Authors: Helen Prejean
In August 1988, we succeed in establishing the New Orleans victim assistance group. We’ve gotten start-up funds from a few church groups, a small office at Hope House, and the Mennonite Volunteers send Dianne Kidner to launch the organization. Four years earlier I had worked to set up legal assistance for death-row inmates. Now, at last, I have done something to help victims.
The first thing I do is take Dianne to visit the Harveys. She is eager to get their ideas about needs of victims and possible programs. When I call to arrange the visit, Elizabeth suggests a potluck meal, so I bring baked beans and Dianne brings a pie. Elizabeth has made potato salad, and Vernon barbecues hamburgers.
Outside by the barbecue pit Vernon and I sip bourbon highballs and he tells me about different jobs he’s had in construction and how he almost died in World War II when his ship was torpedoed. He tells how he was fished out of the sea unconscious, presumed dead, and almost dumped into a body bag when someone happened to notice that he was alive.
This only emphasizes the randomness of Faith’s death. I don’t know what to say and we’re both quiet for a while. The only sound comes from the hamburgers sizzling on the grill, and I remember what Robert had said about the electric chair: “I know it fries your ass.”
During the meal, the talk mostly centers on Dianne’s work with victims. Dianne says she hopes the program will empower people, so she’s thinking of not using the word “victim” in the name of the program. She tries out the name “Survive.”
13
The Harveys like it.
One day in July 1989, I get a telephone call from Elizabeth Harvey. She is worried about Vernon, who is recuperating from open-heart surgery. She says he’s been talking about giving up. “That’s just not Vern,” she says, and she wonders if I can pay him a visit. “If anybody can get him fighting, you can,” she says.
That very afternoon I go to visit him in New Orleans Veterans’ Hospital. He and Elizabeth both looked washed out. Elizabeth has been driving back and forth across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway to see him each day while working as a cashier in a department store.
“The damn doctors lied to me,” Vernon says to me as soon as I walk in. “They didn’t tell me I was going to hurt like this. If I had known, I would never have let them cut me,” and he shows me the red gash down the middle of his chest. He’s lying on a stretcher in the hall near his room waiting to go to X ray.
Elizabeth tells how she and Vern have recently spent three days in court with a murder victim’s relatives from Ohio. “Their daughter was killed near the state park in Mandeville,” Elizabeth says, “and here they come for the trial all alone, not knowing the court procedures or anything. Vern and I explained to them what was going to happen in court.”
Vernon fidgets on the stretcher. “You wait forever in this damn place,” he says.
“Know what they should’ve done with Willie?” he says. “They should’ve strapped him in that chair, counted to ten, then at the count of nine taken him out of the chair and let him sit in his cell for a day or two and then strapped him in the chair again. It was too easy for him. He went too quick.”
He says he’s been thinking of a much more effective way to prevent murders. “What we do is fry the bastards on prime-time TV, that’s what we oughta do. Show them dying in the electric chair, say, at eight at night, and see if that doesn’t give second thoughts to anybody thinking of murder.”
I say that maybe what an execution does is show that the state can kill as well as anyone else, and that what people learn from such
an example is that when you have a really bad problem with someone, what you do is kill him.
Vernon says I have
got
to be kidding, and here we go again, Vernon and I playing our familiar roles, jousting with each other about the death penalty.
I tell him that the people doing the thinking and the people doing the killing are not the same people.
“That’s because we’re not executing
enough
of ‘em,” Vernon retorts. “We have to make executions more frequent and more consistent. No exceptions.”
“But money and race and politics and the discretion we leave to D.A.s is always going to keep it from being a uniform and fair process,” I say, “and even locale plays a part. Some states have the death penalty and some don’t.”
Vernon is getting some color in his face.
Elizabeth looks relieved.
An attendant has now appeared to bring Vernon to X ray. “What we really oughta do,” he says as his stretcher begins to move away, proving to me just how effective my arguments have been, “we oughta do to them exactly what they did to their victim. Willie should’ve been stabbed seventeen times, that’s what we oughta do to them.”
I tell him to hang in there and I’ll he coming back with an apple pie.
One evening in January 1991, I’m facing another doorknob and taking a deep breath before I turn it. Behind it are members of Survive, the victim assistance group begun by Dianne Kidner and now directed by Mary Riley, another Mennonite volunteer. During the two years Dianne worked with victims she mostly helped individuals, but now Mary has moved the organization toward group self-help and has begun weekly gatherings on Monday nights in one of the conference rooms at the Loyola University law school. Under Mary’s direction, membership has been steadily growing and it now numbers about forty people — mostly indigent black women trying to cope with the death of sons, daughters, spouses, parents. Mostly sons — almost all of them killed with guns.
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang
. If sounds of the killings could be accumulated and played back, it would sound like a war — which, in fact, it is. The
Louisiana Weekly
, a black-owned newspaper, ran a full page listing the name and race of the 323 homicide victims in New Orleans in
1990 (284 were black) with the headline: “For the City of New Orleans, Saddam Hussein Was Not the Only Horror of the Year.”
14
And Dr. Frank Minyard, Orleans Parish coroner, in a recent newspaper interview said, “Between AIDS, drugs, murder, police, prisons … You talk about genocide: by the year 2000 we will have lost a whole generation. There will be no more black males between the ages of 30 and 40.”
15
I open the door.
I feel prepared for what I will hear tonight. “Braced,” maybe, is a better word because almost every week at Hope House staff meetings I hear stories of shoot-outs and deaths in the St. Thomas Housing Development.
As the stories begin, I think of the plagues visited on Egypt recorded in the Book of Exodus. The last plague was the worst — the slaying of the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. The Israelites who had put lamb’s blood over their doorposts were spared by the Avenging Angel. But no one here tonight seemed able to get the blood on the doorpost in time, and some have been visited by the Avenging Angel more than once.
How do I introduce myself — as the mother of six or the mother of four? I guess I’ll say six even though two of my sons were killed, both of them shot, five months apart. I’ve been angry at God and confused because I have really tried to do right, go to church every Sunday, and give a good home to my kids and I thought that would protect us.
My son was abducted and shot twelve times. It was just a few days before he was to appear as a witness to a drug-related murder. He had seen two boys killing someone. We had gotten threats and I had called the D.A.’s office and asked for protection. I sent my other son to the country to stay with kinfolk. They was callin’ and threatenin’ him too.
Well, they know me at City Hall, yes, they do, because I still get out there with my picket sign and I let them know I know my son was set up to be killed by the police. He had been dating a white girl, a policeman’s daughter, and I’m gonna stand up to ‘em ‘til the day I die.
My son was shot by his girlfriend. She just got a gun and shot him in the eye, his right eye, and I’m going to have to quit my second job so I can pay more attention to my younger daughter. I’m so worried about that child.
I keep wanting to stay in bed and sleep and not get up. If I can just get through my boy’s birthday, then Christmas … I’ve lost three children: the first was a crib death, my three-year-old died of hepatitis, and now my twenty-four-year-old son was shot to death.
I had to drop out of LPN [licensed practical nurse] school for the second time now. Got a bad case of nerves.
I keep waitin’ for my boy to knock on the door. Seven times, that was his little knock and I’d say, “Who’s there?” and he’d say, “Me, Baby,” and the newspaper told it wrong. They talked about my boy’s murder like it was just another drug-related murder. They don’t know who shot my boy. The killer’s still out there somewhere.
My eighty-three-year-old father was shot in cold blood. I think it was because he was speaking out about crime in the neighborhood.
My son was a crack cocaine addict. I called his parole officer and tried to get him to arrest him but the officer said my boy was hopeless, that it was no use. They found him shot.
I went to several stores where they sell guns — not to buy one exactly, I just asked about buying one. It was so easy. All I had to do was show a picture ID … All these young kids are totin’ guns — handguns, sawed-off shotguns, .357 Magnums, Uzis. Even thirteen-year-olds have guns. They go in people’s houses and steal them.
As each of the women speaks, a litany punctuates the testimonies — “Oh, Lord … Yes, Lord … Jesus … Say it … Amen … Jesus, help us … God makes a way out of no way” — and sometimes soft moans and tears and heads bent down and then raised up, and at times hands reaching to clasp another hand.
Some talk of considering suicide, of staying in bed and sleeping, of numbing the pain with alcohol or drugs. They talk of confusion and bewilderment. But mostly they talk about carrying on. The struggle for physical survival — meeting utility and rent payments, putting food on the table, taking sick children to Charity Hospital — helps keep them going. Except for the one woman who pickets in
front of city hall, it seems to be a given, a fact of life, that no one expects anything from the criminal justice system.
A pattern emerges: of the forty or so members of Survive, only one hopes to see her child’s murderer brought to trial.
Maybe
, another member cautions. She, too, had thought her child’s killer would be brought to trial, only to be told that the charges had been dropped because of “insufficient evidence.”
One case in forty of a perpetrator brought to trial is not a very good track record for a D.A.’s office. I soon discover that in the majority of these cases the perpetrator is still at large, or, if apprehended, kept in jail for a short while, then freed. A good number of Survive members have never been interviewed by investigating officials. Some have never seen a document of any kind — a medical or autopsy report or even a death certificate.
Granted, even the most fair-minded law enforcement officials face a substantial challenge in a city as crime-ridden as New Orleans. First there is the sheer volume of homicides, where in a single weekend there might be as many as four murders, especially in poor black neighborhoods, where most homicides take place.
16
The police are not legally required to investigate every reported crime.
17
Then there is the difficulty of getting witnesses to come forward. Blacks in low-income housing projects are reluctant witnesses because they both distrust the police and fear retaliation from drug dealers. Nor are police investigators eager to conduct investigations in violence-ridden neighborhoods.
In such circumstances “equal protection of the laws,” a Fourteenth Amendment right, is indeed a challenge. Yet some tough cases show that where there is resolve, results can be expeditious.
A recent New Orleans case comes to mind of a judge’s son who was murdered. The young man, who had been to a bar, was killed in the street near the bar in the early-morning hours. There were no witnesses to the crime, yet within four days of vigorous investigation two suspects were arrested, charged, and jailed. A high bond was set, and the suspects were kept in jail pending trial.
18
In 1989, there were 249 homicides in New Orleans. Eighty-five percent of the victims were black. Sixteen offenders were convicted and jailed.
19
My hunch is that the large number of “unsolved” murders of black victims is not unique to New Orleans, but I discover that the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not track the race of the victim in its records of “unsolved” murders.
The “Chattahoochee Report,” whose findings were presented
to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Georgia House of Representatives on July 9, 1991, revealed strong racial bias in the way some D.A.s prosecute murder cases. The study of murder cases in a six-county area in Georgia from 1973 to 1990 found that although blacks made up 65 percent of murder victims and whites, 35 percent, the death penalty was sought in 85 percent of murder cases that involved white victims but only in 15 percent of those cases that involved black victims.
20
The section of the “Chattahoochee Report” entitled “Victims’ Families: A Contrast in Black and White” could have been transcribed from a Survive meeting. Numerous black families in Columbus County, where the death penalty has been vigorously sought, testified that despite the D.A.’s protestation that he always met with victims’ families, he had not in fact ever visited them. In contrast, the study shows, when the victim was white, the D.A. was solicitous of the family’s feelings, often paying them courtesy visits at their homes and then announcing at a press conference that he would seek the death penalty.