Authors: Helen Prejean
The swath of violence cut by Christians across the centuries
is long and wide and bloodstained: inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, persecutions of Jewish “Christ-killers.” Now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, U.S. government officials kill citizens with dispatch with scarcely a murmur of resistance from the Christian citizenry. In fact, surveys of public opinion show that those who profess Christianity tend to favor capital punishment slightly more than the overall population — Catholics more than Protestants.
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True, in recent years leadership bodies of most Christian denominations have issued formal statements denouncing the death penalty,
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but generally that opposition has yet to be translated into aggressive pastoral initiatives to educate clergy and membership on capital punishment. And the U.S. Catholic Bishops in their “Statement on Capital Punishment,” while strongly condemning the death penalty because of the “unfair and discriminatory” manner in which it is imposed, its continuance of the “cycle of violence,” and its fundamental disregard for the “unique worth and dignity of each person,” nevertheless uphold the “right” of the state to kill.
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But if we are to have a society which protects its citizens from torture and murder, then torture and murder must be off-limits to
everyone
. No one, for any reason, may be permitted to torture and kill — and that includes government. Before prisons existed, executions might have been justified as society’s only means of defense against crazed, violent killers. But today in the United States, following the example of other modern industrialized countries, we can incapacitate violent criminals through long-term imprisonment.
Recently this point was succinctly argued by convicted murderer Willie Leroy Jones. On September 15, 1992, just before the state of Virginia electrocuted him, he said, “Killing me is not the answer. There’s a place called prison.”
I look at Warden Blackburn and he is looking intently at me. He is ready to move the discussion to another front.
“What about this fainting episode you had?” he asks.
“I fainted because I was hungry,” I tell him. And I remind him of the prison rule forbidding visitors from bringing food into the prison and how the rule had forced me to fast for long periods of time once inside the prison.
“You know, Warden,” I say, “if it were emotional stress that caused me to faint, I would have fainted when I witnessed Pat’s execution, not two days earlier when I was planning a prayer service with the chaplains.”
I want to handle this fainting episode carefully. What he calls “a lot of commotion for prison personnel,” if stretched a bit, could be
interpreted as a threat to prison security if it were judged to involve an “inordinate” diversion of attention to my well-being instead of to inmates.
He nods his head, rests his cigar on the ashtray, and says to me, “We understand each other. We’re going to do all right.”
Those matters settled, I tell him that I wish to become Robert Willie’s spiritual adviser and I need him to speed up the process of my approval because there may not be much time for Willie. He says he’ll take care of it.
We rise and shake hands.
“I think the two priest chaplains here are pretty upset with me,” I tell him. He nods his head vigorously.
I say, “It seems they’re trying to block women from visiting death row.”
“I’ll see that it’s straightened out,” he says.
And he does. A couple of weeks after my meeting with him, Sister Lilianne receives approval to serve as spiritual adviser to a death-row inmate.
Organizing efforts for the October walk from New Orleans to Baton Rouge are gaining momentum. The steering committee is meeting every week now. Participants are signing up.
I have decided to move into a house near the Quigleys with two other nuns, Ann Barker and Leigh Scardina. We are drawn together by our concern for the poor and our desire to translate faith into social action. Once a week we gather with Bill and Debbie to talk, pray, and share a meal. We also participate in the pot-luck dinners in the Quigleys’ spacious backyard, where a refreshing cross-section of people gather — lawyers, project residents, ex-offenders, teachers, professors. I am glad to be part of an effort that draws together black and white, rich and poor — an antidote, I believe, to what I see as an endemic national malady, the isolation of socio-economic classes and races from each other.
For me, the costliest part of being a member of the new community is moving my residence out of St. Thomas. I hate to lose touch with the residents there. But I realize that the focus of my work now extends across the state, and it seems a matter of justice not to occupy valuable apartment space if I am not devoting myself primarily to the people who live there. There is a list five miles long of people waiting to get project apartments.
I also realize that by changing residence I am not changing my commitment to stand with the poor and work for justice. Plus, I will continue to have contact with the people of St. Thomas because
Pilgrimage for Life, the Louisiana abolitionist group, is housed at Hope House, and I continue to attend weekly staff meetings there.
Meanwhile, there’s Eddie Sonnier. Since Pat’s execution I have continued to visit him and driven his mother, sister, and aunt to visit him. He seems calmer. Something in him has settled. He has found some footing, some niche of workable peace. Once he said to me, “Pat’s dead now and there’s nothing I can do to bring him back. Every night before I go to sleep, I read the last letter he wrote to me.” He has taken to calling me “Sis.” It fits. I know I’m family to him.
Within a week after getting approval from the warden, I go to visit Robert Willie. It’s October 1984, six months after Pat Sonnier’s execution. With Pat time had a slower, more open-ended feel. But now time is an undertow.
Here are the same red block letters over the green metal door. Here’s the same eerie feeling coming back. There is no getting used to this place. I half expect Pat to show up behind the heavy mesh screen in the visiting room. But this is no Pat Sonnier coming into the cubicle. A slight young man in his mid-twenties peers through the screen to get a glimpse of me. He has dark blond hair brushed back in front, but long in the back, down to his collar. He has one of those intricate beards, an inverted V mustache above his lips coming down in two thin lines around his lips to his chin. The middle of his chin is clean-shaven but just under his bottom lip there’s a little tuft of hair. He’s fair-skinned and has pale blue eyes. He looks showered and neat in a blue denim jacket over a white T-shirt tucked into his jeans. Very thin waist.
I look at this man who has left such destruction in his wake. I can’t get over how small he is and how delicate his features are — nose, chin, lips — almost feminine, except for the beard. The process that has brought me to him is mysterious, but here I am and here he is.
“Thanks for coming to see me, ma’am. Never thought I’d be visitin’ with no nun,” Robert Willie says and laughs softly. I’m surprised at how deep his voice is — the slight body led me to expect a higher pitch. He speaks in a slow, even-toned drawl. His tone is polite and I can tell he’s trying to be friendly. He bends his head down low to take a drag from the cigarette in his hand cuffed to his waist. Very self-possessed. Like a cowboy.
I take the lead in the conversation. I let him float along and come into it when he feels like it. I want him to know who I am, what I think, how I feel. I do not expect much personal revelation from
him here in the beginning of our relationship. I tell him about going to the St. Thomas Project and working at Hope House. I tell him about my opposition to the death penalty and the walk we’re planning from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. I tell him that after Pat’s execution, I thought I’d never be coming back to death row again, but how Millard had come over for lunch and — here I am. I tell him some of the “Millard stories” (of these, there are an abundance). I tell him about my family and childhood. I tell him about becoming a nun.
He stops me there.
“Don’t you miss having a man? Don’t you want to get married?”
He is simple and direct. I’m simple and direct back.
I tell him that even as a young woman I didn’t want to marry one man and have one family, I always wanted a wider arena for my love. But intimacy means a lot to me, I tell him. “I have close friends — men and women. I couldn’t make it without intimacy.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “But there’s a costly side to celibacy, too, a deep loneliness sometimes. There are moments, especially on Sunday afternoons, when I smell the smoke in the neighborhood from family barbecues, and feel like a fool not to have pursued a ‘normal’ life. But, then, I’ve figured out that loneliness is part of everyone’s life, part of being human — the private, solitary part of us that no one else can touch.”
“What I miss most being here,” he says, and I notice he blows the cigarette smoke downward so that it does not drift into my face, “are the women and just bein’ in the bars and listenin’ to the music and dancin’ ‘til three or four in the morning. And I’m not goin’ to lie to you, ma’am, I believed in
doing it
. Me and my lady friends, we’d get us a blanket and a bottle or a little weed and go into the woods and do it,” and he gives a slight smile.
“Well, Robert,” I say, “let’s face it. If I had a husband and family, chances are I’d be there with them this afternoon, instead of visiting with you.”
“True,” he says. “Glad you’re here, ma’am.”
He’s primed now and he talks about his case in the courts. He’s aware that “time’s gettin’ short” and says how he’s been reading and studying every law book he can get his hands on. “When you’re in a place like this, you learn the law fast,” he says. “Let’s just say you have special motivation,” and he smiles. He speaks softly. At times I have to press near the screen to hear him.
Bill Quigley is one of the attorneys pressing a class-action suit on
behalf of death-row prisoners, and I’ve heard him mention Robert Willie as one of the plaintiffs. The suit aims at securing better conditions on death row: more phone calls, access to a legal library, “contact” visits, better health care. Not many inmates are willing to put their names to such a suit. Facing death in the electric chair leaves them “stuck out” enough, they figure. Better to keep a low profile.
But Robert Willie says, “Hell (“hay-ull,” said in two syllables), let’s face it, we’re all up against the ultimate, anyway. Ain’t riothin’ more ultimate than death, is there? I say, let’s join forces and make a stand. Together we stand; divided we fall.” I’m not surprised when he tells me that he subscribes to
Soldier of Fortune
magazine.
Driving home I think of the man I have just met. I had expected a wild-eyed, crazed, paranoid type, but met instead this polite, soft-spoken, obviously intelligent young man. From the terror he’d wreaked I’d expected a huge brute, but he’s so small, so slight. I notice that he didn’t mention his crimes; he didn’t show any remorse. While I was talking to him, I kept thinking about Faith Hathaway, and I was conscious of her there, silent, in the room. I am defending Robert Willie’s right not to be executed and I am affirming his dignity as a human being, but I can never for one moment forget what he did. I decide that as soon as our New Orleans to Baton Rouge trek is over I will visit the Harveys.
On Friday morning, October 26, a group of us — about 40 people — gather on the outskirts of New Orleans to begin walking the 80 miles to Baton Rouge.
Several TV and radio stations and newspaper reporters show up. “What do you hope to achieve by doing this?” they ask. I am one of the marchers assigned to speak to the media. I say that this march is the beginning of a statewide information campaign about the death penalty.
We know that one of the key issues we must address is the fear of crime which fuels the death penalty. Actually, the public (not by accident) has an exaggerated perception of the risk of felony-type murders (murders which occur in the course of another felony which may be punishable by death). The risk varies, of course, according to one’s neighborhood — inner-city residents have
good
reason to fear felony-type murders — but nationwide, according to 1989 statistics, a very small percentage, 2.0 persons per 100,000, die of felony-type murders each year, roughly the same percentage as those who die from drowning or accidental poisoning. In contrast, the probability of dying in an automobile accident is 47.9 per 100,000, and
the probability of dying from heart disease is 765.5 per 100,000.
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But the public’s view of crime is largely shaped by the media, which are prone to emphasize death from violence while downplaying more prevalent and commonplace threats to life. In one study, for example, some respondents thought that homicides cause more deaths than strokes, when in fact strokes cause eleven times more deaths.
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Along with media, politicians also distort public perception of crime. Politicians in dramatic thirty-second campaign ads purporting to address the “crime problem” tend to emphasize the most violent crimes, which they then propose to counter by use of the death penalty. “Tough problems call for tough solutions,” they say — as if executing a few people a year has anything to do with
real management
of crime.
The truth is that the death penalty is potentially relevant to only a very small pool of the 14 million-plus “index crimes” committed in this country every year. Supreme Court decisions and resulting legislation have restricted the use of the death penalty to certain forms of aggravated homicide — about 1 of every 2,986 “index crimes” and only 1 of every 345 violent crimes.
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Such constricted use makes the death penalty, in fact, only a relatively minor criminal-justice policy. Dealing with the real crime problem in this nation involves a far more comprehensive approach in areas of employment, drug prevention, police security, and education — not easily packaged in thirty-second, bang-for-the-buck T.V. campaign ads.