Authors: Helen Prejean
My sister, Mary Ann, has agreed to go with me to St. Martinville to see the Sonniers and to deliver Pat’s possessions. The clothes are all washed and dried and smelling clean and folded neatly in the boxes — gray sweat pants and white T-shirts, jeans, socks, underwear. It’s about a two-hour drive to St. Martinville from Baton Rouge. We leave in late morning and stop for a sandwich in a little snack shop once we get there. Pat has been dead for four days now.
We drive up to Gladys Sonnier’s little project apartment. It’s a small one-story red brick building. It has a small yard. The grass has been cut recently. She grows a few vegetables. There’s a heavy, sweet smell in the air. Must be ligustrum bushes nearby. I take a deep breath. The last time I was here I was with Millard and Pat was still alive. Houses, when you look at them, always look different when you know someone associated with them has died. This little red brick house looks different now.
When I greet Gladys Sonnier, she hugs me briefly, then turns away, wiping her eyes. There are deep circles under her eyes and her body seems leaden, sagging. She’s barely sixty but she looks very, very old.
In her kitchen Gladys has brewed a fresh pot of coffee for us. Her hands shake as she hands me my cup. She asks us to serve ourselves. Marie, her daughter, is here, and Joan, her sister, and Glenda Ann, Joan’s daughter.
Glenda and Marie express their distress about how the press
“misrepresented” their family. Glenda tells me that one story said the family had “refused” Pat’s body and so the body had to be “turned over to the nuns.” Marie says another story said Pat’s family was “too poor” to bury him. “We would have found a way to bury him if he had only asked us,” she says. And Glenda says that the media said there was no one from the family with him at Angola at the end, “but they don’t say that we weren’t there because Pat wanted it that way.” And she tells how she had written Pat and offered to come and be with him in the death house and so had her mother, but he had refused, saying he didn’t want to “put us through it.” And Marie says that one newspaper article said that the flowers on Pat’s coffin had been donated by the funeral home, but it was the family who had bought the wreath. “And one account mentioned Eddie as the only family member present at the funeral Mass. They didn’t even mention that there were fifteen of us there and it was all family members who were the pallbearers,” says Marie.
“Will you write a letter to the editor and present our side?” Marie asks me.
I promise them that I will, right away, and I’ll send them a copy.
I tell Mrs. Sonnier about Pat’s last moments and how strongly he had urged me to convey his love to her. I tell her how Bishop Ott had remembered her in his prayers at the funeral Mass. I am very brief. I know she can’t take very much. Then I talk about Eddie. I suggest that if she wants to visit Eddie, I could drive her to Angola. Transportation is a problem for her. Mrs. Sonnier shuts her eyes tight and shakes her head from side to side and says that she doesn’t know if she can ever “set foot inside that place again.” Maybe, after some time has passed, perhaps we can talk about it again, I suggest.
The boxes of Pat’s things have been sitting on the floor and I mention them now, but Mrs. Sonnier turns away from the boxes, and Marie offers to sort through the clothes to see who might be able to use them.
On the morning after the execution, Mrs. Sonnier tells us, she had found a dismembered cat on her front porch.
“People are so cruel,” she says.
I think of the Bourques and the LeBlancs. Lloyd LeBlanc, I hear, cannot sit behind teenagers in church because he cannot bear to look at the back of their heads.
Back now in Baton Rouge I pack my things. It is time to return to Hope House. Sister Lilianne has been carrying a double load, covering for me at the Adult Learning Center. Time to head back.
Am I the same person I was before? I had learned as a child from my Catholic catechism that some sacraments like baptism leave an “indelible” mark on the soul, a mark that can never be erased. Does witnessing an execution also leave an “indelible” mark?
The thought of working with students appeals immensely to me. I picture the large classroom at Hope House and how the breeze ruffles the curtains as it comes through the tall windows, the mimosa trees blooming outside. It will be good to be in the flow of normal life again. I am glad to step out of this surreal landscape. I figure I will never be going to death row or an execution chamber again.
Back in St. Thomas a stack of newspaper clippings and letters is waiting for me on my bed. Sister Lilianne says, as she helps me unpack, that the letters to the editor about Pat’s funeral in the
Times-Picayune
have been running “hot and heavy.” The
Picayune
had run the AP story on Pat’s burial with the headline: “Executed Killer Blessed with Burial for the Elite,” and the article had said that this executed murderer “received in death what few Catholics ever achieve — a funeral Mass conducted by a bishop and burial within the shadow of graves of other bishops.” There is no mistaking the thrust of the article — Pat Sonnier was buried as a hero.
Over the next six weeks that becomes a theme of outrage in the letters to the editor of the
Picayune
and the
Daily Iberian
and in personal letters sent to me:
My husband and I have supported the church all our lives, sent our children to Catholic schools, and what happens? We see a criminal getting buried in the place reserved for nuns and bishops!
… 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.