Authors: Helen Prejean
And so I sit down with Tom and we hatch some plans.
I telephone Millard Farmer in Atlanta and tell him about our proposed training session and ask him if he will give a presentation on the legal system. I have not talked to him since Pat died. And here he is with that gravelly Georgian voice, saying once again that he’ll “hep” us. He asks me how I’m doing and he says, “I heard a little rumor that you are taking on another guy on death row as his spiritual adviser.”
“Unh-unh, Millard, you heard wrong,” I say, and punch
wrong
.
The training session goes well. Tom, who knows all the death-row inmates, matches volunteers with inmates.
After the training session Millard, Tom, and I sit down at the table in the Hope House kitchen and talk about legal representation for death-row inmates. Poor Tom is tired. For two years now he’s been ministering to the needs of
all
prisoners in Louisiana, an impossible job in itself, not to mention all the needs of death-row inmates. The executions have drained him. What we need, Tom says to Millard and me, is a legal office just for death-row inmate appeals. Millard has some suggestions: recruit an attorney who has a “passion for this issue,” someone willing to work for $12,000 a year for two years, maybe someone just getting out of law school, raise about $25,000, and we’re in business. “Our office will work with the attorney and give our expertise,” Millard says.
This plan of Millard’s is exactly what we do. Tom and I enlist Martha Kegel, director of the Louisiana branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Bill Quigley, and some folks who have money, and we put the office into operation in September 1984.
11
It’s time to make my yearly retreat — a time to sit on the riverbank and take a look at where I’ve been and where I’m going. Time to get in touch with the “soul of my soul.”
I pack my suitcase and go to our motherhouse in New Orleans for a week. All I need is a room, some food, silence. The silence I both long for and resist. I have made enough retreats to know that silence almost always entails at least one soul-sized wrestling match. The writers of the Christian Gospels talk about Jesus being led into the desert of solitude to be “tempted” by the devil. Not all sweetness and light, this silence.
The first few days of retreat are all calmness and soft light. No blinding flashes. Quiet waters. I float. I sleep. But one afternoon, several days into the retreat, I come into my bedroom and find a
newspaper clipping on my bed placed there by one of the Sisters. I see Bishop Ott’s picture, taken as he appeared before the Criminal Justice Committee of the Louisiana legislature to speak in favor of a bill to abolish the death penalty. The accompanying article recounts how the bill was defeated in committee: thirteen to two. I see that Dracos Burke, the assistant D.A. who prosecuted Pat’s case, is there to speak against the bill. Noting that opponents of capital punishment are saying that executing criminals may not deter crime, Burke says, “If it doesn’t, all we’ve lost is the life of a convicted criminal.”
As if some among us —
not-as-human-as-you-and-I
— are disposable. And who selects and eliminates the
disposable
ones?
Government.
For the last year or so I’ve been reading and studying Amnesty International’s investigation into the death penalty as it is practiced by governments around the world. Amnesty has found that ten countries — China, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa,
*
the former USSR, and the United States — account for eight out of ten executions worldwide. And six countries — Iran, Iraq, Bangladesh, Barbados, Pakistan, and the United States — have, for the last decade, led other countries in juvenile executions despite a worldwide trend setting eighteen as the minimum age for execution.
12
The Amnesty reports include photographs: in China two young men atop a flatbed truck en route to their deaths by firing squad, their crimes — “thief,” “rapist” — on signs above their heads; in Nigeria an elderly father touching the face of his son, tied to a post, about to be shot by firing squad for armed robbery; in Egypt, a woman, her face contorted with fright, about to be hanged for murdering her husband; in Saudi Arabia two decapitated bodies in a public square, people huddled, staring.
Amnesty’s investigation into the judicial processes of the hundred or so governments that impose the death sentence (the United States and Turkey are the only NATO countries that continue to execute)
13
has revealed that without exception, the penalty of death is disproportionately meted out to “the poor, the powerless, the marginalized or those whom repressive governments deem it expedient to eliminate.”
14
No government gets it right.
Most of the governments that execute, Amnesty points out, do
not deny that imposing death is cruel; they simply argue that executions are necessary.
But the U.S. Supreme Court denies the cruelty.
In
Furman v. Georgia
in 1972 the Court found the practice of the death penalty to be constitutionally unacceptable, not because it considered killing criminals inherently cruel, but because it thought the penalty too “arbitrary” and “capricious” in its implementation. The Court found that, lacking specific guidance, the imposition of the death penalty by juries was frequently based on race or random luck. The court also found the infrequency of the punishment problematic. “When a country of more than 200 million people inflicts an unusually severe punishment no more than 50 times a year, the inference is strong that the punishment is not being regularly and fairly applied,” wrote Justice William Brennan, concurring in the majority opinion.
15
In response to
Furman
, state legislatures quickly set about redrafting capital statutes that were supposed to provide specific trial guidelines so that juries might apply the death penalty more even-handedly.
In
Gregg v. Georgia
, (1976) the high court ruled that Georgia’s “guided discretion” laws for capital sentencing effectively removed the randomness from death sentencing. Other state legislatures, using Georgia’s reformed statutes as a model, passed legislation reinstating the death penalty.
16
The Court in
Gregg
17
expressed its satisfaction that such reformed guidelines, coupled with “meaningful appellate review,” would effectively eliminate capriciousness in death sentencing: “… no longer can a jury wantonly and freakishly impose the death sentence.”
So, the Court reasoned: death
evenly handed out
to criminals was not cruel. Then it gave further arguments why killing criminals was not in violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” provision of the Eighth Amendment:
Pressing its argument further, the Court ruled that in some instances death as a punishment not only is allowed, it is demanded:
Indeed, the decision that capital punishment may be the appropriate sanction in extreme cases is an expression of the community’s belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the
only
adequate response may be the penalty of death
[emphasis mine].
At the heart of the Eighth Amendment is the concept that human beings are not to be subjected to cruelty and torture because they possess an inherent dignity. But in
Gregg
the Court reaffirmed what
Furman
had determined: retribution — even in its most extreme form, killing, is not “inconsistent with our respect for the dignity of men.”
Given such a moral climate in the judiciary, Dracos Burke is not ethically far afield when he argues before the Criminal Justice Committee of the Louisiana legislature that the loss of life of a “convicted criminal” is no loss at all.
Burke’s words ignite me into action. I realize that I cannot stand by silently as my government executes its citizens. If I do not speak out and resist, I am an accomplice. Here I see Bishop Ott calling for abolition, standing up for what he believes. Here he is and here I am and what am I going to do?
After retreat, I call Bill Quigley and he invites me to a meeting in New Orleans of attorneys, civil rights leaders, and religious leaders. At the meeting about eight of us sit around a table in Julian Murray’s office. (Julian is an attorney representing Earnest Knighton, a Louisiana inmate facing imminent execution.)
Bill says that he believes it’s time to take the issue of the death penalty directly to the people. All other avenues of recourse, he points out — the governor, the legislature, the courts — are closed.
It is time, he says, for public witness, public education, a grass-roots campaign.
Barbara Major, a black woman who knows about marches and their role in history, says, “Let’s walk. Let’s walk big-time. From here to Baton Rouge.” And it’s a spark and it catches and everybody starts throwing in pieces of kindling and a little fire sputters and builds.
We open up calendars and set a date: October 26 to 28. Bill, Barbara, and I will serve as steering committee. Everybody commits to raising fifty dollars. There are flyers to be printed. Invitations to be sent across the state. Permits to be secured for marching on state highways and city streets. Food, lodging, and transportation to be solicited. A whole swarm of things to be done.
We know that this public action is only the first step, that the task of informing people in schools, churches, and civic groups is the real work. There will need to be brochures printed, speakers trained, educational videos produced.
We know we have our work cut out for us, aware as we are that the vast majority of U.S. citizens say they favor capital punishment. A 1966 Gallup Poll showed 42 percent of the population in favor of the death penalty; a 1991 CNN/Gallup Poll showed support at 76 percent.
18
Clearly, the public’s fear of escalating violent crime has fueled the recent fervor for capital punishment. Between 1960 and 1976, the number of reported murders in the United States more than doubled — from 9,060 to 18,780 — and between 1960 and 1980 the rate of “index crimes”
*
listed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation rose by more than 230 percent.
19
Despite high pro-death-penalty sentiment, however, public support seems stronger in the abstract than in the concrete. Most juries, for example, faced with actually imposing death in capital trials, choose life imprisonment, even in “Death Belt” states;
20
and a growing number of public opinion surveys show that it is protection from criminals rather than executions that most citizens want. A 1986 Gallup Poll reveals that while 70 percent say they favor the death penalty, if they are given new data that show that capital punishment does not deter crime and are offered the alternative of life imprisonment without parole, support for executions drops to 43 percent.
21
In
Furman
, Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that “informed public opinion” about the death penalty was, in fact, anything but informed: “… the American people are largely unaware of the information critical to a judgment on the morality of the death penalty … if they were better informed they would consider it shocking, unjust and unacceptable.”
In 1975 Austin Sarat and Neil Vidmar, fellows at Yale Law School, empirically tested the “Marshall hypothesis” and found it to be correct. Their study found most subjects ignorant of the way the death penalty was imposed and of its effects and less inclined to favor it once they received even minimal information about it.
22
Soon after the meeting in Julian Murray’s office I find myself looking around the room at a Hope House staff meeting. There are about sixteen people on the staff now, many engaged in adult education. But no one in the entire state of Louisiana is working full-time to talk to the public about the death penalty.
23
I will do this.
The decision unfolds like a rose.
I ask to meet with the regional coordinator of my congregation. If I am to devote myself to this work, I need the confirmation of my religious community. They readily give their blessing.
My decision to work for abolition of the death penalty does
not
include offering myself as spiritual adviser to another death-row inmate. But one day in October, six months after Pat Sonnier’s execution, Millard Farmer comes over for lunch and asks for my help. He says he is representing two death-row inmates in Louisiana and he would like me to become their spiritual adviser.