Fifteen years ago, Burl Cain, then-Warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, agreed to allow my film crew to speak to death-row prisoner Gerald Bordelon, who was scheduled to die the following day, on January 7, 2010. 

Bordelon’s name has found its way into recent headlines because he was the last condemned person to be killed here in Louisiana. His death, by lethal injection, unwittingly sparked a surprising 15-year pause in executions in the state. 

That’s over now. Last month, Gov. Jeff Landry, who had pledged to resume executions, signed his first death warrants, for two men on the state’s Death Row, Christopher Sepulvado and Jessie Hoffman, effectively resetting the Row’s ticking clock.

As Bordelon’s time was running out, I was already at Angola, making a documentary for Oprah’s Doc Club with Forest Whitaker, who narrated the resulting film, “Serving Life,” about the prison’s world-renowned hospice program. Our team was interested in the visual dichotomy of a state-sanctioned execution on the same grounds as their hospice.

Within the halls of that hospice, we witnessed a group of prisoners – drug dealers, armed robbers and murderers, some who had once been Death Row prisoners themselves  – who found redemption through work as hospice volunteers, trained to care for fellow prisoners who were near death. They emptied bedpans and changed sheets, sat at bedsides, making sure the dying men were as comfortable as possible.

When we visited Bordelon in the prison’s “death house,” he was soft-spoken but clear. Earlier in the week, he’d been moved from the Row. The rusty stool he sat on in his death-house cell was only steps away from the gurney to which he would be strapped the following day. 

We arrived carrying two white Styrofoam containers, one with a roast chicken meal and one with chocolate chip cookies prepared by Warden Cain’s ranch house staff. Bordelon ignored the trays. 

I remember that it felt cold on the tier, it had snowed that week in Louisiana. I don’t know what I expected, but there was nothing remotely intimidating about this man in an orange jumpsuit, white thermal shirt and flimsy blue canvas shoes. I wasn’t sure if he was shivering because he was cold, or because he was afraid. 

Earlier that week, our crew had been allowed to witness one of several death-house rehearsals with the seven security officers who were assigned to, or volunteered for the execution team. During the rehearsals, these seven men choreographed every move they would make when it came time to kill Gerald Bordelon. In the rehearsals, the role of Bordelon was played by one of the officers, a guard who was derisive to me about our mostly female film crew – three women, one man – and our access to this story. 

Filming within the narrow confines of the death house was a challenge. I knew that director Tim Robbins had filmed much of Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir, Dead Man Walking, at Angola. We struggled to adequately light this somber group walking their colleague to the gurney with a stiff military precision that felt unsettlingly reverential, similar to what I had seen at formal ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. I wondered whether Tim Robbins had constructed a set for this moment in his film, or if they’d fit all that equipment into the narrow halls of this building. 

I stayed out of our camera’s view by placing myself in a small room adjacent to the one where the guards were strapping their fellow officer to the gurney. There was discussion of how much activity would be visible to the spectators, and their superiors explained that, before the spectators were brought in, there would be time to get the condemned man in place, and for the EMT to put the needle in his arm. The woman who would be responsible for activating the mechanism that would administer the cocktail of drugs to Bordelon would have time to secret herself out of view of the spectators, into the room where I was standing. 

From our room, we could see only two things. The machine that would push the poison into his veins in three steps. And the feet of the guard playing Bordelon. As I was watching, I saw that he was trembling. I was stunned. This security officer had shown me only bravado.

I had never considered that this process, Gerald Bordelon’s execution, might affect him. I had assumed he was in it for the overtime.

Our interview with Bordelon was not high drama. We knew going in that he had instructed his attorney Jill Craft not to enter the legal battlefield that accompanies most death sentences. He had waived his appeals so that his execution wouldn’t be further delayed.

Warden Cain had called to ask Bordelon if he would talk to us. He agreed, to my surprise. 

With no animation or emotion in his voice, Bordelon told us that he knew he would re-offend if he were ever free, and that he did not want to live with the guilt and shame of what he had done to his victim. He had raped and murdered his 12-year-old step-daughter Courtney LeBlanc. He’d done something heinous like that before, and he knew he was not capable of controlling his impulses. So he preferred to die, he said.

I remember feeling a flush of anger that the State of Louisiana was giving Bordelon what he wanted, relief from his guilt. My husband had died a few years before that, leaving me a widow and mother to two small children. Death, for me, was not something a governor should casually enter into with a signature — or that Bordelon could chase, to relieve his personal agony.  

To Bordelon, the governor that signed his death warrant had given him a gift. It seemed like an easy way out. Some crime victims who I have interviewed would prefer to see their perpetrator spend every moment of their natural life in prison, agonizing over the shame that plagued him, living the hell he’d made for himself.

Death-penalty supporters often cite the death penalty as a deterrent to crime. But this argument has never made sense to me, because there was no difference in crime rates between the state of New York, where I lived then, which does not impose death as a punishment, and Louisiana, a death-penalty state where more than half of death sentences have been reversed since 1976, after a four-year hiatus in executions prompted by a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Furman v. Georgia. 

The only other argument for killing a prisoner is to give families some sense of retribution. Burl Cain reported that Bordelon’s last words to his victims were “I’m sorry. I don’t know if that brings any closure or peace. It should have never happened, but it did, and I’m sorry.” Did that bring Courtney’s family some peace, some finality? 

Certainly, it’s not hard to imagine thinking that Bordelon deserved to die for what he’d done. The same could be said about Christopher Sepulvado, whose death warrant was signed last month. He killed his six-year-old stepson after scalding him in the tub. 

But I do wonder if the state of Louisiana should be able to kill them, given its track record with Death Row reversals and exonerations, one of the highest rates in the nation. 

After all the time we spent filming in the death house, we did not end up using our interview with Bordelon. We felt would upstage our point, which was to examine whether it’s possible to find redemption within a prison’s walls. Gerald Bordelon wasn’t interested in serving others for the rest of his natural life.

Angola’s hospice volunteers do incredible, selfless, humbling work. They grant last wishes – like a fishing trip somewhere on the grounds of the prison. They locate estranged family members and, if finances are tight, raise the funds to fly them in for a final visit. But the real work is in the small stuff: bathing, feeding, changing diapers, and soothing bedsores. 

And near the end they stand vigil, night by night, shift by shift, hour by hour – holding hands, praying, waiting together for the end. No man, no matter his crime, dies alone in the Angola hospice. Anyone who visits their hospice can see the dignity that is shared, and the ripple effect that is felt beyond the walls of the hospice into the general population down the walk. When it is over, you will not be abandoned.

On February 21, 15 days after the governor had signed his death warrant, Sepulvado, 81, suffering from a severe leg infection, was transferred from Death Row to the same treatment center where we made our film. He officially entered hospice care and was placed on vigil, when a dying person is typically cared for by a hand-selected group of trusted volunteers. 

But this time, the volunteers were ordered not to enter his room. Word “from above,” sources told us, was that Christopher Sepulvado must die alone. And he did, the next day. 

Typically, Sepulvado would have had someone wiping his face, changing the dressing on his leg, and swabbing his mouth so it didn’t dry out. But those volunteers were made to sit on the other side of the door like sentries. And while they sat there, Sepulvado died on his own, which was viewed as a victory by his legal team, which decried the state’s efforts to asphyxiate a frail, 81-year-old man. 

In ensuing days, some have said that Sepulvado had cheated the executioner. But it could also be said that he had experienced the ultimate punishment – living with his shame and guilt every minute of every day, until he took his last breath.