Authors: Helen Prejean
I tell him of Robert’s request for the polygraph test and the plans I have just set in motion, and he approves the test provided it’s administered early enough in the day.
Now, once again, here’s the familiar feeling of the tight, cold grip of fear in the hollow of my stomach. Talking through the morning with Robert, I had forgotten where I was. But now, talking to Warden Blackburn, I know all too well where I am, and I say, “I have to get back to Robert.”
“Robert sent me a Christmas card, which was real nice and I thanked him,” Blackburn continues. “You know, it wasn’t my decision to send him here on Christmas Eve. I was willing to let him stay with his buddies on the Row until after Christmas. It was his choice,” he says.
I go back to the white metal door. It seems that this day is lasting a hundred years. It also seems that the day is flying. Death-house time is like no other.
Robert stands by the chair to stretch his legs a bit, and I stand up too.
“I shouldn’t have said all those things about Hitler and being a terrorist, all that stuff,” he says. “It was stupid.” He says that Blackburn told him this morning that there would be no more media interviews. “Actually,” he says, “I have a legal right to do more if I want to, but I don’t feel like doing any more. Still, the warden shouldn’t just exert his authority like that.”
I tell him that the polygraph test is set up for early tomorrow morning.
“Wow. Quick work. You did that already?” he says, and I can tell he’s happy it’s going to happen. It seems to mean a lot to him.
I tell him what Zuelke had said about the accuracy of the test being jeopardized by the stress of the situation. I want to prepare him because I sense he will probably be disappointed in the results. How can he
not
feel stress in a situation like this? I ask him, and I tell him that stress is not always a conscious thing.
“I wonder what would have happened if they had let me take this test after I was arrested like I asked them to,” he says. “I know they couldn’t have used the results in court or nothin’, but doubt, that’s what I was after. If the D.A. had doubts, maybe he would’ve offered me a plea.”
Warden Blackburn approaches us and says that time’s up for today and I’ll have to leave now. Robert takes a quick look at his watch and then at the warden. He’s been enjoying the company, and I know he’d like me to stay longer. There are no set rules regarding “special” visits in these “last days.” Robert shrugs his shoulders.
“Just a moment longer, Warden,” I say, “I’d like a chance to pray with Robert.” Blackburn nods his head and leaves. Robert winks.
“That
was an offer he just couldn’t refuse, ‘cuz ain’t he a minister or somethin’ in his church?” Robert says and smiles. One of the things he had told a reporter was that yes, he had religious faith and believed in Jesus Christ and had a spiritual adviser, but he was no “religious fanatic or nothin’,” not “one of those jailhouse religious hypocrites who only use religion for their own purposes.” He was an “ordinary person,” he had assured the reporter, and continued to “curse a lot.”
That had made me smile. I have never before met a man quite like Robert Willie.
I put my hands upon the screen as close as I can get to him and say a prayer. He bows his head and I find myself looking at the top of the black knitted hat, which he will give to me as a gift there at the end right before he walks to the chair, the black hat that covers the head of the Outlaw, the Aryan brother, the “Marlboro Man,” the “Rebel” — the kidnapper/rapist/murderer. I ask God to give him what he needs — mercy, courage, remorse for the pain he has caused — and freedom of heart to accept death when he meets it. I also pray for the Harveys, who will be there to watch him die.
At the end of the prayer he says, “Amen. Thank you, ma’am, for the nice prayer. I don’t know if I can be everything the prayer says, but I’m sure gonna try.”
I leave him with a parting word about the God I believe in not being a God of blood who demands torture and death but a God
of love, of compassion. I refer him to the Gospel of John, to a passage he might want to read before he goes to sleep tonight (his last full night on earth), where Jesus talks about living freely and dying freely:
I lay down my life
in order to take it up again
No one takes it from me;
I lay it down of my own free will …
(John 10:17–18)
“Not that they’re right to take your life,” I say to him. “It’s wrong and it ought to be resisted and denounced, but you have within yourself the freedom to choose the way you die — with love or hate.” And I tell him that I care about him, I value his life, and I will stand by him until the end.
And I’m out of the death house and into the pale yellow December sun. Robert has asked me to come tomorrow at two in the afternoon when his mother and brothers will visit. I dread that, watching the pain of his family in such a place. Todd is only eleven years old.
But that’s tomorrow and I don’t want to think about it. Today — now — that is what I’ll think about. I’m driving through the curvy Tunica hills out to Highway 61 and Baton Rouge and Mary Ann’s house for supper tonight, where her five children are all home from college for Christmas.
Christmas?
Robert had sent out Christmas cards from the death house.
A snatch of a Christmas carol comes to me and I fiddle with the words.
God rest ye merry gentlemen
let nothing you dismay
.
We’ll pick our day to execute
In June or Christmas day …
I think of the running debate I engage in with “church” people about the death penalty. “Proof texts” from the Bible usually punctuate these discussions without regard for the cultural context or literary genre of the passages invoked. (Will D. Campbell, a Southern Baptist minister and writer, calls this use of scriptural quotations “biblical quarterbacking.”)
It is abundantly clear that the Bible depicts murder as a crime for
which death is considered the appropriate punishment, and one is hard-pressed to find a biblical “proof text” in either the Hebrew Testament or the New Testament which unequivocally refutes this. Even Jesus’ admonition “Let him without sin cast the first stone,” when he was asked the appropriate punishment for an adulteress (John 8:7) — the Mosaic law prescribed death — should be read in its proper context. This passage is an “entrapment” story, which sought to show Jesus’ wisdom in besting his adversaries. It is not an ethical pronouncement about capital punishment.
Similarly, the “eye for eye” passage from Exodus, which pro-death penalty advocates are fond of quoting, is rarely cited in its original context, in which it is clearly meant to limit revenge.
The passage, including verse 22, which sets the context reads:
If, when men come to blows, they hurt a woman who is pregnant and she suffers a miscarriage, though she does not die of it, the man responsible must pay the compensation demanded of him by the woman’s master; he shall hand it over after arbitration. But should she die, you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stroke for stroke. (Exodus 21: 22–25)
In the example given (patently patriarchal: the woman is considered the negotiable property of her male master), it is clear that punishment is to be measured out according to the seriousness of the offense. If the child is lost but not the mother, the punishment is less grave than if both mother and child are lost.
Only
an eye for an eye,
only
a life for a life is the intent of the passage. Restraint was badly needed. It was not uncommon for an offended family or clan to slaughter entire communities in retaliation for an offense against one of their members.
Even granting the call for restraint in this passage, it is nonetheless clear — here and in numerous other instances throughout the Hebrew Bible — that the punishment for murder was death.
But we must remember that such prescriptions of the Mosaic Law were promulgated in a seminomadic culture in which the preservation of a fragile society — without benefit of prisons and other institutions — demanded quick, effective, harsh punishment of offenders. And we should note the numerous other crimes for which the Bible prescribes death as punishment:
contempt of parents
(Exodus 21:15, 17; Leviticus 24:11);
trespass upon sacred ground
(Exodus 19:12–13; Numbers 1:51; 18:7);
sorcery
(Exodus 22:18; Leviticus 20:27);
bestiality
(Exodus 22:19; Leviticus 20: 15–16);
sacrifice to foreign gods
(Exodus 22:20; Deuteronomy 13:1–9);
profaning the sabbath
(Exodus 31:14);
adultery
(Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22: 22–24);
incest
(Leviticus 20:11–13);
homosexuality
(Leviticus 20:13);
and prostitution
(Leviticus 21:19; Deuteronomy 22: 13–21)
.
And this is by no means a complete list.
But no person with common sense would dream of appropriating such a moral code today, and it is curious that those who so readily invoke the “eye for an eye, life for life” passage are quick to shun other biblical prescriptions which also call for death, arguing that modern societies have evolved over the three thousand or so years since biblical times and no longer consider such exaggerated and archaic punishments appropriate.
Such nuances are lost, of course, in “biblical quarterbacking,” and more and more I find myself steering away from such futile discussions. Instead, I try to articulate what I personally believe about Jesus and the ethical thrust he gave to humankind: an impetus toward compassion, a preference for disarming enemies without humiliating and destroying them, and a solidarity with poor and suffering people.
3
So, what happened to the impetus of love and compassion Jesus set blazing into history?
The first Christians adhered closely to the way of life Jesus had taught. They died in amphitheaters rather than offer homage to worldly emperors. They refused to fight in emperors’ wars. But then a tragic diversion happened, which Elaine Pagels has deftly explored in her book,
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:
in 313 C.E. (Common Era) the Emperor Constantine entered the Christian church.
Pagels says, “Christian bishops, once targets for arrest, torture, and execution, now received tax exemptions, gifts from the imperial treasury, prestige, and even influence at court; the churches gained new wealth, power and prominence.”
4
Unfortunately, the exercise of power practiced by Christians in alliance with the Roman Empire — with its unabashed allegiance to the sword — soon bore no resemblance to the purely moral persuasion that Jesus had taught.
In the fifth century, Pagels points out, Augustine provided the theological rationale the church needed to justify the use of violence by church and state governments. Augustine persuaded church authorities that “original sin” so damaged every person’s ability to make moral choices that external control by church and state authorities over people’s lives was necessary and justified. The “wicked” might be “coerced by the sword” to “protect the innocent,” Augustine taught. And thus was legitimated for Christians the authority of secular government to “control” its subjects by coercive and violent means — even punishment by death.
In the latter part of this century, however, two flares of hope — Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King — have demonstrated that Jesus’ counsel to practice compassion and tolerance even toward one’s enemies can effect social change. Susan Jacoby, analyzing the moral power that Gandhi and King unleashed in their campaigns for social justice, finds a unique form of aggression:
“ ‘If everyone took an eye for an eye,’ Gandhi said, ‘the whole world would be blind.’ But Gandhi did not want to take anyone’s eye; he wanted to force the British out of India …”
Nonviolence and nonaggression are generally regarded as interchangeable concepts — King and Gandhi frequently used them that way — but nonviolence, as employed by Gandhi in India and by King in the American South, might reasonably be viewed as a highly disciplined form of aggression. If one defines aggression in the primary dictionary sense of “attack,” nonviolent resistance proved to be the most powerful attack imaginable on the powers King and Gandhi were trying to overturn. The writings of both men are filled with references to love as a powerful force against oppression, and while the two leaders were not using the term “force” in the military sense, they certainly regarded nonviolence as a tactical weapon as well as an expression of high moral principle. The root meaning of Gandhi’s concept of
satyagraha …
is “holding on to truth”… Gandhi also called
satyagraha
the “love force” or “soul force” and explained that he had discovered “in the earliest stages that pursuit of
truth did not permit violence being inflicted on one’s opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy … And patience means self-suffering.” So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self
.
King was even more explicit on this point: the purpose of civil disobedience, he explained many times, was to force the defenders of segregation to commit brutal acts in public and thus arouse the conscience of the world on behalf of those wronged by racism. King and Gandhi did not succeed because they changed the hearts and minds of southern sheriffs and British colonial administrators (although they did, in fact, change some minds) but because they
made the price of maintaining control too high for their opponents
5
[emphasis mine].