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The Light of Art on Capital Punishment 

Rev. Sharon K. Dittmar
November 3, 2002

Dead Man Walking is one of the most disturbing books I have ever read.  Written by Sister Helen Prejean in 1993, the book tells the true story about her experiences as a spiritual advisor to two death row inmates, Patrick Sonnier and Robert Willie.  The book is utterly devastating, both in its description of the crimes committed by these two men and the unbearable burdens these crimes place on loved ones and friends, as well as its unremitting description of the countdown to death, and ultimately the approximately four minutes it takes to kill these men in the electric chair.

I finished this book in two days, and at the end I was overwhelmed.  My heart was so full that I could not write.  If I had been a character in an opera, I would have burst into a tormented aria something along the lines of "My heart is severed by the cavern of human cruelty." 

When I finished this book, there was only one thing I wanted to do, go pick up my son at day care so I could look at his smiling face to see that life is good.  There was one other thing, pray.  I prayed in a way I don't even believe in, I prayed for a specific thing.  I prayed that no one as unexplainably, randomly cruel as Patrick or Robert would ever touch my son on a "bad night", and that my son would never do something the state believes is cause for his execution.

The United States has been deadlocked on the issue of capital punishment, killing someone as punishment for crimes committed, for decades now.  There was a ten year moratorium between 1967 and 1977, when no executions took place in the United States.  During this time the question of whether or not capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment (in terms of the United States Constitution) and should therefore be abolished, was strenuously fought in the courts.  But since the late 1970's the practice of capital punishment has rolled onward, particularly in the so-called southern "Death Belt" states, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, where according to Sister Prejean, two-thirds of all U. S. executions take place.[1]   

Prior to reading Dead Man Walking I was reluctant to give a sermon on the death penalty.  It's not that I am undecided, for a long time I have believed that capital punishment is cruel and unusual, and not an answer for crime.  I could give you all the statistical and logical reasons for this, and I will later, but not just yet, because I want to get to why this sermon is different, special, not a debate club topic or political speech, not a study on ethics or crime, but a sermon, an exploration of cruelty, loss, love, forgiveness, and redemption.

This year our worship theme is worship and the arts.  At least once a month we are using the arts as a vessel to challenge, deepen, and inspire our faith, to move us, to take us beyond what we know, to provide a pastoral or prophetic voice on some theme.  The 1993 book, then 1995 movie, and recently released 2000 opera Dead Man Walking, all abundantly qualify as the prophetic voice of art.  But not just prophetic, something deeper, more powerful, shining light on this cavern of humanity, crime and capital punishment.  One member of the congregation wrote to me after seeing the opera, Dead Man Walking, which played in Cincinnati this past summer.  He wrote: 

I found that the death penalty, like abortion, is something that people have pretty engrained views about.  By using the opera – the arts – to explore the tragedy of both sides, Sister Helen really does a wonderful job of challenging our views and moving us to action. 

Another member wrote to me and said:

The musical theme was the same at the beginning when the murders occurred, and at the end when the state was killing the murderer.  Opera was a way to tell the story without having to use words to spell out the tragedy - allowing each of us to develop our own feelings as it went along.

More compelling than all the statistics is the story of individual people.  The art of literature, film, and opera tell this story in all its complexity and pain, drawing out the themes of violence, rage, cruelty, punishment, grief, love, and forgiveness, and allowing us, the reader and viewer to struggle with moral questions instead of arguing over statistics.  As Joshua Kosman writes in his review of the opera:

[The creator's] treatment of this material is focused on what opera has always done best: exploring the emotional journeys of people under great duress . . . To some observers, the opera's failure to take a more forceful and explicit stand against the death penalty is nothing less than a failure of nerve.  But the truth is that nothing could be more foreign to the world of opera than that kind of overarching moral stridency.  Like the questioning woman [Sister Helen Prejean] at its center, Dead Man Walking knows just where its moral priorities lie: in the essential but elusive virtues of love and forgiveness.  But the point of the opera is not so much to preach in favor of them as to illuminate just how difficult it is for any human being to attain those spiritual goals.[2]

Although I did not see the opera, I have listened to it, and both the opera and the book had this same effect on me, illuminating the pain of the situation and complexity of emotions, challenging me on many fronts.  Sister Helen Prejean is an ardent opponent of the death penalty, based on her faith as a Christian and avocation as a nun helping the poor and marginalized.  Certainly in her book she presents compelling statistics on the death penalty, but again more than the numbers, it was the stories that stayed with me, illuminating the challenge of love, forgiveness, and peace in the face of violent crime.  The movie and opera tell variations on the book.   For the purposes of this sermon I am going to rely on the story from the book.

Sister Helen Prejean moved to New Orleans in the early 1980s to work with the inner city poor.  Shortly thereafter she was asked to become a penpal with a death row inmate.  She agreed, seeing it as part of her mission to the poor and marginalized.  Noting the preponderance of black death row inmates in Louisiana, she assumes she will be paired with a black man.  Instead she is given the name of Elmo Patrick Sonnier, a white Cajun from a small town in central Louisiana.

In 1977 Patrick Sonnier and his brother Eddie kidnapped a teenage couple, Loretta Bourque and David LeBlanc, from a popular lover's lane, assaulted Loretta, and then killed both Loretta and David.  Previous to the murders, the Sonnier brothers had kidnapped other young couples at this lovers lane spot by posing as security guards.  In those instances they had assaulted the females and disappeared.   I tell you about this crime because it haunts me.  It is calculated.  It is cruel.  It is violent.  It shows an utter disregard for the sanctity of Loretta's and David's lives.   

Throughout her association with Patrick, Sister Helen struggles with Patrick's crime and the havoc it wreaks on the Bourque and LeBlanc families.  I began this book disapproving of the death penalty.  Experiencing the grief of the families, I thought twice.  I truly thought twice.  Their pain and the burden of their loss is off the scale to all but those of us who have experienced violent crime that ends in murder.  Their experience is one of my worst nightmares. 

As Sister Prejean tells the story of serving as spiritual advisor to Sonnier through his appeals and ultimately execution, members of the LeBlanc and Bourque families are there every step of the way, reliving the crime, their loss, the end of their innocence, the death of their children.  Dead Man Walking reminds us that any true death penalty dialogue must also focus on the devastation of the survivors.  It would be inhuman, cruel, to ignore their pain, or the space they rightfully occupy in this issue.  This is a reality that statistics don't measure, but that art illuminates.  You can't numerically address the murder of a loved one, the absence they occupy in the lives of the survivors.  And as the book, film, and opera show us, the survivors are first, the victims family, and then ultimately, the family of the executed prisoner.  As Joshua Kosman writes,

In some of the most wrenching scenes of the entire opera, it gives us portraits of both the victims' parents and [the executed prisoner's] widowed mother-a constellation of parents divided by everything in the world except for their grief and bereavement.[3] 

The sextet at the end of Act I is extraordinary, with all the parents singing.  The mother of the inmate sings, "I failed you."  The parents of the victims agonize in remembering their last words to their children "Comb your hair," "Fix your blouse."  All Sister Prejean can say is "I'm sorry, so sorry."

In the book Dead Man Walking Sister Prejean writes that the Bourque family cannot sit behind teenagers at church because the father, Lloyd, can't bear to look at the back of teenager's heads (his son was shot in the back of the head).  Another father, Vernon Harvey, attends the execution of his daughter, Faith's, murderer (Robert Willie) with seeming delight and then proceeds to drive to Angola State Prison for years thereafter to be present at the execution of other death row inmates.  Sister Prejean writes of a meeting with Vernon:

He [Vernon] 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.[4]

To me, this is one of the saddest passages of all, the desperation and desolation of grief, and the ultimate futility of capital punishment, and again, there is no number that can calculate this futility.  Something like 46 out of 50 states now have the option of life without parole, that is, any criminal can receive a life sentence, and never, never have the chance for parole.  This is a permanent life sentence appropriate for these crimes.

The Death Penalty Information Center conducted a survey that shows that 66% of Americans support capital punishment.  When this same group was asked if they supported capital punishment if there was the option of life without parole, support dropped to 50%.[5]  Add to this the fact that the actual execution of a prisoner, including court challenges, costs more than it would to house someone in prison for life, and there is even less logical incentive for the death penalty.  But the death penalty is not about logic, it is about emotion, about vengeance, retribution, and fear.

I would never presume to tell a family that has survived a violent crime how to feel.  I would never suggest to Vernon Harvey that he just "get over it."  I would never tell Lloyd LeBlanc that now all teenagers are his teenage son and he should happily sit behind them in church.  We have no right to tell these survivors how to grieve or mourn, or forgive, even if we could, because they are like volcanoes of grief, deserving of our kindness and space.  Yet I think Sister Prejean speaks accurately when she writes that Vernon could watch Willie killed a thousand times and it would never assuage his grief.

I think that use of the death penalty acknowledges just one thing, our bottomless grief.  Our hearts are broken that humanity can be so cruel.  I don't believe that the death penalty is an answer to pain.  I don't believe that it is an answer to prevention or safety.   As one former public defender said to me "People kill because they don't value life.  Period." 

I don't believe that capital punishment is an answer to justice.  Fifty percent of all murder victims are white, yet 83% of capital cases involve white victims.  Although African Americans make up approximately 20% of the population, 43% of death row inmates are black, 9% are Hispanic.[6]  Any lawyer who works in the system will tell you that a disproportionate number of black men (as opposed to white men) are sentenced to die, and that the likelihood of a death sentence is increased if the victim is white. 

Although Dead Man Walking involves white families, victims, and perpetrators, at the end of the book Sister Prejean will meet with a New Orleans family survivor group and discover that of the forty members, only one will see the killer of their loved one brought to trial.  The reason, both the survivor families and killers are black, and law enforcement has been historically unconcerned about black on black crime.

And as far as blind justice, even Dead Man Walking address this.  Patrick Sonnier committed his crimes with his brother, Eddie.  Patrick is executed, Eddie receives life in prison.  Patrick and Eddie are both poor, and as is so often the case, those who are poor often get less experienced, less persuasive, less powerful, sometimes less motivated or caring lawyers.  Patrick's first lawyer is just such a lawyer.  By the end of the book Patrick's second lawyer, who is much more skilled, makes a clear case that Patrick, while obviously a participant and responsible, was not the murderer. 

Even Eddie says this is true, and although we tend to doubt those convicted, and it is plausible that Sister Prejean is biased, I came away virtually certain that Eddie pulled the trigger, not Patrick, and yet Patrick was executed and Eddie lives.  Our justice system is not fair and equal.  Money, power, race are all primary factors in who is sentenced to death row, who gets life, and who is acquitted.  The crime is secondary.  This does not make me feel safe.

This past week I spoke to David Singleton, director of the Prison Reform Advocacy Center.  He said "If you can dehumanize you can execute. The nightmare is that we may have executed innocent people.  Should we have a system that allows this?"  According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973 ninety death row inmates have been released because new information, often scientific, exonerated them.[7]

For me, the horror of crime and capital punishment is the same, people execute because they don't value life, whether the executioner is a criminal or the state.  Since reading Dead Man Walking I am struggling to value all human life.  Patrick Sonnier had remorse for his crime from the time he first entered Angola until his execution years later.  I'm not saying he spoke easily of it or that he was consumed with guilt and grief, but he had a clear awareness that what he did was wrong.  But I am deeply troubled that he repeatedly kidnapped and assaulted teenagers.  

And Robert Willie was even more troubling to me.  I'm not sure he was sorry.  He might have just been sorry he was caught (more like the character in the opera).  This does not make me feel safe either.  Dead Man Walking has me deeply troubled about the potential for human evil.

As Unitarian Universalists we value the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  I am having trouble uplifting the good, when the bad is so devastating.  I come within a hair's breath of calling these men evil, socio-paths, but I don't think that I can without it taking away from what I believe is ultimately good, both in myself and humanity.  To call someone inherently evil begins the process of dehumanization both in myself and others.

Sister Helen's story shows us that these men have families, they love, they hurt, they fear, they hope.  They are human.  Sister Prejean writes of this exchange with Patrick Sonnier:

"I have never known real love," he says, "never loved women or anybody all that well myself.  I gave Mama a lot of trouble and Eddie was always her 'baby.'  She always loved her 'baby' and it's not that I blame her.  It's a shame a man has to come to prison to find love."  He looks up at me and says, "Thanks for loving me," but I feel guilty that so much love has been lavished on me.  In the face of this man's utter poverty, I feel humbled.[8]

I am so touched by the poignancy that Patrick was never loved, never knew love.  And here is the complexity.  The crime remains, and so does his man's humanity.

If some people are destructively flawed, behave evilly, is there not some part of them, not matter how small or blunted, still deserving of worth and dignity, at least to be fed, sheltered, to live in safety?  I am afraid I would become my enemy if I act like my enemy.  I don't want to continue the cycle of pain and destruction.  And yet I do believe in punishment.  The sentence of life without parole is vital because people like Patrick Sonnier and Robert Willie can be so destructive. 

I take away two equally disturbing memories from Dead Man Walking, the pain of the families (underscoring the horror of their dead loved ones and their last moments alive) and Sister Prejean's description of the executions, the preparations (shaving hair on the head, wearing a diaper, the burn marks on the skin, the length of time it takes, no one really knows if it is painless even if it is a lethal injection).  And it is the state, our government carrying out this last death. 

In our state sanctioned execution, have we just become the last victim of the crime, desensitized just a little more, dehumanizing a people just a little more?  As one congregant remembered about the opera, "The musical theme was the same at the beginning when the murders occurred, and at the end when the state was killing the murderer."  Sister Prejean writes "The death penalty costs too much.  Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons."[9]

Sister Prejean talks about her struggles with the clear fact that in several places the Bible states that the punishment for murder is death.  "You shall give life for life, eye for eye." (Exodus 21)  She goes on to note that it is important to read these passages though in context, that the Bible was written during a violent time, that the Bible also calls for the punishment of death in cases of contempt of parents, adultery, profaning the sabbath, prostitution, and yet, these are not punishments we enact for these behaviors today. 

Sister Prejean writes that she finds discussions about the death penalty based on Biblical texts to be futile, biblical quarterbacking she calls it.  Someone says "an eye for an eye", she responds "Let him without sin cast the first stone", and on it goes back and forth.  She explains:

I find myself steering away from such futile discussions.  Instead I try to articulate what I personally believe about Jesus and the ethical thrust he gave to humankind: an impetus toward compassion, a preference for disarming enemies without humiliating and destroying them, and a solidarity with poor and suffering people.[10]

Dead Man Walking is an all too real labyrinth of human sorrow and destruction, beyond the numbers and logic, it gets at the driving force of capital punishment, pain, unremitting, overwhelming pain, cruelty, loss, and injustice.  I have not yet forgiven Sonnier and Willie for their crimes.  I don't know if I will but I think, I know in fact, I will have to in time so that I can continue to embrace life.  A walk with Sister Prejean has already reinforced my belief that although their crimes revoked their right to freely live in society, Patrick Sonnier and Robert Willie were human beings deserving dignity and respect, including the sanctity of their lives. 

Sister Prejean counsels both Sonnier and Willie that they have a choice on how they leave this world (this is the benefit of a spiritual advisor), with either love or hatred.  When asked if he has last words on the day of execution Robert Willie says:

I would just like to say, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, that I hope you get some relief from my death.  Killing people is wrong.  That's why you've put me to death.  It makes no difference whether it's citizens, countries, or governments.  Killing is wrong.[11] 

When asked if he has last words on the day of his execution Patrick says, "Mr. LeBlanc, I don't want to leave this world with any hatred in my heart, I want to ask your forgiveness for what me and Eddie done, but Eddie done it."[12]  He then looks at Sister Prejean and says "I love you," and she responds,  "I love you too" before the hood was pulled over his face.

The essential and elusive virtues of love and forgiveness.  How difficult it is to attain these spiritual goals.  Sister Prejean has managed both.  I'm working towards it.  Can others manage this, even those more closely hurt?  At least one person can, Lloyd LeBlanc, David's father, who along with Sister Prejean has taught me once again how to pray. 

At the end of the book Sister Prejean tells us that Lloyd prays for his family, for the Bourques, for David and Loretta, and years later also the Sonniers, Pat, Eddie, and their mother.  She writes:

Lloyd LeBlanc has told me that he would have been content with imprisonment for Patrick Sonnier.  We went to the execution, he says, not for revenge, but hoping for an apology.  Patrick Sonnier had not disappointed him.  Before sitting in the electric chair he had said, "Mr. LeBlanc, I want to ask your forgiveness for what me and Eddie done," and Lloyd LeBlanc had nodded his head, signaling a forgiveness he had already given.  He says that when he arrived with sheriff's deputies there in the cane field to identify his son, he had knelt by his boy-"laying down there with his two little eyes sticking out like bullets"-and prayed the Our Father.  And when he came to the words: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," he had not halted or equivocated, and he said, "Whoever did this, I forgive them."  But he acknowledges that it's a struggle to overcome the feelings of bitterness and revenge that well up, especially as he remembers David's birthday year by year and loses him all over again:  David at twenty, David at twenty-five, David getting married, David standing at the back door with his little ones clustered around his knees, grown-up David, a man like himself, whom he will never know.  Forgiveness is never going to be easy.  Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won.[13]

 He will gather us around, all around
He will gather us around
By and by
You and I
He will gather us around[14]

Reading

I love the opera.  I love the way it captures essential human conflicts: love or hate, compassion or vengeance, redemption or condemnation.  All of life’s deepest struggles are in this opera.  Guided by Heggie’s probing music, it takes us into places of our hearts that we don’t even know we have.  I was amazed watching my story unfold on the stage – but I’m only a window: through my journey the audience goes on its own spiritual journey.  In the prologue everyone is witness to an unspeakable crime and everyone knows who did it, and then when we meet him, brash and unremorseful, we want to see him executed for his terrible crime.  There is no question as to guilt or innocence, so all the energy of the audience gathers around the outrage we feel about the crime and wanting to see “justice” done.  But when the killer’s mother begins to sing before the Board of Pardons for her son’s life, we are all brought into a terrible moral dilemma: by killing the killer are we achieving “justice” or are we creating another victimized family?  I could hear the audience breathing.  And then, as “justice” is enacted before our eyes and e all witness the execution of the killer (an opera with a minute and a half of silence), our moral dilemma is compounded.  So now the state has killed in our name – and where are we now?  Have we achieved “justice” and cleansed ourselves, or have we become crass imitators of violence, killing the killer?

I love the opera because it is clean and spare and pure and brings us into the deepest recesses of our own hearts.  At heart, the opera is about the search for redemption – everybody’s redemption.  That’s mostly why I am so moved by it.  From the beginning I told McNally and Heggie that I’d trust them to compose the opera if they wove into its center the quest for redemption.

—Sr. Helen Prejean

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