Dead Man Walking (7 page)

Periodically, inmates are strip-searched. Eddie points to the door in the visiting room through which inmates return to the prison. Behind that door is a room and a guard. After a visit the inmate removes all of his clothes. He opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue. He turns his head from side to side so the guard can check his ears. He raises his arms above his head and stands spread-eagled, then he turns his back to the guard, bends over, and opens the cheeks of his buttocks. Finally, his back still toward the guard, he raises his feet one at a time for the guard to inspect the soles of his feet, his toes. If a guard suspects drugs he may do a “finger wave” of the inmate’s rectum.

I shudder to think of myself in this type of situation, and I remember reading Dorothy Day’s account of her experience in jail for civil disobedience. She told how the woman who conducted her physical exam had been “brutal” and how shocking it was to hear other women inmates shouting vulgar invitations to her and her young companions as they were led down the tier to their cells.

I can’t imagine.

Sometime in July 1983, I receive a phone call from Pat. That morning a guard had entered the tier, stopped in front of his cell, and handed him a paper to read and sign. The paper was entitled “Warrant of Execution in Capital Case,” and he had found himself reading his own name after the words “the condemned person to be put to death,” and the date of his death, “the 19th day of August, 1983.”

His voice cracks. “This is my second date,” he tells me, and I remember that Chava had mentioned his receiving an execution date shortly after his arrival at Angola.

On my fingers as I talk to him I count the days. How many Fridays left? Thursdays? Sundays?

“I’ll be moving to Cell 1 any time now,” he tells me. An inmate on “countdown” for execution is put in the cell nearest the guard station. That way the guards, trained to spot desperate behavior — suicide, escape — can look in on him and make notes in a log book on how he is bearing up. Tranquilizing medication is offered to the inmate if he desires it. Pat refuses medication.

I step up the visits and begin seeing Pat once a week. I write to him more often and tell his other pen pals about the execution date so they can write to him also. A week or so after the delivery of the death warrant he tells me that a couple of guards had appeared
unannounced at his cell one morning. They had shackled his hands and feet and taken him to a scale. “What’s this for?” he asked. “Vail starting a Weight Watchers program around here?” But the guards had not answered and did not smile. One guard recorded his weight while another measured his height. Then the guards returned him to his cell.

“What was that all about?” I ask.

“They wouldn’t say,” he answers. “Some of the guys on the Row say they’re measuring us for our coffins.”

Later, Warden Frank Blackburn will explain to me that a guard, matching the inmate’s height and weight, does a dry run from the cell to the chair to make sure the “Tactical Team” can “contain” the condemned prisoner should he put up a fight. “Some of these guys are pretty big and strong,” he explains. “Once the guards get the inmate in the chair, they use the leather straps on the chair to hold him, then remove the leg irons and handcuffs.”

Albert Camus:

Long in advance the condemned man knows that he is going to be killed and that the only thing that can save him is a reprieve … In any case, he cannot intervene, make a plea outside himself, or convince. Everything goes on outside him. He is no longer a man but a thing waiting to be handled by the executioners … This explains the odd submissiveness that is customary in the condemned at the moment of their execution. (pp. 201-202)

Pat is scheduled for execution on Friday, August 19. That really means the evening of Thursday the eighteenth, because the execution is scheduled for just after midnight. I go to visit him on Wednesday the seventeenth. Warden Ross Maggio has granted me a special four-hour visit. Just before entering the prison I use the public telephone outside the gates to call the Coalition office to see if perhaps the courts have issued a stay of execution. Execution is about forty hours away. They have not yet moved him to the death house, where the electric chair is located about five miles deep inside the prison.

Pat looks thin, sallow. He has dark circles under his eyes. He has not been able to keep his food down and has lost thirty pounds in two weeks. He keeps going on coffee and cigarettes.

“My stuff is packed, ready to go,” he tells me when I walk in.
Any minute the prison authorities might summon him to move to the death house. He has packed what they allow him to bring: a toothbrush and toothpaste, a change of underwear, cigarettes, his Bible, his address book, some stationery and a ballpoint pen. No radio. Music stirs emotions, and prison authorities want as little emotion as possible in this process. There will be a television for him to watch. There will be a telephone on the wall near his cell from which he can make collect calls. Some men on the Row have recently made this move to the death house, but they have all come back alive, receiving stays of execution from the courts. There hasn’t been an execution in Louisiana since June 1961.

I tell him that I have just spoken with the Prison Coalition by phone and Tom Dybdahl, who has replaced Chava, has told me to assure him that his attorney has filed his petition and he will surely get a stay from the courts any minute now. I tell him I will visit with him for a couple of hours, and if by then word of a stay has not come, I will ask the major to let me use the phone in his office to call the Coalition office again.

I hope Tom knows what he is talking about. I know nothing of legal issues. I’m practicing blind faith that the attorney knows what he’s doing.

“How sure are you about the stay?” I had asked Tom. “Ninety-five percent sure,” he had said. That reassures me. But he had also said, “You’re never absolutely sure about what the courts will do.” How does one deal with this kind of waiting? How keep one’s poise, one’s sanity? Even if he had said 99.9 percent sure, there’s that one tenth of 1 percent.

The simplest surgery can go wrong. Delivery of babies can go wrong. Anything that human beings do can go wrong.

To pass the time I do what I do best. I talk to him. I ask him questions, tell him stories. He talks about hunting in the woods, driving the big trucks, working on a hog farm in Texas, how his mama cooks venison and rabbit stew with a lot of onions and thick gravy, what it is like to work on oil rigs and what makes it dangerous work, some close calls he’s had, some bad accidents he’s seen.

We talk for two hours. We do not talk about death and dying. We will if the time comes, but for now the talking helps pass the time and maintain sanity until the time when the phone will ring and the guard will come in and say, “Sonnier, you got a stay.”

Pat is hyped, at times full of bravado. “They want to see me break. Well, they’ll never break me.” He had talked to one of the guards about getting some barbecue corn chips and a Dr Pepper
from a snack machine for me. “We’ll celebrate when we get news of the stay,” he told me. “Ole Maggio [the warden] thinks he’s got me this time, but I’ll show him. My attorney will pull off the stay at the last minute. Maybe I’ll even get a good ‘last’ meal off of him,” and he laughs. But the laugh is forced. It comes from his diaphragm. He is talking and laughing like this and I can see the terror in his eyes.

“Be a man my son.” The line from Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” wells up in my mind, the words of a priest to Sam Cardinella, who loses control of his anal sphincter muscle on the way to the gallows.

As if one can be brave by simply willing it. I wonder what kind of dignity I would muster if I were facing my executioners.

It’s surreal, all of it. My mind keeps casting about for something familiar to reassure myself that it is just a question of time before the stay of execution comes, that this is all a bad dream. Unreal.

At about two o’clock I go to the major’s office to make the phone call.

“Sorry,” Tom says, “no word yet from the court. You just have to help him wait it out.”

I go back to the visiting room. He is standing up, peering eagerly through the heavy mesh screen. “No word yet,” I tell him. “Would you like to pray?”

He nods his head. I don’t remember the exact words of the prayer — a prayer, I’m sure, of essentials: forgiveness, courage, sustenance for the final big step if it should come.

When the prayer is over I say to him, “If you die, I want to be with you.”

He says, “No. I don’t want you to see it.”

I say, “I can’t bear the thought that you would die without seeing one loving face. I will be the face of Christ for you. Just look at me.”

He says, “It’s terrible to see. I don’t want to put you through that. It could break you. It could scar you for life.”

I know that it will terrify me. How could it not terrify me? But I feel strength and determination. I tell him it won’t break me, that I have plenty of love and support in my life.

“God will give me the grace,” I tell him.

He consents. He nods his head. It is decided. I will be there with him if he dies.

He says, “If only I knew I’d die right away when the first jolt hits me. Will I feel it? They say the body burns. [Later, his death
certificate will record that death took four to five minutes.]
²
My poor mother …”

Yes, his poor mother. She had been raised by her grandmother, lived out in the middle of cane fields, and at a young age had married an older man. The marriage had brought a trail of sorrows, no companionship, just poverty. Once, Eddie, her “baby,” had cried for two days and two nights with a toothache because she had no money for a dentist. And then had come the ultimate tragedy — her sons’ terrible deed, the trial, the sentencing. She did not come much to Angola, but when her sons were awaiting trial in the parish jail close to home, she had brought them home cooking. She had earned money by sitting at night with an elderly sick man so she could get them cigarettes and warm winter clothes. But she has been able to visit death row only once or twice. It makes her ill to see her son here.

Pat says, “When they put that hood on my head, I don’t want that ‘Lord is my shepherd’ prayer. It will only delay things. I just want to get it over.”

I ask him if he believes God has forgiven him or does he feel condemned forever for what he has done? Now, for the first time, he talks to me about the murders.

“At first, no,” he says, “I felt that even God hated me, but I know now that God forgives me. I went to confession to the old priest.

“Nobody was supposed to get killed. Eddie was upset. We had just gotten him out of jail. He had come unglued over a girl who was pregnant with his child. She wouldn’t marry him, and he had gone to her house with a sawed-off shotgun, cut the telephone wires, and threatened to shoot her and her whole family. They had him put in jail and every day Mama was calling me at work. ‘Get your brother out. Get my baby out.’ We got him out, got the charge dropped, but his nerves was messed up. Something I think the boy David said to him teed him off and he shot the kids. I should’ve known he could blow. I shouldn’t have let us get mixed up in the bad things we was doing.”

He has his head down. The cigarette hangs limp between his fingers. The smoke comes up in a thin, curling line. It is very quiet.

“I read the articles about it at the Prison Coalition office,” I say. “Those poor children. Those poor parents. They must be in hell.”

“I will go to my grave feeling bad about those kids,” he says. “Every night when they dim the lights on the tier I kneel by my bunk and pray for those kids and their parents. Nobody was supposed to get killed.”

His voice is barely audible.

Later, one of the trusties [trustees], who served meals on death row, will tell me that he never saw anyone with more remorse than Patrick Sonnier. “The guy wouldn’t eat when he first got here. He didn’t sleep much. The guy was eaten up by what he did.”

Later, I will find out that after his arrest, while in the parish jail, he had attempted suicide by slitting his wrists.

But now I just look at him. I’m not sure how to measure his sincerity. I see the young people getting down on their knees and lying down in the cold wet grass. Even if he didn’t do the shooting, he participated in the kidnappings — not just this couple. There had been others.

The silence is heavy. And then he says with anger in his eyes, “I didn’t rape Loretta. I never touched her.”

He had confessed to the murders, he tells me, because it was their plan, his and Eddie’s — each would say he did it and the authorities wouldn’t know who had done it, and he was afraid of the police. Two of the police officers had taken him into an office, his hands cuffed behind his back, and one of them had taken off his jacket, revealing a holstered gun. He was afraid that they were going to pistol-whip him with the gun. He figured that he could do the time at Angola, he said. He had served time when he and his cousin had stolen a truck. “In the confession I said I killed the kids because they might identify me and I didn’t want to go back to Angola, but I had done good at Angola, and I could do it again.”

The murders and the arrest had happened in 1977, he tells me, shortly after the reinstatement of the death penalty by the Supreme Court, but he had not “kept up too good with the news. If I had known then I could get the chair, no matter what they did to me, I would never have confessed.”

He tells me these things all in a flow, all at once, no break in the words, his eyes down most of the time or looking past me to a place I cannot see. He seems to accept that he is responsible for what had happened, even though he claims not to have killed the teenagers. He does not press his innocence. Nor does he seem to harbor any bitterness toward his brother. A week before his execution he will face off with the warden over his right to visit with his brother before he dies.

I remember the old chaplain’s words: “These people are the scum of the earth, and they’ll try to con you.”