Dead Man Walking Read online

  I ask who volunteers to take these cases.

  “People who believe in fairness,” Chava says and explains that sometimes even attorneys who support capital punishment take a postconviction capital case because they believe that no one, no matter how despicable the crime, should be deprived of a habeas review. He says that more than half of the attorneys recruited are from out of state, but Sonnier’s attorney is a native Louisianian who telephoned and offered to take the case.

  I don’t know anything about the legal issues in these cases. Once Pat mentioned that he had got a letter from his attorney, but only in passing, and he has never mentioned legal issues. I gather that he has a lot of confidence in his attorney. Since the man offered on his own to take the case, I assume he must be good at what he does. I look down at the mound of documents.

  As Chava leaves he says, “Pull the door behind you when you leave. It’ll lock,” and he’s gone.

  There are seven volumes of transcripts. I slide them to one side of the table and open a folder labeled “Correspondence.” I find a letter from Eddie Sonnier, Pat’s brother, written from parish jail.

  “These lawyers we have, I’m not sure what all they’re doing for me and my brother because we hardly ever see them. Can you help us?”

  I open the top folder full of newspaper clippings.

  “Leads are few in murder here,” the November 7, 1977, front-page headline of the Daily Iberian announces, and I look down upon the smiling faces of a teenage couple. The young man has laughing eyes and the young woman, a serene half-smile. The article tells how on the Friday evening before the murders, David LeBlanc, age seventeen, and Loretta Bourque, eighteen, had been “just two happy faces in the crowd at Catholic High School’s homecoming football game.” The couple had each been shot three times at close range in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle.

  The day after the bodies of the couple are discovered, the Iberian runs an editorial, which says in part, “It’s hard to imagine that there may be somebody in this fine community of ours who could contemplate, much less carry out, this vilest of vile deeds.”

  It takes a month to capture the killers. Their sneering faces appear on the front page of the Iberian December 2 issue: Elmo Patrick Sonnier, age twenty-seven, and Eddie Sonnier, age twenty. The article says that the brothers are being held in neighboring parish jails without bond and have been given attorneys to represent them at the court’s expense.

  In addition to the murder charges, the Sonnier brothers face ten counts of aggravated kidnapping and one charge of aggravated rape. Law enforcement authorities have revealed that a number of teenage couples in the area, six weeks before the murders, had been attacked at the local lovers’ lane. Two men, posing as security officers, would handcuff the men and molest the women. Most of the couples were too afraid or too ashamed to come forward, parish deputies said, but now, in the wake of the killings, the young people are revealing what happened to them and identifying the Sonnier brothers as the assailants.

  As the trials take place, the horror of David LeBlanc’s and Loretta Bourque’s last evening of life unfolds: the Sonniers rabbit hunting with .22 rifles, the couple parked in a lovers’ lane, the Sonniers posing as security officers, the young people accused of “trespassing” and handcuffed together in the back seat of a car and driven twenty miles down dark, abandoned roads, the car stopping in an abandoned oil field and the girl taken off by herself in the woods and raped, the couple being ordered to lie face down on the ground.

  That would be their last physical sensation before the shots were fired: the cold, dew-laden grass. The coronor testifies that they died instantly.

  The brothers’ confessions are riddled with contradictions. At first, Patrick Sonnier says he shot the young people because he didn’t want to go back to Angola, where he had served time in 1968 for stealing a truck, and he was afraid the couple would identify him to the police. He confesses to the murders not once but two, three, four times over several days. He takes law officers to the scene of the crime and points out the place where he stood as he fired the gun. But then at his trial he says he confessed because he was afraid of the police and that in fact it was his brother who had gone “berserk” and killed the teenagers. But Eddie Sonnier at his brother’s trial testifies that it was Patrick who had committed the murders, that he had been afraid of him and had held the flashlight while Patrick shot the youngsters. Both admit to the kidnapping; Patrick denies raping the girl, but Eddie says his brother did have sex with the girl and admits to having sexual intercourse with her himself but claims she was “willing.”

  At separate trials each brother is found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, but Eddie Sonnier’s death sentence is overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which holds Patrick Sonnier to be the triggerman and Eddie, the younger brother, not as culpable. Patrick Sonnier’s death sentence is also overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court because of the judge’s improper jury instruction.12 At Patrick’s second sentencing trial, Eddie, declaring, “I want to tell the truth and get everything off my chest” testifies that it was he who had killed the teenagers, that he had “lost it,” because the boy’s name was David and shortly before the killings his girlfriend had spurned him for a man named David — not the victim — and something the boy had said had triggered his rage, something had “come over him,” and the two Davids had blurred in his mind and the gun was in his hand and he had fired.

  But the prosecutor discredits this confession of guilt, arguing that Eddie Sonnier, his death sentence now overturned by the court, is transparently trying to save his brother from the electric chair. The jury readily agrees with the prosecutor and resentences Patrick Sonnier to death.13

  Information about the Bourque and LeBlanc families filters through the news articles.

  “The Sonniers exterminated the LeBlanc name,” Lloyd LeBlanc tells a reporter. He and his wife, Eula, are older and do not expect other children. David was their only son. The LeBlancs are Catholics who attend Mass regularly and send their children to Catholic schools. They have one other child, Vickie, who is attending college.

  Loretta Bourque was the oldest daughter of Godfrey and Goldie Bourque’s seven children. The Bourques’ youngest child, Hubert, age five, was born with severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk, or feed himself. He lives in a crib in the Bourques’ living room and the family calls him God’s “special angel.” The Bourques are devout Catholics.

  The sun is setting and a shaft of orange filters through one of the tall windows. I close the folder and put my head in my hands.

  A boy and girl, their young lives budding, unfolding. Snipped.

  And their parents, condemned to wonder for the rest of their lives about their children’s last tortured hours; sentenced for the rest of their days to fear for their families, their other children; startled out of their sleep at night by dreams of the terror that ripped their children from them.

  The details of the depravity stun me. It is like the spinning merry-go-round that I had once tried to climb aboard when I was a child, but it was spinning too fast and it threw me to the ground.

  You may take the documents home, Chava had said, but I do not want to take them home. I know enough. More than enough. I leave the documents on the table and walk across the dying sunlight to the door and close it behind me, the words of Jeremiah welling within me:

  A voice was heard in Ramah,

  sobbing and lamenting:

  Rachel weeping for her children,

  refusing to be comforted

  because they were no more.

  (31:15)

  A few days later a letter from Pat Sonnier arrives. It brims with small details: that the grits for breakfast had been hard that morning, that he hoped for scrambled eggs soon, that he had lent ten cigarettes to a guy on the tier, giving him a second chance, because the last time he had lent this guy cigarettes he had not returned the favor. But he would give the guy “one more chance.” It e
nds as all his letters end, thanking me for my love, my care. He has sketched and colored a green and blue duck on the envelope.

  Between the lines of his letters about eggs and cigarettes and daily routine I sense words he does not say, a reality he scrupulously omits. He never talks about the death the state has in store for him.

  Louisiana used to hang its criminals until the state legislature in 1940 decided that electrocution would be more humane and efficient. Hanging didn’t always work. As the noose was placed around the condemned’s neck, the knot had to be positioned exactly right, or the victim died a slow death by strangulation — or worse, decapitation, if the distance of the drop was disproportionate to body weight.

  Death by electrocution was introduced in the United States in 1890 at Auburn Prison in upstate New York, when William Kemmler was killed by the state of New York. The New York Times described the new method as “euthanasia by electricity,” and the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the state appellate court’s decision that death by electricity was not cruel and unusual punishment, had concluded: “It is in easy reach of the electrical science at this day to so generate and apply to the person of the convict a current of electricity of such known and sufficient force as certainly to produce instantaneous and therefore painless death.”

  A reporter for the New World newspaper who witnessed Kemmler’s execution reported:

  “The current had been passing through his body for 15 seconds when the electrode at the head was removed. Suddenly the breast heaved. There was a straining at the straps which bound him. A purplish foam covered the lips and was spattered over the leather head band. The man was alive.

  “Warden, physician, guards … everybody lost their wits. There was a startled cry for the current to be turned on again … An odor of burning flesh and singed hair filled the room, for a moment, a blue flame played about the base of the victim’s spine. This time the electricity flowed four minutes …”

  That was in 1890.

  On October 16, 1985, the electrocution of William Vandiver by the state of Indiana took seventeen minutes, requiring five charges of electricity.

  On April 22, 1983, as the state of Alabama electrocuted John Louis Evans, the first electrical charge burned through the electrode on the leg and the electrode fell off. The prison guards repaired it and administered another charge of electricity. Smoke and flame erupted from Evans’s temple and leg but the man was still alive. Following the second jolt, Evans’s lawyer demanded that Governor George C. Wallace halt the proceedings. The governor refused. Another jolt was administered. It took fourteen minutes for Evans to die.

  On May 5,1990, as the state of Florida killed Jesse Tafero, flames shot six inches from the hood covering his head. The executioner interrupted the standard two-minute 2,000-volt electrical cycle and officials later determined that a sponge on Tafero’s head had caught fire.

  The only man to walk away from an electric chair alive was seventeen-year-old Willie Francis. On May 2,1946, he was strapped into Louisiana’s portable electric chair in the jail in St. Martin Parish. As the current hit his body, witnesses reported that the youth’s “lips puffed out and he groaned and jumped so that the chair came off the floor, and he said, ‘Take it off. Let me breathe.’ ” The officials applied several more jolts, but Francis was still alive. They then helped him back to his cell to recuperate from the ordeal.

  The U.S. Supreme Court, considering whether it could be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” or “double jeopardy” to subject Francis to electrocution a second time, rendered a split verdict. On May 8, 1947, Louisiana officials once again strapped Willie Francis into the chair, but this time they succeeded in killing him.14

  Witnesses over the years have rendered graphic descriptions of state electrocutions, which Justice William J. Brennan, in Glass v. Louisiana, included in his dissenting opinion:

  “The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands … The prisoner’s limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted … The force of the electric current is so powerful that the prisoner’s eyeballs sometimes pop out on his cheeks … The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool … Sometimes the prisoner catches fire … There is a sound like bacon frying and the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh … when the post-electrocution autopsy is performed the liver is so hot that doctors said it cannot be touched by the human hand … The body frequently is badly burned …”15

  It is a common opinion that persons subjected to 2,000 volts of electricity lose consciousness immediately and feel no pain. But Dr. Harold Hillman, director of the Unity Laboratory in Applied Neurology, University of Surrey, England, thinks otherwise. Hillman, who studied autopsies of thirteen men electrocuted in the Florida and Alabama electric chairs from 1983 to 1990, concluded that such executions are “intensely painful” because the prisoner may for some time retain consciousness. For death to be instantaneous, he maintains, the full force of the electrical current would have to reach the brain. Instead, he says, only a small percentage of the current may be reaching the brain because the greater portion travels through and over the skin to reach the other electrode. The autopsies of electrocuted prisoners which he studied reveal that there was minimal damage to the brain in comparison to massive burns to the skin.

  He adds, “The massive electric current stimulates all the muscles to full contraction. Thus, the prisoner cannot react by any further movement, even when the current is turned off for a short period, and the heart is still beating, as has been documented in numerous cases of execution by electrocution. It is usually thought that the failure of the convict to move is a sign that he cannot feel. He cannot move because all his muscles are contracting maximally.”16

  Later, in the months ahead, Patrick Sonnier will confide his terror to me of the death that awaits him, telling me of a recurring nightmare, always the same: the guards coming for him, dragging him screaming toward the chair, strapping him in with the wide leather straps, covering his face with the hood, and he is screaming, “No, no, no …” For him there can never again be restful, unbroken sleep, because the dream can always come. Better, he says, to take short naps and not to sink into deep sleep.

  I cannot accept that the state now plans to kill Patrick Sonnier in cold blood. But the thought of the young victims haunts me. Why do I feel guilty when I think of them? Why do I feel as if I have murdered someone myself?

  In prayer I sort it out.

  I know that if I had been at the scene when the young people were abducted, I would have done all in my power to save them.

  I know I feel compassion for their suffering parents and family and would do anything to ease their pain if I knew how. I also know that nothing can ease some pain.

  I know I am trying to help people who are desperately poor, and I hope I can prevent some of them from exploding into violence. Here my conscience is clean and light. No heaviness, no guilt.

  Then it comes to me. The victims are dead and the killer is alive and I am befriending the killer.

  Have I betrayed his victims? Do I have to take sides? I am acutely aware that my beliefs about the death penalty have never been tested by personal loss. Let Mama or my sister, Mary Ann, or my brother, Louie, be brutally murdered and then see how much compassion I have. My magnanimity is gratuitous. No one has shot my loved ones in the back of the head.

  If someone I love should be killed, I know I would feel rage, loss, grief, helplessness, perhaps for the rest of my life. It would be arrogant to think I can predict how I would respond to such a disaster. But Jesus Christ, whose way of life I try to follow, refused to meet hate with hate and violence with violence. I pray for the strength to be like him. I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with the blood of those who have fallen victim to “God’s Avengers.” Kings and Popes an
d military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God’s authority and God’s blessing. I do not believe in such a God.

  In sorting out my feelings and beliefs, there is, however, one piece of moral ground of which I am absolutely certain: if I were to be murdered I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by government — which can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.

  Albert Camus’ “Reflections on the Guillotine” is for me a moral compass on the issue of capital punishment. He wrote this essay in 1957 when the stench of Auschwitz was still in the air, and one of his cardinal points is that no government is ever innocent enough or wise enough or just enough to lay claim to so absolute a power as death.

  Society proceeds sovereignly to eliminate the evil ones from her midst as if she were virtue itself. Like an honorable man killing his wayward son and remarking: “Really, I didn’t know what to do with him” … To assert, in any case, that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no one in his right mind will believe this today.17

  Camus addresses the moral contradiction inherent in a policy which imitates the violence it claims to abhor, a violence, he says, made more grievous by premeditation:

  Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence … For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. (p. 199)

  I am beginning to notice something about Pat Sonnier. In each of his letters he expresses gratitude and appreciation for my care. He makes no demands. He doesn’t ask for money. He does not request my phone number (inmates at Angola are allowed to make collect phone calls). He only says how glad he is to have someone to communicate with because he has been so lonely. The sheer weight of his loneliness, his abandonment, draws me. I abhor the evil he has done. But I sense something, some sheer and essential humanness, and that, perhaps, is what draws me most of all.