THIS IS PART OF “OPERATING CAPITAL,” AN ONGOING LENS DISCUSSION ABOUT LOUISIANA’S RESUMPTION OF EXECUTIONS.
Why do we kill people who may have killed people to show that killing people is wrong? It is important to keep the word “may” in there, because a shocking number of innocent people face execution. Over the last 30 years, we have exonerated more people from Death Row in Louisiana than we have executed.
Even if there were not the eternal – and far too frequent – specter of killing an innocent person, it is depressing to think that Louisiana wants to get back into the business of “Official Homicide.”
I have very fond memories of the years I spent doing capital defense in New Orleans, going back to 1993, and it seemed then that the state was edging away from the notion that a periodic human sacrifice to a mythological god of deterrence would somehow make the world a more civilized place.
Too often, government loudly trumpets a policy that purports to address a thorny issue in simplistic and often foolish ways. The death penalty is one such policy. I have, regrettably, watched six of my clients die in front of me over the years. Invariably it takes place in the dark of night, because we are – at some level – aware that what we are doing is barbaric.
Each time, as I emerged from the Execution Chamber where I had just watched someone die, often in an unspeakable way, I looked up at the stars and wondered to myself who, in his right mind, thinks that makes the world a better place? (If I close my eyes today, 30 years later, I can see, in vivid black-and-white, my client Nick Ingram being roasted to death in Georgia’s electric chair on April 7th, 1995.)
Of course, an execution is a lie, both to the victim’s family and the population at large. I have helped in the defense of perhaps 400 people facing execution now, and I have always tried to meet with the victim’s family, because being opposed to capital punishment does not equate to supporting the madness of violence on the streets of Louisiana. I should know that well enough, as I was held up at gunpoint seven times during my sojourn in New Orleans and once, when merely walking along St. Charles Avenue, my assailants put me in hospital. Somehow the death penalty did not deter those perpetrators.
Yet from the start of the trial process, to the execution many years later, prosecutors tell grieving victims that they will enjoy a catharsis when the suspect is put to death. This is again the Big Lie: instead, they will be denied the chance to heal. Consider the case of Christopher Selpulvado: in 1992, he committed a terrible crime. His appeals then dragged on until 2025, more than three decades. All along, the prosecutors from DeSoto Parish promised closure with his execution, which was finally set for March 17th, 2025. But Chris cheated the executioner by dying, aged 81, on February 22nd.
It has always struck me as odd that our ministers preach the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy”) while our prosecutors promote revenge. I used to talk to jurors about this: when a juror is persuaded to vote for death, the person who forfeits mercy is the juror herself. Mercy is what our parents teach us, but the government, the omnipotent teacher, prefers to tell us to be nasty, because the Capital Punishment Lie is easier to explain than a real solution to crime.
Of course, there is a big difference between Mercy and Forgiveness, as was explained to me by one of my true heroes, Lorelei Guillory. She was the mother of a six-year old lad, Jeremy, who was indubitably killed by one of my clients, Ricky. Lorelei did not want revenge, she wanted to understand why this tragedy had taken place, and what could be done to prevent another mother from suffering the loss of a child.
When Ricky’s capital retrial was looming I met with her, and explained his back story:
Before Ricky was born, and before the habitual use of seat belts, his parents were driving along with two kids in the back. His father was drunk, and drove off the road into a telegraph pole. The two kids were both killed – one of them was the tousle-haired six-year old Oscar Lee. The mother was thrown through the windshield and spent the next two years in a full-length body cast, in and out of Charity Hospital.
At some point she became pregnant – her husband had no more sensitivity when it came to insisting on sex when she was in plaster from head-to-foot than he did for the rules against drunk driving. The doctors did not realize she was bearing a child (Ricky) until she was five months pregnant, whereupon they cut the cast off – whoosh! went her belly – and then insisted she have an abortion. The fetus who would become Ricky had been exposed to his own personal Hiroshima of X-rays, along with a panoply of dangerous medications.
But Ricky’s father insisted that, because they were Catholics, abortion was not an option. Hence Ricky was born (to his lifelong sorrow).
Ricky was (and is) a pedophile. He hates this, and when he was led to understand it, he actually wrote to the authorities asking that he should be locked up in a secure hospital for the safety of others. Our bureaucrats would not comply with his wishes, and this is why he ended up taking the life of young Jeremy who, in the midst of his delusions, he thought was his “tormentor,” his dead brother Oscar Lee.
This is obviously an abbreviated version of the story, but Lorelei wanted to understand it, and spent three hours in the Calcasieu Parish Jail listening to the full edition. She then announced that she, also a Catholic, was having none of this death penalty stuff. She was never, she said, going to forgive him for taking her son’s life, but now that she had some comprehension of how this could have happened, she wanted to show him mercy.
The Lake Charles prosecutor was taken aback by this. He told her she was a “very strange defendant … I mean victim,” and then tried to have her second child taken away from her on the basis that she was an “unfit mother” for spurning the desire for vengeance.
Ultimately, provoked by this folly, she announced that she wanted to testify in Ricky’s trial that she wanted him in a secure mental hospital for the rest of his life. I asked her one question: “Do you have an opinion as to the mental state of that man there” – pointing at Ricky – “when he killed your child?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do,” she began. “I think that Ricky has been crying out for help since the day he was born and, for whatever reason, his parents, society and now the legal system have never listened to him.”
“As I sit on this witness chair,” she took a deep breath, “I can hear the death cries of my child Jeremy, but I can still hear that man calling out for help. And I think he was mentally ill when he did it.”
Understandably the jurors rejected the prosecution’s drumbeat for death.
Lorelei was – and remains thirty years later – one of my greatest heroes. It is past time that Hollywood made a film about her. She was able to take the true lessons of our parents, and of the Bible, and put them into action.
We should take moral guidance from Lorelei before we do from Gov. Jeff Landry when it comes to the death penalty. That way we might learn to understand the causes of crime, and prevent more of it from happening. So long as we look to the death penalty to achieve this, we will continue the pointless and barbaric spiral of violence.
Stafford Smith, a human-rights lawyer, has defended more than 400 people facing execution in the United States.