Authors: Helen Prejean
Subject was in the woods behind Wymers Store. Subject came out to the store and called the sheriffs office and said he would like to give his self up, that he was at the store and would wait for the deputies. Deputies arrived and arrested the subject … subject was transported to Charity Hospital in New Orleans because he could not walk on his feet [he had jumped three stories] and had cuts and scratches on his feet and arms.
Between 1972 and 1979, when he was twenty-one years old, Robert Willie was arrested thirty times. His last year of schooling is ninth grade. A tattoo of “Pam” appears when he’s sixteen, “Peggy” at seventeen, and at nineteen, a skull and crossbones. One of the reports gives his name as “Little John Willie.” During one of his stints in the St. Tammany Parish Jail he meets Joseph Vaccaro.
I review Robert’s trial transcripts and other legal documents. I see that Robert had been awarded a new capital sentencing trial by
the Louisiana Supreme Court on grounds of improper arguments by Assistant District Attorney, Herbert R. Alexander.
14
Urging the jury away from a life sentence, Alexander had argued that later in time a governor, who would “not know the facts of this case,” might release Robert from prison. He also argued that if the jury decided on death, the final responsibility, in fact, was not theirs because there would be numerous appeals and reviews of the case by state and federal courts. “So the buck really don’t stop with you. The buck starts with you.”
15
I read the appeal petition to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court, filed by Ronald J. Tabak, an attorney whose Wall Street firm has volunteered to collaborate with Millard on Robert’s appeal. I am struck by the substance, the thoroughness of the arguments. It’s a thick document, 170 pages, bound with a blue cardboard cover. On the front page in large black letters is stamped “Pauper Case.”
In the brief Tabak puts forth fourteen arguments on Robert’s behalf.
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I don’t understand some of the fine-tuned legal points, but several of the claims seem startling and obvious.
One is that pretrial publicity before Robert’s second sentencing trial was so prejudicial that it required a change of venue. (Robert’s second sentencing trial was held in the same parish courthouse as the first.) Tabak recounts the intense media coverage surrounding the first trial. The media had referred to the case as “the worst crime in the history of Washington Parish … the trial of the decade.” The district attorney was quoted as having referred to Willie and Vaccaro as “animals.” Some newspaper articles reported that Willie had “confessed” to having raped and killed Faith Hathaway and included reports of prior arrests and the fact that his father, who had previously killed another man, was in jail for attempted murder. After trial and sentencing, the media repeatedly referred to the fact that Vaccaro had received life and Willie death, “leaving the impression,” Tabak points out, “that Willie was more culpable than Vaccaro.”
At voir dire for the second sentencing trial forty-seven of the fifty-two prospective jurors admitted to hearing of the case. In an affidavit, a jury expert brought in by Tabak’s firm to study the possibility of bias on Robert’s jury testified that people, convinced of the defendant’s guilt, might lie at the voir dire out of a feeling that they could “get justice” by getting on the jury. She then cited cases of two such jurors, who first admitted to having an opinion on the case but within a few hours denied they had an opinion. There was one pool of jurors for both Robert and Vaccaro; and
jurors who had been struck from one trial presented themselves for the other.
Tabak argues that the Louisiana Supreme Court, which reviewed the case and agreed that no change of venue was warranted, did not have the benefit of the jury expert’s findings about biased jurors because she had been hired only after Tabak’s firm — with financial resources to hire experts — took on the case.
But perhaps the most telling instance of impropriety during jury selection was this: “At least four members (one third of the jury) that convicted Petitioner were present when the attorney for Joseph Vaccaro stated [during Vaccaro’s jury-selection process] that Robert Willie had killed Faith Hathaway. These assertions were made in the upstairs courtroom in which Vaccaro was being tried, only minutes before these jurors were sent to the downstairs courtroom to participate as jurors in [Willie’s] trial.”
Tabak argues that this statement was “far more devastating than any evidence used against Willie at trial and completely inconsistent with his defense. But neither Willie, his trial attorney, nor the trial judge knew that these highly prejudicial statements had been heard by four of the jurors.”
Again, Tabak says, the Louisiana Supreme Court had been unaware that these jurors were exposed to such prejudicial statements because the defense attorney had not himself known of them.
Tabak ends the petition by citing claims of ineffectiveness of counsel, especially the defense counsel’s admitted lack of preparation for both the sentencing trials (several days before both trials the defense counsel had informed the judge that he was not prepared). In the petition Tabak argues:
The only mitigation witness called at the first trial was Robert’s mother and at the second, an aunt, and even she was not prepared for the testimony. Five close family members said that they would have been glad to testify but were not contacted. Each would have brought out about Robert’s unsettled childhood bereft of adult guidance, his long-standing drug habit, his troubled mental state
.
By contrast, Tabak, points out, Vaccaro’s attorney had amply documented his client’s troubled childhood and drug-abuse history and his client had received a life sentence.
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In August 1984, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the
petition and a request for rehearing, and on November 12, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Now it is mid-November, and all that stands between Robert Lee Willie and the electric chair is the Pardon Board and the governor.
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I can hear the words San Quentin guards used to yell when a death-row inmate was let out of his cell: “Dead man Walking.”
*
For eight years the Kansas legislature passed death-penalty bills only to have them vetoed by an anti-death-penalty governor. With a new pro-death-penalty governor in the statehouse in 1987, the legislature had its green light. But at a time when the financially strapped state was cutting some services 10 percent, the senate balked at the death-penalty process, which would cost an estimated $10 million the first year alone and $50 million before the first execution could be carried out.
7
CHAPTER
8
“W
e’ve
got
to get Robert off this
political prisoner
kick, “John Craft
says to me as I walk into his office. He is preparing for Robert’s Pardon Board hearing scheduled for November 19, one week away, and he tells me that Robert seems determined to expose the “politics” in his death sentence. John shakes his head “A surefire strategy for defeat with a Pardon Board, if ever I heard one.”
Millard Farmer has recruited John to serve as local counsel in Robert’s case, which means representing him at the Pardon Board hearing. Marcia Blum, the attorney director of the newly formed Louisiana Capital Defense Project, has been helping John prepare for the hearing, and Millard has been offering advice over the phone.
I sit opposite John in a spacious room in his new French Quarter office. French doors, flagstone floors, eggshell-colored walls. Not much furniture yet, only his desk at one end of the room and his partner’s desk stuck casually in the center. There are piles of legal folders stacked in heaps along the walls, file cases, no secretary in sight. John’s been busy preparing for the hearing and hasn’t had much time to settle into the new place.
He’s soft-spoken, serious, but not officious. Mid to late thirties, I figure. Dark-rimmed glasses, balding, a black close-cropped beard. I like his sober, reasoned energy.
I feel my stomach muscles tighten as we begin to talk about the hearing. The Harveys will be there with their grief and loss and their terrible need to see Robert Willie die. And there’s the personality of Robert himself — defiant, remorseless. I’m afraid that Robert might smart-mouth Vernon Harvey or one of the Board members.
John tells me he’ll speak first and present the legal issues, then Robert’s mother, then me.
I’m dreading it. It will be the same board that took only an hour to uphold Pat Sonnier’s sentence. Since Pat’s execution, two other condemned prisoners have stood before them — Timothy Baldwin, executed in September, and Earnest Knighton, executed just a week ago.
Theoretically, pardon boards are supposed to have wide latitude to dispense mercy. They are not bound by previous legal rulings of the courts and may give full sway to whatever heart or conscience dictates. But, being appointees of the governor (and subject to removal at his discretion), they can hardly ignore the wishes of their patron. There are no special qualifications required by law for the job, so Board positions are natural slots for political appointments.
1
It would be two years before Howard Marsellus, chairperson of the Board, would be sentenced for taking bribes.
Joe Doss, an Episcopalian priest and cocounsel for Earnest Knighton, told me that when he was preparing for Knighton’s Pardon Board hearing, someone close to the governor had said that the present board — sympathetic to Edwards’s personal aversion to the death penalty — avoids putting “pressure” on Edwards in death-penalty cases. Now, as we prepare for Robert’s hearing, I wonder what not putting “pressure” on the governor means.
“What do you think about the politics in Robert’s case?” I ask John.
John tells me that the St. Tammany Parish D.A., Marion Farmer (not related to Millard), who is prosecuting the case against Robert, had been up against stiff opposition in his bid for reelection at the time of the Hathaway murder. Shortly after Willie and Vaccaro’s arrest, Farmer publicly stated that he would seek the death penalty.
A murder case which Marion Farmer prosecuted in 1978 had sparked much of the criticism against him in his reelection bid. Two ex-offenders from New York, John DeGirolama and Vincent Pellicci, had kidnapped a teenage couple at gunpoint and brought them into a wooded area in Farmer’s district. There, after holding them captive for several hours, they fired four shots into their
victims, killing eighteen-year-old Rachelle Rees and injuring her boyfriend. The parish grand jury indicted the men for first-degree murder, but Farmer, wanting to avoid the cost and risk of a trial (he might not get a death-penalty verdict) and the lengthy appeals of a capital case, had let both men plead guilty to second-degree murder, which carries a life sentence.
Rachelle Rees’s parents had petitioned a state court to force Farmer to seek the death penalty, protesting that his decisions for indictment were based on “whim and caprice.” But their petition failed.
2
“No doubt about the politics in Robert’s case,” John says to me, “but the Pardon Board hearing isn’t the place to bring it up.”
“I’ll talk to Robert about it,” I tell John. Straight from this meeting I’m going to Angola to visit Robert.
The Louisiana countryside, usually so vibrantly, verdantly green, is taking on a brownish hue. With the trees going bare I can see deep into the swamps, which cover the first fifteen miles or so out of New Orleans. The furry cypress needles have turned to rust. They’re still holding on, but not for long.
Pat had died in spring when the flowers and trees and grass were exploding with life. If Robert dies, he will die in winter.
Faith Hathaway had also died in the spring.
I imagine her coming from beyond the grave to speak at this Pardon Board hearing.
I picture her speaking of love swallowing up hate and all she knows is love now and that she hopes her mother and stepfather can move on with their lives and not worry about avenging her death because she’s past all that, she’s past all that is negative and downward and hurtful and she occupies another kind of universe and she hopes they can occupy this universe too.
Yes, I can picture her saying that.
I can also picture her pointing to Robert Willie and saying that because of all she has suffered, this man, her killer, should be made to suffer and die and the angry desire to avenge her death is righteous and noble and holy as God is holy.
I know which of these speeches Vernon and Elizabeth are likely to hear.
I’ve passed the sign: “Do not despair, you will soon be there”; and now I see open sky ahead and Angola.
I get my pass from the visitor center and walk over to death row. I’m bringing a little money for Robert so he can buy coffee. During
the last visit I had asked him if he needed anything and he had said, “Nah,” and when I asked him how much he had in his account, he said, “About two dollars and forty cents.”
He steps into the visiting booth with his black knitted cap on his head. He likes that cap.
“Glad you’re here, ma’am” he says. “Thanks for the coffee money.”
I tell him about the ride up and the way November is settling into the swamps and he says he can see the trees turning there on the hill near the tier and we talk a bit about seasons and how Louisiana really doesn’t experience dramatic change, not like up North — small talk, but not for long. The Pardon Board hearing looms large.
He’s brought a copy of his presentation — neatly typed, four pages.
It begins: “There are a few things that I would like to say, considering this will be my last time before the Courts and the Judicial System.” I listen as he reads. I am standing up, my head close to the screen (tired of sitting after the three-hour drive). I think of my past students giving oral reports at Cabrini Elementary — lanky seventh- and eighth-grade boys, shifting from foot to foot, stumbling and mumbling the words, shy about standing there in front of me, their black-robed mentor, and their classmates, especially the girls. Now I hear this twenty-six-year-old man read the words of what undoubtedly will be the most important “oral report” of his life. And from what I know about his schooling — or lack of it — chances are he has never made a presentation before a group before.