THIS IS PART OF “OPERATING CAPITAL,” AN ONGOING LENS DISCUSSION ABOUT LOUISIANA’S RESUMPTION OF EXECUTIONS.
I represented Jessie Hoffman for a few years, after he was already under a sentence of death. And I know his lawyers very well. So, I was hugely relieved and hopeful to hear that his March 18th execution had been stayed by the federal district court, and fearful and saddened by the decision of the Fifth Circuit to undo the injunction.
It’s been 23 years since Louisiana had a contested execution, and yet it is not hard for me to remember with vivid clarity the moments spent in the Death House, and the advocacy and litigation that precedes a stay or an execution.
But there is another question: who gets hurt by an execution?
There’s an obvious answer, and it is a true one: the condemned is killed. His life is over. A few have said it would be a relief, but most prisoners, like most people, don’t want to die. That said, the punishment is over when the execution is.
The condemned have families, and they suffer. It’s often horribly complicated by estrangement, mental illness, and guilt, but that doesn’t always lessen grief. In the movie Dead Man Walking, the kid brother of the condemned man doesn’t know what to say in the hours before the execution, so he drags his sneaker across the floor for the sound, for something to take his mind off what’s going to happen. That was an artist’s invention, born of truth. I’ve been in that room, watched the families run out of words as the minutes count down. And I’ve held the mothers and the sons of the executed, in the days that follow.
The victims, of course, have families. Often the world assumes they know how they feel, and always they are wrong to assume. Abolitionists are often asked “How would you feel if your loved one was murdered?” and I can only answer, “I hope I never know.” But I’ve been taught by the people I’ve met who do know, that all victim’s families, and the members of those families, are not the same. Some want an execution. Some don’t. Some want only an end to the legal process and a return to the memory of the one they lost. None I’ve ever met have appreciated being anyone’s pawn. The spokesmen for state-sponsored killing often say they are doing it “in the victims’ names,” whether or not that’s true.
The guards and wardens who carry out the execution are “only doing their jobs,” they often say. Some volunteer for the strapdown team; some would do anything to be somewhere else. Generally, we think guards and prisoners don’t like each other, but they spend a lot of time together. I remember watching a Deputy Warden, known for always wearing a white cowboy hat. A big guy, he stood at the head of the gurney during the execution of my client and never moved a muscle. He didn’t take off his hat, and he never wiped his face, which ran with tears. Another guard called a colleague, begging him to keep quiet about the guard’s participation in some of the executions in the 80s. “My daughter can never know. She would never speak to me again. Please, please don’t tell.”
I got a call like that from a juror. Her family was horrified that she had been a necessary vote for death, they didn’t want to listen when she said it had been years ago, no one thought he’d really be executed, she’d tried to take it back. She, too, had a grown daughter who never quite saw her mother the same way.
Given those jurors, some ambivalent prison guards, and perhaps some victim family members, there are a lot more people than you might think who are hurt by the irrevocability of an execution. Then add the judge who gets elected here in Louisiana, so he can’t make waves about it, but whose Catholic conscience really hates having to sign a death warrant. Perhaps there is even a prosecutor or two who can’t see that their future holds a child or grandchild who will be horrified by their participation in a process that most of the world regards as a human rights violation.
There may be too many people harmed by executions for Louisiana to bear. We don’t need this. Execution is not the solution.
Denny LeBoeuf is a longtime capital defense attorney in New Orleans, Louisiana. She recently retired from the American Civil Liberties Union, where she was the Director of the John Adams Project and former Director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. She has been a capital defender for over 35 years, representing persons facing the death penalty at trial and in state and federal post-conviction proceedings.