Authors: Helen Prejean
Poor Vernon and Elizabeth. No matter that Faith was killed four
years ago. Every time the terror is told, she suffers and cries out and dies again.
She suffered alone and in great terror and no one was there to comfort her
. Who can blame them for wanting to see her murderer executed? Maybe they feel that not to demand death, the harshest punishment possible, would be a betrayal of their daughter’s memory.
Great as the sea is thy sorrow
.
I wonder what will ever be able to heal the Harveys’ pain and bring them peace. No, there is no replacing the unique universe of Faith Hathaway. Even if Robert Willie is destroyed, the aching void can never be filled.
I understand the Harveys’ desire for retribution. Their lives have been violated by Robert Willie and they want to see him punished. They want to see him made accountable for his actions. They want to see him pay for what he did. So do I. In an ideal world, there would be no need for retribution. But in real societies, punishing the guilty is as integral to the function of law as exonerating the innocent and preventing crime.
Susan Jacoby, in her insightful book
Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge
, says:
Establishment of … the restraint that enables people to live with one another and the ineradicable impulse to retaliate when harm is inflicted has always been one of the essential tasks of civilization. The attainment of such a balance depends in large measure on the confidence of the victimized that someone else will act on their behalf against the victimizers … Stripped of moralizing, law exists not only to restrain retribution but to mete it out … A society that is unable to convince individuals of its ability to exact atonement for injury is a society that runs a constant risk of having its members revert to the wilder forms of [vigilante] justice …
1
But Jacoby maintains, and I agree, that the retribution which society metes out should be
measured
. Her objection to capital punishment is that such “eye-for-an-eye” retribution is as excessive as the original crime it punishes. But she also finds it excessive that those convicted of so heinous and irrevocable a crime as murder should be made to serve only a few short years in prison. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that in 1986 the average amount
of time served on a life sentence in the United States was six years, nine months.
2
Jacoby holds that the public’s desire to see serious punishment consistently meted out for serious crimes is legitimate and that to ignore it encourages “the boundless outrage that generates demands for boundless retribution.”
3
But she says that punishment should be tempered: “There is, or ought to be, a vast middle ground between belief in the death penalty and acceptance of a system that allows too many killers to ‘pay’ with only a few years of their own lives — or to escape retribution altogether through legal and psychiatric loopholes — for a life they have taken from another.”
4
Such measured retribution is attained, I believe, by sentencing which requires
nonnegotiable
long-term imprisonment for first-degree murder (also termed
aggravated
or
capital
murder). At least forty states in recent years have revised criminal codes to require life without parole or lengthy mandatory minimum years served for convictions they deem most serious.
5
In a growing number of states — twenty-five as of 1992, including Louisiana — life-without-parole sentences are
true
life sentences. The only way prisoners serving such sentences can be released is by commutation of sentence by the governor, and because of the unpopularity of such commutations, governors now grant them rarely.
Most other states have taken extra precautions to assure that felony-type murderers are not released from prison after a few years served. They do this by legislating a statutory minimum time which a convicted murderer must serve before being eligible for parole. The Arizona criminal sentencing code, for example, demands that convicted first-degree murderers serve twenty-five years before eligibility for parole. Colorado demands forty years; New Jersey, thirty; Ohio, twenty; Indiana, thirty.
6
The Kansas legislature, which in 1987 balked at reinstituting the death penalty because of its costliness,
*
in 1990 enacted a “Hard 40” statute, which stipulates that a perpetrator more than eighteen years of age who is guilty of premeditated murder must serve forty years’ imprisonment before becoming eligible for parole.
8
A South Carolina statute specifies
that if the governor commutes a death sentence, he or she must sentence the prisoner to life without eligibility for parole.
9
As indicated earlier, public opinion surveys in a number of states show that support for the death penalty drops significantly when the public is assured that murderers will remain behind bars for life.
10
And support for the death penalty also drops dramatically — well below the majority — when the alternative is presented of long-term imprisonment (at least twenty-five years) for offenders plus restitution by the offender to the victim’s family.
11
This evening’s encounter with the Harveys has to count as one of the most painful of my life. Never have I met such unrequited grief. What, I wonder, can I possibly do to ease their pain? I am out of my depth. Driving across these dark waters of Lake Pontchartrain, I realize how vulnerable we all are. Faith Hathaway — dead. Loretta Bourque — dead. David LeBlanc — dead. Children snatched from their parents in the night. I think of my sister, Mary Ann. I think of Mama. I think of Mary Ann and Charlie’s five children, especially Helen, my namesake. I think of Julie and Marcy, my brother Louie’s little girls. When I get home I will telephone Mama. I want to hear that everyone is safe.
This Robert Willie, who is he? I recoil at the thought of him. How dare he calmly read law books and concoct arguments in his defense? He should fall on his knees, weeping, begging forgiveness from these parents. He should spend every moment of his life repenting his heinous deed. But, judging from my first visit, he seems to be in a world of his own, oblivious to the pain he has caused others. Remorse presupposes enough self-forgetfulness to feel the pain of others. Can Robert Willie do that? I doubt it and wonder whether his death sentence makes his own repentance even more difficult.
Someone is trying to kill him
, and this must rivet his energies on his own survival, not the pain of others.
The tragedy for the Harveys will be compounded because the murderer of their daughter, about to undergo a dramatic death at the hands of the state, is certain to draw media attention, which will carefully note what the condemned man eats at his last meal and his farewell words to the world — far more attention than his victim received. We remember the names of the executed — Gary Gilmore, John Spenkelink, Ted Bundy. Who remembers the names of their victims? Meanwhile, human rights advocates will protest the execution (in Louisiana before an execution, scores of protest letters from
Canadian and European Amnesty International members pour into the governor’s office) — another kind of attention for the murderer, which to a victim’s family is almost certain to seem misguided and unfair.
My hope for the Harveys is that eventually they will be able to overcome their terrible grief and once again live positive lives. How I can help them I am not sure, but I want to try. And Robert Willie? What can I possibly do for him? I will do what Millard Farmer asked me to do — accompany him, treat him with dignity — but I will also challenge him to take responsibility for his crime and to ask forgiveness of the Harveys.
Emotionally it’s confusing to think of the Harveys and their needs alongside Robert Willie and his. Hearing the details of Faith’s vicious murder, I find myself sucked into the Harveys’ rage. But then I think of the death the state has in store for Robert Willie.
A few days after visiting the Harveys I visit Robert for the second time. I have a notebook on the front seat of the car. I’m not allowed to take it into the prison (only attorneys and news reporters can bring writing materials inside), but afterward I’ll jot down notes from our conversation. I’m much more alert now than I was with Pat Sonnier. When the Pardon Board hearing comes up, facts about Robert’s family life and background will be important. I feel that there isn’t much time.
Robert comes into the visiting room. He is wearing a black knitted hat. He walks with a little bounce, poising momentarily on the balls of his feet. I dispense with preliminaries.
“I went to visit the Harveys,” I say. “They told me about Faith’s death. Robert, you raped and stabbed that girl and left her to rot in the woods. Why?”
“All right,” he says, and he lights a cigarette. “I’m telling you what, ma’am, I’m real, real sorry that girl got killed, but like I told the police when they was questioning me, I didn’t stab and kill that girl. Joe went crazy and started stabbin’ her. I told them that when I gave my statement, and I offered to take a lie detector test then and there on the spot, but they wouldn’t let me. I told them I don’t kill women. I don’t. But when Joe started stabbin’ her, her hands went up and he told me to hold her hands and I did. But it was more instinct than anything, and with him slashing with that knife, there was blood everywhere, I was scared. I just did what he said, and afterwards we was runnin’ around in those woods lost, goin’ through brambles and mud and couldn’t find the truck and I was some scared.”
I groan inside. The truth. What’s the truth? Not another one of those situations where two perpetrators each accuse the other and it’s so difficult to ferret out the facts. He admits that he held Faith’s hands. He did not come to her defense. Even if he’s telling the truth and did not stab her himself, he is responsible for her death. Does he know what he did? And if he does, how can he live with himself?
“Robert,” I say, “Vernon Harvey tells me that you taunted him in the courtroom. You said you’d never fry, is that true?”
“He said he’d see me fry and I said, ‘The hell you will,’ ” Robert says. “I’d never show my inner feelin’s out there in the courtroom, in public like that. Ever since I was a little boy I ain’t ever showed my real feelin’s. See, my daddy went to Angola when I was a baby. People would point to me and say, ‘That’s John Willie’s kid,’ and wham, there I am in a fight. My mama had her hands full in her own life, much less trying to take care of me. I don’t blame her none for what’s happened. She separated from my daddy when I was real young and married again, and me and my stepfather never got on too good. I’d stay with my grandmother sometime, my aunt and uncle sometime, my mother and stepfather sometime. By the time I was in seventh grade I was sniffin’ glue, paint, gasoline, you name it. Me and Joe were loaded on Valium, acid, and booze when this happened with Faith Hathaway. I had this light airy feelin’ inside. I hadn’t slept in two nights.”
I say, “Robert, drugs don’t explain violence like this. Thousands of people take drugs and don’t slash and rape and kill people. The Harveys told me about that young boy, Mark Brewster, and his girlfriend whom you and Joe kidnapped after you killed Faith. They say you raped the girl and stabbed the boy and shot him and tied him to a tree and left him to die. The boy’s paralyzed now for the rest of his life and God knows about the emotional scars on the girl. Did you do that?”
I am keeping my voice low, but it’s an effort. I am quivering inside.
He pauses. He always speaks in a measured way and softly. “Yeah,” he says, “I let Joe Vaccaro call all the shots and I went along. I wasn’t thinkin’ straight.
“The only other time I was involved in hurting somebody bad, where they died, was when me and my cousin struggled in the woods with this drug dealer for a big hunk of money — $10,000. We was all three fighting in the river and me and my cousin held his head under the water and then dragged him out and left him on the bank. We thought he was just unconscious, but he ended up dead.
“But with that couple we kidnapped, Vaccaro told me to kill the boy and I took out my knife, which was pretty dull, and I cut him across the neck and punched it into his side, but not hard or deep ‘cause I really didn’t want to kill him, and I said to Joe, ‘He won’t die,’ and then Joe came up and shot him in the head.”
He shakes his head. “I was stupid to let myself get messed up with Joe Vaccaro. He was supposed to be such a tough dude. He had been to Angola and so I was saying, ‘Hey, man, he’s been to Angola.’ All that week when we were doin’ all this, I knew it was wrong. This voice kept going off in my head, ‘This is wrong. This is wrong.’ I was a damn fool.”
“Have you ever told the Harveys that you’re sorry?” I ask him.
“Well, ma’am that’s hard to do because Vernon Harvey keeps holding these press conferences, mouthin’ off about how he can’t wait to see me fry. Personally, I think the guy is his own worst enemy. He just needs to let it go, man. The girl’s dead now, and there’s nothin’ he can do to bring her back. Even watchin’ me fry ain’t gonna bring her back, but he won’t let it go and he’s just makin’ himself miserable, in my opinion.”
“Robert,” I say, “you understand, don’t you, that you are the
last
person in the world with the right to say that to Vernon Harvey?”
“I guess you’re right,” he says, but he doesn’t seem terribly convinced.
“Hell,” Robert says, “it’s hard, ma’am, to be having much sympathy for
them
when, here, they’re tryin’ to kill
me
. When somebody’s after your hide, it kind of tends to occupy your mind, if you know what I mean.”