Free Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean Page A

calculated, premeditated act. 3
    “What words could I ever say to the families of those kids?” he asks me. “I’m sorry? What good are those words now? No words can bring those kids back. I’ve been over it in my mind a million times. If I could turn back the clock …”
    He looks up at me.
    I miss the moment. I should say to him,
Yes, yes, apologize. As weak and ineffective and futile as your words of remorse and sorrow may seem, say them
. Only later will I learn from Lloyd LeBlanc, David LeBlanc’s father, what such an apology means. He will later tell a reporter that his main reason for attending Patrick Sonnier’s execution was to hear an apology.
    “Why did you testify in court against Pat?” I ask. It had shocked me when I read this. What kind of man would testify against his own brother?
    He explains that before their arrest they had planned what each would say, but he had understood one thing and his brother another. Pat had understood that they would each confess to the murders, but he had understood that they would each accuse the other. Pat’s attorney, he says, had not interviewed him before calling him to testify at Pat’s trial. “I was real, real nervous up there trying to keep everything consistent and not contradicting myself, and I was coming unraveled right there on the stand and Pat could see that, he could see I was about to blow, and he told his attorney to stop the questioning. His attorney didn’t know what the hell was going on. He didn’t know what I was going to say when I got up there.”
    I am astonished that in a first-degree murder trial an attorney would call a witness to the stand, much less such a crucial one, without talking to him or her first.
    In October 1983, I hear that the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans has denied Pat’s appeal. He is running out of time. In talk around the Coalition office I have heard of an attorney in Atlanta named Millard Farmer who defends death-row inmates. I decide to call him.

CHAPTER
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    P oor Millard Farmer. I am pleading with him: “a man on death row
running out of time … even though you’re busy … help him, please, help him.”
    I telephone him in early November 1983, about a week after Pat’s denial by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. I have heard that he is a native Georgian, but I am surprised by how thick his accent is. After a short pause: “Okay, we’ll ‘hep’ you. Send me the transcripts.” And he gives me the address and I thank him profusely. I waste no time in mailing the papers to him.
    After a moratorium of twenty-two years, executions have once again become a reality in Louisiana. On December 14, 1983, the state executed Robert Wayne Williams, a young black man who had shot and killed a black security guard during a robbery. The execution was scheduled for midnight, but just as Williams approached the chair, news came of a delay so a legal question could be settled. Williams went back to wait in his cell, then, one hour later, was executed.
    In Louisiana it’s unusual for a black man to be executed for killing another black man. Although the majority of victims of homicide in the state are black (90 percent of homicide victims in New Orleans in 1991), 75 percent of death-row inmates are there for killingwhites. And when blacks do get death for killing other blacks, their victims typically fit a certain demographic profile: police or security guards, children, more than one person, or, more rarely, women. 1
    Tom Dybdahl, now heading the Prison Coalition office, comes over to use the Hope House photocopying machine and tells me about Williams’s funeral and that Robert Wayne’s mother would not let the embalmers hide the burns on her son’s body. 2 “The casket was open and you could see the deep burn marks on his head and the calf of his leg,” Tom says.
    About a week after the Williams execution I visit Pat. His eyes are dark and he looks pale. He’s having trouble sleeping, he says. He had seen