Authors: Helen Prejean
Elizabeth and the boys invite me to the house and I go and we sit around the dining-room table and drink coffee and look at a photograph album and Elizabeth gives me a wallet-sized photograph of Robert as a small boy, maybe six years old, with his thin little face and a slight smile and his hair all slicked close to his head. She also gives me another photo, one Robert had sent her from Marion, where he is standing, unsmiling, dressed in khaki pants and a white, tank-top undershirt, a cigarette limp in his hand, and on the back the inscription, “Hello, Mom, here is the picture of me living every day to the fullest.”
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The states of Washington, Montana, Delaware, and New Hampshire still allow hanging. On Tuesday, January 5, 1993, the state of Washington hanged triple child-killer Westley Allen Dodd. In a twelve-page list of instructions the Department of Corrections specifies a thirty-foot Manila hemp rope ¾-to-1¼ inch in diameter which is boiled to eliminate stiffness and lubricated with wax, soap, or oil to ensure tightness when the noose is placed around the neck. According to the manual the distance a standing person must fall to generate enough force so the knot breaks the spine depends on weight. For Dodd, that was calculated at 7 feet, 1 inch. If the condemned feels faint while waiting for the trapdoor to be sprung, a board with straps is nearby to prop him or her up.
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*
Is this because we Americans seem to hold our civil liberties lightly? Two out of every three Americans don’t know that the Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments of the Consitution. Twenty-three percent of Americans believe the President can suspend the Bill of Rights during wartime.
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Fifty-five percent support mandatory drug testing for all Americans.
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CHAPTER
11
T
he best thing I can do for the Harveys is avoid them. Definitely, I
decide, this seems the best course of action. Here I am, spiritual adviser to yet another man on death row,
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giving lectures, conducting workshops, and organizing public demonstrations for the abolition of the death penalty. The Harveys, on the other hand, don’t miss an execution. Each time, there they are outside the front gate of Angola, celebrating as another murderer is killed.
On what common ground could we possibly meet?
Good-bye, Harveys. Or so I think.
I have decided to avoid the Harveys, but they have not decided to avoid me.
Two years after Robert’s execution, in 1986, our abolition group is sponsoring a weekend seminar on the death penalty at Loyola University. Not a big event by any means, attended by a hundred or so of those most dedicated to the cause. Proponents of the death penalty
never
attend these seminars.
Except the Harveys.
As we are about to begin the first session I look across the room and see them. I avert my eyes. All day I avoid them. Why have a confrontation over irreconcilable differences, a confrontation that can only lead to further estrangement and pain?
I make it through the whole day without meeting them. The day is ending. People are beginning to leave. Elizabeth is standing near the exit and I don’t see her ahead of time and suddenly here she is and here I am and she says, “You haven’t even looked at us all day. We haven’t heard from you in such a long time. When are you coming to see us?”
I’m stunned. I tell her I’ll be glad to come see them if they want me to come. Vernon, standing near Elizabeth, nods. Yes, they want me to come.
I realize that in their sorrow they must be lonely, but even more, I know it’s rough going organizing victims’ families in Louisiana.
They want me to visit
. It is an invitation for which I haven’t dared to hope. I remember Vernon saying he liked apple pie. I decide to bake an apple pie. When sorrow and loss and conflict are overwhelming, bake a pie.
A few weeks later I drive up to the Harvey home in Mandeville across Lake Pontchartrain. Same tall trees near the house. Same swing on the porch. Vernon is recuperating from hip surgery. He’s glad to get the pie. Elizabeth says, “For disagreeing with somebody so strongly, you sure are tearing into her pie.” Vernon just smiles and eats. I sit in their kitchen and we talk and drink coffee. I am glad to be in their company again. They talk about helping victims’ families — going with them to court, telling them what to expect, educating them on their rights. “Which we have had to learn on our own,” Elizabeth says, “because we sure didn’t have anyone to teach us,” and then she says how they experienced two victimizations — one with Faith’s murder and the other at the hands of the criminal justice system. “All the rights of the criminal are protected — they have lawyers appointed to them if they can’t afford one and their rights are all spelled out and they are told what those rights are, but nobody told us our rights. We didn’t even know we had rights. Like the right to see the autopsy report and Faith’s body. They kept me from seeing Faith’s body and then once the chance had passed it was too late. I know they were trying to protect me but that was my decision, not theirs, to make.”
“What people don’t know,” Vernon says, “is that if they get stonewalled by local law-enforcement people, they can call up elected officials — politicians — and get some action.”
“In dealing with the D.A. and the police,” Elizabeth says, “you could probably get more information when you get your car stolen than if your child is killed because then you’re the victim, but when someone’s killed, they figure the one killed is the victim, not you,
and you’re pushed to the sidelines. You and what your needs are don’t even count and you can call them until you’re blue in the face and they won’t call you back. Some do. Some are understanding, but not most of them. They’re too busy prosecuting the criminal to be concerned about the victim’s family.”
Elizabeth says that she tells victims’ families to be calm and unemotional when they telephone the D.A. or the police for information. “They don’t deal well with emotionally upset people, they just hang up on you, and it’s real important to keep lines of communication open with them. There’s one case I’m thinking of where the woman’s daughter could talk to the police calmer and easier than her mother, and so the daughter was the one who always made the phone calls for information. I tell them that after they hang up the phone, then they can cry and scream all they want, but not when they’re talking to law enforcement people.”
Vernon says prosecutors may not even want victims’ families in the courtroom. “After all their hard work they’re scared some relative of a victim might lose control and blurt something out and the jury will hear it and they’ll lose the case.”
“Some people don’t know that they can give a victim impact statement,” Elizabeth says, “and most don’t know about the victim assistance programs that are available. Again, it’s the sheriffs and D.A.s who are supposed to let folks know about these programs, but plenty of them don’t get the word out. There’s no votes in it for them. They don’t get elected or reelected for helping victims. We’re making progress and now more people do know about the programs, but not nearly enough.”
Dealing with the law enforcement officials is one thing, Vernon and Elizabeth say, and the way they were treated had surprised them, but what had surprised them even more was the way all their friends and even Faith’s friends stayed away from them after the murder. Few, they say, came to visit them and very few came to the funeral.
“I think everyone was denying that this sort of violent death could hit so close to home,” Elizabeth says. “They didn’t want to admit it had happened to Faith because then they’d have to admit that it could happen to them, and people don’t want to face that.”
Vernon talks about the abolitionist seminar they had attended at Loyola University. He says he had told Elizabeth, “We better watch that nun, we better watch her. She’s gonna abolish executions if we don’t watch out.’ ”
He says it half joking, half serious. It’s easy. The conversation is
easy — even with Vernon shingling in his favorite death-penalty arguments and my countering with my own. I tell them about Robert’s last hours and his struggle to formulate his last words. I tell them that I believe he was sincere when he said that he hoped his death would relieve their suffering.
Vernon begins to cry. He just can’t get over Faith’s death, he says. It happened six years ago but for him it’s like yesterday, and I realize that now, with Robert Willie dead, he doesn’t have an object for his rage. He’s been deprived of that, too. I know that he could watch Robert killed a thousand times and it could never assuage his grief. He had walked away from the execution chamber with his rage satisfied but his heart empty. No, not even his rage satisfied, because he still wants to see Robert Willie suffer and he can’t reach him anymore. He tries to make a fist and strike out but the air flows through his fingers.
I reach over and put my hand on his arm. My heart aches for him. I sympathize with his rage. Reason and logic are useless here. In time, I hope Robert’s final wish comes true: that Vernon and Elizabeth find peace. But I know that it will not be Robert’s death which brings this peace. Only reconciliation: accepting Faith’s death — can finally release them to leave the past and join the present, to venture love, to rejoin the ranks of the living.
Some months later I meet the Harveys again — on the steps of the Louisiana Supreme Court building in New Orleans. They are there with a small group of supporters holding signs — “What about the victims?” — waiting for us as we conclude a weeklong abolition campaign across the state. It has been the longest trek yet for Pilgrimage for Life, about two hundred and fifty miles. All along the way we have gotten excellent media coverage and used the opportunity to educate the public on the death penalty.
This is getting to be familiar — the Harveys and their friends waiting for us here at the end.
During the rally Elizabeth asks me if she can have the microphone to speak to the group. As an organizer I know that one thing you
never
do at a public demonstration is hand over the microphone to the opposition. The media just might choose to feature them on the evening news, and you lose a hard-earned opportunity to get your message across.
But this is Elizabeth Harvey.
I hand her the microphone.
The television cameras zoom in.
She says that Congress is about to cut funds for victims’ assistance
and asks us to join them in writing letters to protest the cuts. Her request is met with hearty applause.
Two weeks after Elizabeth’s appeal, a group of us from Pilgrimage send a signed petition to our congresspersons protesting the proposed cuts. I send the Harveys a photocopy of the petition and a personal note of support.
Our next encounter outside the prison gates, in August 1987, is more painful.
I’ve come with several fellow nuns to support Sister Ruth Rault, D.C., when she returns to the front gate after the execution. It’s her nephew, Sterling, who will die tonight
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and she will be there with him at the end. I had promised her that I would be waiting for her at the gate when she came out.
All the way there I am praying,
Please, God, please don’t let the Harveys be there
. But here they are in the amber prison floodlights, with their daughter, Lizabeth, seated in folding chairs near the gates. A few friends are with them, and so are their posterboard signs, propped up on chairs.
“How are y’all doing?” I say as I walk across to meet ehem. I nod respectfully toward the couple with them. Things are stiff.
“Hey, take a look at my new poster,” Vernon says.
It’s done in two frames, the first with the words, “Murderer’s Rights: You have the right to an attorney” in bold black letters, and the second showing a tombstone with “R.I.P.” on it and the words “You have a right to remain silent.”
“He’ll be silent all right — forever,” Vernon chuckles. He is pleased with the poster. I admit that it makes its point very well. Propped up next to the Harveys are signs that are now familiar to me. One of them says, “Tell them about Jesus, then put them in the electric chair.”
“How’s the hip?” I ask Vernon. He has recently had a hip replacement.
“Coming along,” he says.
My fellow nuns have formed a small circle about thirty feet away. They hold lighted candles and pray. Some of their words to God float over, words that the victims’ families couldn’t disagree with more.
The daughter of a couple seated near the Harveys was murdered several years ago. They are bitter that her murderer was given a life sentence, not death. They drive more than 100 miles to the penitentiary to join the Harveys for executions.
The woman says to me, “Have you read the Bible, the part where
God says, ‘An eye for an eye,’ and ‘Whosoever doth shed blood shall have his blood shed?’ Have you read that?” I say, yes, I’m familiar with the quote.
“Do you know what Romans 13 says?” she asks.
“About obeying civil authority, obeying the law, is that the one you mean?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, her voice clipped. But she doesn’t want to talk to me anymore, about the Bible or about anything.
“You haven’t lost a child. You don’t understand anything,” she snaps. “You’re upsetting me. Just go away and leave us alone.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” I say as I move away. I hear Elizabeth saying something to her, something about my being “all right” and that I don’t try to “change” them. And I hear Vernon saying something, too, and then I’m with the Sisters, praying and looking at my watch and knowing what’s going on inside the prison and I can’t hear them anymore.
The killing is done.
The guards at the gate announce the time of death. The news media interview us. And everyone leaves to go home. Everyone but the Harveys and me.