Authors: Helen Prejean
Along the road from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, I use every media opportunity to provide facts about the death penalty. I point out that in Louisiana, since the legislative reforms of 1977, life sentences for first-degree murder have become
real
life sentences, so we can protect ourselves from dangerous criminals without killing them.
I also point out that execution of a prisoner costs more than life imprisonment. That’s because capital trials require more expert witnesses and more investigators, a longer jury-selection process (those who oppose the death penalty must be screened out), the expenses of sequestering a jury, not one but two trials because of the required separate sentencing trial, and appeals in state and federal courts. When a D.A. decides not to go for the death penalty, there may in fact be no trial at all, but whenever the death penalty is sought, almost always there is a trial and all it entails. In Florida, which may be typical, each death sentence is estimated to cost approximately $3.18 million, compared to the cost of life imprisonment
(40 years) of about $516,000.
8
Another reason for swollen costs is the added expense of incarcerating prisoners on death row. Most states segregate death-row prisoners in maximum security units and must hire additional security personnel. Nor are most death-row prisoners allowed to work, which prevents them from helping to pay for their upkeep.
Besides the expense there is also a “distortion cost” which capital trials and appellate proceedings impose on the court system. State supreme court judges in some death-penalty jurisdictions report that they spend a disproportionate amount of their judging time tending to capital punishment business.
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To these utilitarian arguments I add others in these media interviews — that the death penalty is too selective and capricious to serve as a deterrent, that it is racially biased — but the argument I always save for last is this one: if we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone, not just individuals but governments as well. And I end by challenging people to ask themselves whether we can continue to allow the government, subject as it is to every imaginable form of inefficiency and corruption, to have such power to kill. “It’s not a marginal issue,” I say. “It involves all of us. We’re all complicit. Government can only continue killing if we give it the power. It’s time to take that power back.”
It’s my first time meeting people in the media. I notice how friendly many of them are. After the interviews I always shake hands and thank them for coming out, the reporters and the camera people too; and before the walk is over I have quite a collection of their personal cards, which I file so I can call on them in the future. Reflecting back after ten years, I realize now, even more than I did then, just how crucial the media are to public education on this issue, and I am struck by how many reporters and journalists become sympathetic to the cause of abolition once they become knowledgeable about the issue.
We walk in the sunshine. It’s October, one of Louisiana’s clearest, driest months. The sky is cobalt blue. The trees and grass are still mostly green, but the swamp maples have turned orange-red. It feels good to be walking out on the open road. Bill Quigley is at the head of the line, setting the pace. We’ll do twenty-five miles each day. When people drop behind the crowd (people such as me, with short legs), a van picks us up and brings us to the front. That way we keep a brisk pace. Everybody’s full of chatter. Some sing. One young fellow plays a kazoo. We’re an interesting assortment:
black and white, ex-cons and nuns, secretaries and teachers, housewives, students, a carpenter, lawyers, a woman whose sister was murdered but who opposes capital punishment, some family members with sons on death row, a Vietnam vet.
Many people, barreling along the highway, energetically signal their response to our cause: they put thumbs down; they flip us the middle finger; they shout “Fry the bastards”; they call us “bleeding-heart liberals”; they call us “commies.” But every now and then we hear a horn and see a thumb up, and we all wave and cheer.
Then as the sun climbs in the sky and shoes rub and legs and hip joints ache, we fall silent, and all you can hear is the thud and scrape of feet moving and the whine and roar of cars and trucks on the highway.
For three days we walk.
We arrive in Baton Rouge as the sun is setting. The darkness is fast descending and streetlights have come on and give a furry amber glow. As we approach the capitol steps we spot a small group holding up posterboard signs. Supporters coming to join us for the rally? Getting closer, we can make out what the signs say: “What about the victims?” “Justice,
even
for victims.” It’s a counterdemonstration group. How will we deal with them? Ignore them? Talk to them? The steering committee huddles. We decide to send a couple of people on a “peacekeeping” mission.
We hold the rally. The press gives us good coverage. The “peacekeeping” mission is successful, and we are not interrupted by the counterdemonstrators. We can all go home now, and my thoughts are turning toward the free and airy bus ride home,
sitting
, not walking, and knowing I’m not responsible any longer for all these people and the myriad details of organizing.
A full moon has come out and is shining its white metallic light on the capitol steps. People are drifting down the steps toward waiting yellow school buses and cars.
A young man, one of the marchers, touches my arm and points to the bottom of the steps where the counterdemonstrators are and says that a man says to tell me “to watch out or someone is going to hurt you.” The man down there wants to talk to me. He says his name is Vernon Harvey. My heart tightens. Oh, God, not here, not now. “Someone wants to hurt me?” What does that mean?
I look down the wide rows of white steps — forty-eight steps, to be exact, each engraved with the name of a state and the date it achieved statehood. At the age of ten with my Girl Scout troop, my green skirt swishing across my bony knees, I had skipped and run
up and down these steps, saying the name of each state in singsong. Now I am all too glad to have forty-eight states between me and Vernon Harvey.
I don’t
have
to respond to the invitation, I reason with myself. With the crowd milling about, I could pretend the message never reached me. Besides, maybe another time less confrontational than this would be better for our first meeting.
Any time
would be better than this.
The young man delivering the message looks at me expectantly. I know it would be cowardly not to respond to the invitation. I thank him for the message, my heart racing, and walk down the long, white steps to Vernon Harvey.
I introduce myself. He’s a short guy with close-cropped gray hair, black-rimmed glasses. I brace myself for attack. He says he’s heard I visit with death-row inmates and that I’d better watch myself with those “scum.” “They’ll just as soon slit your throat as look at you,” he says. He’s not shouting and he looks at me when he talks.
Relief. I was prepared for apoplectic rage, and here he is expressing concern about my safety.
We must have executions, he tells me, because it’s the only way we can be sure these “mad dogs” don’t kill again. He ticks off his favorite pro-death-penalty arguments, just as I tick off mine for abolition. I have to respect that he’s out here at the foot of these capitol steps because he believes in his cause as strongly as I believe in mine. Maybe even more. I haven’t had anyone close to me murdered. I tell him that I’m terribly sorry about his stepdaughter and ask if I may come to visit him and his wife. “Sure, come on over,” he says, and he writes his telephone number for me on a piece of paper.
The next week I call him and get directions to his house in Covington, a small town on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. I go in early November on a Sunday afternoon. The first feel of fall is in the air. I bring a sweater along. I don’t know how long I’ll be, probably late, and the evenings are getting cool. This is one visit that can’t be rushed.
I turn into the driveway of a cozy-looking little house surrounded by tall trees. There is a swing on the front porch. A happy enough looking house, I think, as I climb the front steps and reach for the doorbell. As a child, riding in the family car through neighborhoods, I used to play a secret game of looking at houses and trying to guess from the outside appearance whether or not the people inside were
happy. Bright, cheery houses: happy people inside. Sad, bedraggled houses: sad people inside.
Great as the sea is thy sorrow
. Words well up from a prayer to Mary, mother of Jesus, who watched her son dying on a cross.
Vernon comes to the door and invites me in, asking good-naturedly if we’re planning to do any more walks against the death penalty any time soon because he’d sure like to be there at the end of it to welcome us. Elizabeth, his wife, comes into the living room and introduces herself. She’s younger than Vernon and more reserved, not the tease that he is. Faith’s graduation picture hangs on the living room wall. A pretty girl with some of Elizabeth’s features. Same facial structure, same nose, same eyes. In her blue graduation gown she looks happy, her eyes gazing past the camera into her bright, young future.
We sit in comfortable chairs in the front living room. I sit where I can see their faces and ask them to tell me about their daughter. They seem to want to talk. Maybe it’s cathartic for them.
Tragedies have a date and time. Tragedy in the Harvey family happened on May 28, 1980.
Faith, eighteen years old, had graduated from Mandeville High School in early May and planned to join the Army on May 28. She wanted to study a foreign language. She hoped to be stationed overseas.
“With me having a long career in the military,” Vernon says, “I had told her about the travel, the educational opportunities plus — this is a big thing with me — patriotism; it’s good to give a few years of service to your country, even if you don’t plan to make it a life career.”
Elizabeth, calm, her voice without emotion as though she is describing someone else’s tragedy, tells how on May 28 a recruiting sergeant was to meet Faith at her apartment to drive her to New Orleans for induction. (At the time, the Harveys lived in an apartment complex that Elizabeth managed and Faith had her own apartment in the complex.) A few days earlier Elizabeth had taken her shopping to get things she would be needing. “You know, practical things,” Elizabeth says, “new bras with plenty of support, a case for her contact lenses, medicine for menstrual cramps.”
The recruiting sergeant would not be coming until early afternoon, so Elizabeth had planned to go over to Faith’s apartment to help her with last-minute packing in the morning.
On May 27 at five o’clock in the evening, Faith headed hurriedly
out the door of her parents’ apartment on her way to Bossier’s Restaurant, where she waitressed. After work she planned to visit with friends to say good-bye and to celebrate the beginning of her new career. As Faith was leaving, Elizabeth had noticed her sandals — the one on the right foot was torn — and had suggested that she ought to change them, but Faith had been in a hurry and said she’d be late for work.
The next time Elizabeth would see the sandals they would be in a cellophane bag as state’s exhibit number 10 at the trial of her daughter’s murderer, and she would identify them along with other objects: a purse, a blue skirt, a blue blouse, a driver’s license, a ring, a medallion, a Timex watch with a blue face.
“You don’t know when you see your child leave through a door that you are never going to see her alive again,” Elizabeth says. “If I had known, I would have told her how much I loved her. My last words to her — the last she ever heard from me — were about sandals.”
On the morning of Wednesday, May 28, Elizabeth and Vernon waited for Faith to come through the front door. The big day had finally arrived. After today they would have to rely on letters and an occasional phone call. Letting Faith have her own apartment had been one step toward independence, but today would be the really big venture. Faith had promised to write.
“She would’ve, too,” says Elizabeth. “We had a close relationship. She’d always talk things over with me. And she and Vern were close. Faith was four when Vern and I met, seven when we got married. He wasn’t just a stepfather; he loved her every bit as much as I did.” And I look over at Vernon and see his head down, tears rolling down his cheeks. It’s been four years since Faith’s death and he still cries when he talks about her. I wish I could take away some of his pain. I feel helpless, overwhelmed. All I can do is listen.
But Faith was late that May 28th morning. Elizabeth called her apartment. No answer. She waited and called again. No answer. No footsteps at the door. No telephone call to say that she was a little late but on her way. No Faith.
Concerned, Elizabeth and Vernon had gone over to her apartment, but it was empty, the bed still neatly made. Elizabeth describes how she held the terror at bay, thinking of possible scenarios: maybe she had overdone the drinking a little and gone home with a friend to sleep it off; maybe it had been late when the partying had ended and she had decided to spend the night with one of her girlfriends …
“But it was strange that she did not call me,” Elizabeth says. “She would always telephone me and tell me where she was. I kept telephoning her friends one by one. I just couldn’t accept that I didn’t know where she was.”
When Faith did not appear by 3:00
P.M
., Elizabeth called the recruiting sergeant, who was supposed to drive Faith to New Orleans. He said he had already been by her apartment twice. Vernon then went to the Mandeville Police Department.
“I told them our daughter was missing,” he said, “but they said someone had to be missing at least forty-eight hours before they could do anything.”
Later the same evening Vernon drove to the St. Tammany Parish Sheriffs Office to file a report on their missing child.