon Board — who, despite his personal reservations about the moral rightness of state executions, nevertheless plays his part in carrying them out. It all seems so intractable. I tell myself that I had simply better accept the fact that the death penalty is here to stay in our society, at least for a while, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe, in time — after how many executions? — people will come to realize the futility of randomly selecting a few people to die each year. In time, perhaps, people will realize that executions do not deter violent crime.
Pat is dead now, I tell myself, and I know that I did everything I could for him, and there is peace in that. But for me there will be no more involvement with death-row inmates. The end. No more death-row pen pals. No more visits. Except Eddie. I’m the only steady, caring lifeline that he’s got. I can see his life solidifying. In the prison welding shop he’s becoming a productive worker, and his disciplinary write-ups have ceased.