Authors: Helen Prejean
In the foyer I walk slowly up and down, just as I had done for Pat, and here again is the same circle of light and strength, and I
pray to Pat and ask him to help Robert, and I ask God to help Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey.
Back at the visitor door Robert rubs his hand on his shaved head.
“Wow, they even took off the eyebrows,” he says.
It’s the first time I’ve seen him without his long-sleeved denim shirt. His arms are covered with tattoos. He lowers his eyes and won’t look at me and says, “You’re gonna think I’m a bad person, seeing all these tattoos,” and I can tell he is very embarrassed. There’s a swastika and a skull, women’s names, and on one arm a naked woman.
“Doesn’t it hurt to get tattoos?” I ask.
It’s something to talk about.
Robert tells me about the man in Marion that did most of his tattoo work, and that when you get it done you want to get it done by an expert so you don’t get infections. He says that on his chest he has the “Grim Reaper” on one side and a woman’s body on the other.
It’s all stream now, the talk, weaving and flowing and not following any pattern.
“I have to make a confession to you,” he says, and he explains that when he first heard I was a nun he thought he was really going to be “in for it.” “I thought you’d be doin’ nothin’ but preachin’ repentance at me, but after our first visit, I saw I could just talk to you like a friend, and I told my mother that I met this real nice lady.”
I tell him that when Millard Farmer had first told me about his crime I thought he was some kind of sociopath. I thought he must be mentally deranged.
“And now that you’ve met me, you’re sure of it,” he says and gives his little soft laugh. “I was deranged all right to let myself go along with Joe Vaccaro.”
It’s a few minutes past 11:00. We can hear the front door opening and closing, opening and closing. The witnesses and press are arriving. Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey must be inside the building now.
“Think I’ll call my family one more time,” he says. “Just stay here. Don’t go out there with all those people.”
The guard at the end of the tier comes down to hand the receiver to him. The operator will say, “A collect call from Robert Willie at a correctional institution. Will you accept charges?”
“Yes,” someone from the family will say, “we’ll accept the charges.” One more phone call. The last time the family will ever hear his voice. I wonder how little Todd is doing, and Mickey and
Tim. Maybe there will be some sort of relief when it’s all over and the phone doesn’t ring any more. Not that they want him to die, but each time the phone rings, their hearts must race to their throats. The dread must be terrible.
It’s 11:30 and the team of guards goes into the cell with Robert to put the diaper on him. I hear the murmur of voices. I hear the toilet flush.
A clean heart create in me, 0 God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me … for you are not pleased with sacrifices … a heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn …
Robert is back at the door and has the guard hand me his parting gift, the black knitted hat. “It’s probably pretty dirty,” he says. “You’ll have to wash it.”
I thank him for the hat.
He thanks me for teaching him about God. “I know God knows the truth about what happened,” he says. “I know I’m gonna be okay, and look, when I get in the chair, I’m gonna let you know I’m okay.”
“Look at me,” I tell him, “look at my face.”
He seems confident that he is going to a better place. “I’m not worried at all,” he says, but he shivers and the guard comes and puts his denim jacket around his shoulders.
And here we go again, we are doing this all over again, with Blackburn, not Maggio, this time coming to the door at midnight with the full squad of the “Strap-down Team,” saying, “Time to go, Willie.”
He is already standing. He is ready.
I step back as the guards bring him out and surround him. As we walk, I read to him from the Gospel of John, and if he can hear, if he can take in the words at a moment like this, he hears the words of Jesus about laying down his life in order to take it up again, and as I read the words I look up and see that Robert is walking with the same little jaunty walk, up on the balls of his feet, the only way I have ever seen him walk.
As we approach the death chamber the guards direct me to a chair with the other witnesses. I see Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey on the front row. They are serious, silent, looking straight ahead. The lights are very bright, the dark oak chair gleams, the big clock on the wall behind the chair says 12:07.
Robert says his last words:
“I would just like to say, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, that I hope you get some relief from my death. Killing people is wrong. That’s why
You’ve put me to death. It makes no difference whether it’s citizens, countries, or governments. Killing is wrong.”
He sits in the chair and the guards begin to strap him in. He watches as they strap his arms and legs. They put the metal cap on his head and the electrode on the calf of his left leg, and they are ready to put on the chin strap and the mask over his face when Robert takes one more look around the room at the world he is leaving. He looks at me and winks, and then they strap his chin, lower the mask, and kill him. This time I do not close my eyes. I watch everything.
CHAPTER
10
I
walk into a blur of television camera lights outside the prison
.
Vernon Harvey pours himself a drink and smiles, and says to the clutch of reporters that he’s sorry every victim doesn’t have the satisfaction of watching a murderer die. But he says Willie died too quickly, and he wishes Willie could have had the same kind of painful death that Faith had, and he hopes he fries in hell for all eternity. When asked if he’s happy, Vernon Harvey says, “Do you want to dance?”
Elizabeth Harvey says Willie’s unrepentant attitude made her want to witness his execution and that she’s glad he’s dead and won’t be able to kill any other people.
Fourteen-year-old Lizabeth Harvey, who was not permitted to view the execution because of her age, has been waiting outside the gates with friends and supporters. Inside the family van, she has helped to make posters supporting capital punishment. A picture of her smiling and hugging her mother and a family friend after the execution will make its way into a two-page spread in
Life
magazine. She tells reporters that this has been the “best Christmas” she has had in a long time, knowing the man who had killed her sister was finally executed. “That ought to tell murderers that if they kill somebody, they’re going to face the electric chair.”
When reporters turn to me, I say, “What have we accomplished by killing Robert Willie? Now two people are dead instead of one, and there will be another funeral and another mother will bury her child.”
Reporters ask me if Willie showed any remorse. I tell them of his last words to the Harveys, that he hoped his death would give them peace.
For a second, in the glare of the lights, Vernon Harvey and I look across at each other. It is only for a moment. Then he disappears among his supporters, their signs bobbing under the glare of the lights: “Just Revenge,” “Remember the Victims,” “Murder in La. and Die.” And I, with the Sisters, head to the waiting cars in the parking lot.
When the jolts hit him, the way he was strapped to the chair, his body didn’t move much. He lifted somewhat in the chair and his chest pushed against the straps and his hands gripped the edges of the chair, but there wasn’t much movement. Three times the current hit, and I couldn’t see his face. I had prayed out loud, “God, forgive us, forgive all who collaborate in this execution.”
The morning after the execution I awake at Mama’s, thinking of Robert’s words — he had said not to mourn him but “maybe now and then go and pour a beer on my grave.” He had not gone to the chair in his boots. He had gone in white terry-cloth slippers.
The phone is ringing. Mickey, Robert’s stepbrother, calls to say the funeral will be held tomorrow at the Brown-McGeehee Funeral Home in Covington, with burial in the family plot in nearby Folsom. The warden’s office calls to tell me that they have Robert’s boots and I can come pick them up. Friends and supporters call, including some who had participated in the anti-death-penalty prayer vigil last night in front of the Governor’s Mansion; and they describe how their prayers kept mingling with the merriment of Yuletide revelers who had come to admire the governor’s forty-foot Christmas tree there on the lawn.
By afternoon I feel the fierce desire to do something
normal
, and I’m in jeans and an old sweatshirt washing the car when the call comes from
ABC Evening News
in New York, asking if I will consent to an interview about Robert Willie’s execution with Peter Jennings. I wipe the back of my wet hand on my pants and weigh the invitation. I look at my watch. It means changing into my suit and heels and getting to the television station
now
. The shortness of time is a good excuse to say no, and I want to stay in this protected, private space and finish washing the car. Besides, this is
national
television
and
live
, and I need my wits about me, and I know that I am tired and wrung-out.
“I’ll be there,” I tell them.
I know I have to be there because it’s an opportunity to talk about the death penalty, and I always make it a rule to say yes to such invitations if I’m able.
I change clothes and drive to WBRZ, the ABC affiliate station in Baton Rouge.
As soon as I arrive, a technician, working quickly, hooks the microphone onto the lapel of my coat, hands me a small hearing device to insert into my ear, and in a few short moments I am hooked up to New York. Before we go on the air, Peter Jennings practices saying “Prejean” — “Pray-zshawn.” He recognizes that it’s French and wants to make sure he pronounces it correctly. To tell you the truth, he tells me, they want my viewpoint because they are featuring the Harveys and they don’t want to present only one side of the issue. It’s unusual, he says, for a state to allow the victim’s family to witness an execution, and that’s what sparked their interest in this story in the first place. The technician advises me not to look at the monitor when I speak because the picture is a second behind the audio and it can be confusing.
The story opens showing the Harveys outside the prison after the execution. Someone is holding a sign that says “Have ‘Faith’ in the Justice System.”
Vernon says he wishes every victim could have the opportunity he had tonight. Lizabeth says that since Robert Willie saw Faith die, her parents should see him die. Warden Blackburn is shown announcing that Robert Willie was pronounced dead at 12:15
A.M
. and then Robert’s last statement is read. Then they go back to Elizabeth and Vernon Harvey, and Vernon says he feels it was too easy and quick for Willie, “he didn’t suffer no pain, and my daughter had to.”
Jennings asks me what purpose is served by letting the victim’s parents attend the execution.
I say that Louisiana officials feel that if any people have a right to witness, it should be the parents of the victim, but I feel that this merely emphasizes that an execution is an act of personal vengeance.
“Are people there for vengeance?” Jennings asks.
Yes, I say, they are, out of their deep pain, and I sympathize with them in the loss of their daughter.
Jennings asks if I feel it would be a good thing for people to be exposed to executions, and I say yes, because then they would see the violence unmasked and this would lead them to abolish executions. I
say that an execution is a brutal and horrible thing, and that I heard Mr. Harvey say Robert experienced no pain, but that the pain came every time he looked at his watch, knowing that in a few days, a few hours he would die.
Jennings thanks me and turns to George Will, the political commentator, and asks whether he thinks people should be able to witness executions.
George Will says the American people favor capital punishment, not primarily because they believe it’s an effective deterrent, but because it satisfies a deeply felt moral intuition that there are some crimes for which death is the only proportionate punishment, and this murder certainly seems to be one of those crimes. That is what the American people feel, he says, and he thinks they’re right and that vengeance, far from being shameful, can be noble.
Jennings presses the original question of whether people, if allowed to witness executions, would be repelled by capital punishment.
Will says he thinks that’s arguable and that some people who see it as a deterrent say we ought to show it on television and make it as grisly as possible, but he believes that would have a “very bad coarsening” effect on the country. Capital punishment, he says, can be done in private and still perform the essential function of expressing the community’s vengeance, not just for the loved ones but for the whole community of Louisiana, which, he believes, was expressing itself last night.
That’s it. That wraps up the death-penalty segment of the evening news. I look up and see that a small group of WBRZ staff has assembled to watch the encounter. I guess this is a pretty big occasion, for a local affiliate to be featured on national news like this. One of the technicians remarks to me, as he unthreads the microphone wire from the sleeve of my coat, that for national prime-time television, that was a “large hunk” of time I was given. Usually, he says, it’s a forty-five-second or one-minute spot, especially when it’s live. But all I can think is that George Will said that the expression of vengeance in an execution is not shameful, but noble.
Noble?
Yet, he was quick to add that only a very few people in a private setting should witness an execution because public exposure would have a “coarsening” effect on society.
How, I wonder, does a
noble
act
coarsen
society?
Another death-penalty advocate, Walter Berns, author of
For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty
,
concurs with George Will on the necessity of restricting the number of witnesses at executions. He, too, fears that public viewing of such events would have a “coarsening” effect upon the populace: “No ordinary person can be required to witness [executions], and it would be better if some people not be permitted to witness them — children, for example, and the sort of persons who would, if permitted, happily join a lynch mob. Executions should not be televised, both because of the unrestricted character of the television audience and the tendency of television to make a vulgar spectacle of the most
dignified event”
1
[italics mine].