street roots
Oct. 25, 2013
PREJEAN, from page 8
going to want to see me. I’m the spiritual
advisor to a man who killed their kids. And I
stayed away. It was really cowardice that
made me stay away. I was afraid of their
anger, their rejection, and then I met them
at the worst possible time. It was right at
the pardon board hearing, one week before
Pat was executed. And they were there at
the pardon board because they had been
told by the D.A., “You bring all your relatives
and friends, because this is the last legal
hoop you gotta jump through to get your
justice.” And that’s when they meet me. And
what am I doing at the pardon board? I’m
there trying to persuade the pardon board
not to kill Patrick Sonnier. And so how could
way.
But some guards, like Felton Coody, he
had been the supervisor on death row for
years. And that was fine, he could do that.
He saw there was order on the tier. But
then they moved him over to the execution’s
slot, and after five executions, he called me
in his office one day and he said, “Sister,
I ma have to quit this job. I’ve been there
five times; and I come home afterward and,
I sit in my La-Z-Boy chair, and I can’t eat, I
can t sleep. In my gut I know it’s wrong,
because they’re defenseless, and we take
em out and we kill ’em.” He said, “My job
isn’t even to strap ’em down. Mine was just
to go the cell and get their stuff, after
they’ve been killed, like their toothbrush
and their personal belongings to give to
this very heavy mesh screen — I couldn’t
believe how human he was. And you know
what I’ve come to? Everybody is worth more
than the worst thing we’ve ever done in our
life. And that has stayed with me.
I shouldn’t have worried and been
nervous: It was two hours, and he did most
of the talking. He was just so glad to have a
visitor. So then I just kept visiting — and
couldn’t believe they were really going to kill
him. This was in the ’80s: He was killed in
’84; I started writing to him in ’82. We
hadn’t had an execution in Louisiana for
over 20 years. There had been an unofficial
moratorium across the nation starting in the
’60s into the ’70s. And then in ’76, the
Supreme Court put the death penalty back.
So it was just beginning again to go
decision, and it means that if one [juror]
holds out, the person isn’t going to be killed.
So everybody on that jury holds that
person’s life in their hands. And they live
with that for the rest of their life.
I tell a story in “The Death of Innocents.”
I call it the “anguished juror.” The trial was
of a man in Louisiana, Robert Sawyer, and
[there was] no doubt that he did the crime.
Then the jury goes in, and so the foreman
says, “Let’s see what we’re facing here.”
And they go around the table and “Death,
death, death, death, death, death, death,”
and they come to this guy, and he goes,
“Hey. Who are we to kill him? Let’s let him
live. He’s going to be in prison. He’s not
going to hurt anybody.”
Tbe boy s parents c a w right op to me? and lley d leBlasic, David's father — David was only IS years old, and when they lost
their sob , Uoyd and his wife were to© old to have other childrens tremendous suffering* Bud he walked right up to me and he
saltb Sister* Where have you been all this time? We%e had nobody to talk to* You can^t believe the pressure on us with this
death penalty thing* 1 said, "Mr* leB laae, I'm so sorry* 1 never dreamed you'd want to see me rr 4/ Sister, yon need to come
walk In our shoes*"
they not see me as an enemy?
There were two teenagers killed: David
LeBlanc and Loretta Borque. And the girl’s
parents were just furious with me. We
bumped into each other outside the pardon
board. But the boy’s parents came right up
to me, and Lloyd LeBlanc, David’s father -
David was only 16 years old, and when they
lost their son, Lloyd and his wife were too
old to have other children: tremendous
suffering. And he walked right up to me and
he said, “Sister. Where have you been all
this time? We’ve had nobody to talk to. You
can’t believe the pressure on us with this
death penalty thing.” I said, “Mr. LeBlanc,
I’m so sorry. I never dreamed you’d want to
see me.” “Sister, you need to come walk in
our shoes.”
Actually, he’s the hero of “Dead Man
Walking,” because he made his way through
the crucible of suffering and loss. All the
people kept telling him he had to be for the
death penalty, and as he put it: “I went
there, Sister. I did. I went there.” [He] said,
“Boy, I’d like to pull the switch myself. I
don’t care what pain it causes their momma
or anything.” And then he said, “I didn’t like
what was happening to me, because this
hatred and this bitterness was taking over
me. They killed our son, but I’m not gonna
let ’em kill me. I’ma do what Jesus said.”
He said, “Sister, people think forgiveness
is weak. The way I experienced was, it was
taking my life away, all this anger and
bitterness. It was eating me alive. I’ve
always been a kind person; I love to help
people. So then I came back to myself, and I
just said, ‘No, that’s not who I am.” And
then he set himself to go down the road of
forgiveness.
He was the first victim’s family I ever met
that taught me that forgiveness is, in a way,
saving your own life and not [letting] the
hatred take over. And that’s why I call him
the hero.
R. R.: A n d gu ard s? What do guards think?
S. H.P.: Some guards, you know, are all
hyped for it. They practice for the execution:
They get a guard of the same height and
weight as the one to be executed, and they
do dry runs of it, where the person goes
peacefully, the person fights them all the
their family.” And, Rosette, he’s the only
one I met in the whole system that quit his
job because of his conscience.
Now we have more and more people
speaking out who have been intimately
involved in the killing process. I don’t know
if you saw this in Newsweek magazine [in
the Sept. 25, 2011, issue]: The title of the
article is “I Committed Murder,” and it’s
about the executioners and the guards and
the people in the prisons and the people
who have been most closely identified in the
process. In fact the title of the article came
from Jerry Givens, and he was the
executioner in Virginia, and he killed 62
people. The first ones by electrocution and
the rest by lethal injection. He was real
honest. He had what you call an
“executioner’s h ig h .” H e did th is in terv iew
in Newsweek, and it was like a public
confession to a nation.
So more and more of those people who
have been so involved in the process are
speaking out. That’s helping us put down
the death penalty. The death penalty is in
diminishment. I’m out there on the road,
waking up people, because it can’t end too
soon. Because the death penalty by its very
nature is the practice of torture, because
you can’t put a conscious, imaginative
person in a cell — like in California, it’s an
average of 20 years — where you wait to be
killed. And you anticipate it.
Everyone I know on death row has the
same nightmares: “They’re coming for me,
it’s my time, someone’s coming to get me.
I’m kicking and screaming, going, ‘No, no,’
and then I wake up and I look around me,
and I’m in my cell, and I go, ‘Oh, it was just
a dream.’ ” Patrick Sonnier, he said, “Sister,
just pray my legs hold me up.” Because they
want to walk with dignity.
R. R.: When you met Patrick Sonnier, what
d id you think?
S. H.P.: When I actually went to the first
visit, we’d been writing letters. I was really
nervous about him, because anybody can
write nice letters, but I’d never been with a
real murderer before. I thought his face
would look different or something, it would
look harder. Then when I met him, and I
looked at his face - we were separated from
one another, he was on the other side of
through the legal process, so that
executions could begin to happen. And I
thought: Oh, my God, they are going to kill
him.
[Editor’s note: After the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled in 1972 the death penalty was
“cruel and unusual,” the Justices then ruled
in 1976 that the death penalty was
constitutional. The first person executed
after the ruling was Gary Gilmore in Utah in
January 1977. Gilmore’s crime and
execution served as the basis for Norman
Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The
Executioner’s Song.”]
R. R.: They are still executing people today.
S. H.P.: You better believe it.
R. R.: [On Sept. 26] Texas officials
[executed] Arturo Diaz. In a T V newscast I
saw, it said that fo r someone to receive the
death penalty in Texas, jurors have to
unanim ously decide that someone is a future
danger to society an d has no redeeming value.
H ow many people have you met in yo u r work
that you thought could never be redeemed?
S. H.P.: There were none.
We’re asking the jury for something
impossible: By our taking on the death
penalty, one of the big crunches is on these
ordinary citizens who are asked to make
these godlike decisions, in which they don’t
have the expertise to make the decision.
Future dangerousness? Criminologists have
studied this. It’s almost impossible to
determine, because so much has to do with
what a person’s context is, what’s around
them, what’s going on in their life. It’s an
impossible thing to answer.
Then to say you have no redeeming
value? I wrote a second book, Rosette, called
“The Death of Innocents” about
accompanying two people to death that I
believe were innocent, and I talk about this
struggle of juries. The working title for a
long while was “Impossible Burden.” We’ve
taken on a burden that human beings can’t
handle. First of all, that we’re always gonna
get the truth. We know that 142 wrongfully
convicted people have come off death row
saved by [law school] students and
innocence projects, so it’s very iffy that we
get the truth. Then it’s a unanimous_______
Then there were a number of factors.
One was: [The juror] didn’t have real
knowledge then that the person wasn’t
going to get out of prison. Jurors for a long
time weren’t informed that if you don’t give
the death sentence, people are going to get
life without parole. So [the jury may]
question, “Well, maybe he’ll get out on good
behavior,” and in good conscience, they may
go, “Well, we have to give the death
penalty.”
So that was a factor in it. But the other
was, he said, “I just gave in to pressure.
‘OK, I’ll vote for death, too.’ ” On the night
Robert Sawyer was executed, this [juror]
calls his lawyer, and he’s drunk and he’s
crying, and he says, “I tell my boy, ‘Son,
don’t cave in to pressure. Stand up for what
you believe, no matter what.’ ”
You know that biblical story of Solomon,
who’s known for being wise? One of the
ways they show the wisdom of Solomon —
this is in the Old Testament of the Bible —
two women came before Solomon, and there
was a baby. Each of those women claimed to
be the mother of the baby.
And so what Solomon said was, “Oh, well,
bring me a sword, and we’ll cut the baby in
half. You each take a half of the baby.” And
the real mother went, “No, no, don’t kill the
child,” and that’s how he knew who the real
mother was. I just want to say that is
chicken feed [compared] to the decision
these jurors make. It’s just ordinary people
called in to make these life-death decisions.
R. R.: You know all these names [o f people
involved with the cases]. H ow do you remember
all these people?
S. H.P.: They’re emblazoned in my life.
How could I forget the names of these
people? When you’re really close and
involved in all this stuff, the names are
sealed forever as part of you. It’s just part of
me. [Pause.] What’s your name again?
[Laughs.] Nah, that’s just a joke.
Reprinted from R ea l Change News, Seattle,
Wash.
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