A Lottery for the Poor

Reviewed by John Cole Vodicka

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 20-21

Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, by Sister Helen Prejean (Random House, 1993, 278 pages).

Not long ago I heard Danny Lyon, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee photographer who chronicled much of the Southern civil rights movement in the early 1960s, describe his photographs of that era as “pictures that force us to remember, force us to confront and grapple with” an issue or event that we might otherwise choose to ignore or forget.

Lyon’s pictures—of police dogs and white men assaulting African Americans on the streets of Birmingham, of dozens of teenage African American girls peering through the bars of their crammed Lee County, Georgia jail cell, of the “white” and “colored” drinking fountains on either side of the Coke machine—are pictures that starkly reveal the inhumanity and brutality of segregation, photographs seen by millions of people to whom the civil rights movement was otherwise little more than an abstraction.

Now, a Catholic nun from south Louisiana has written a riveting book that offers a close-up, often wrenching view of another real-life subject that is too often debated in the abstract: the death penalty. The book is Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, and its author, Sister Helen Prejean, constructs a persuasive, first-person, moral and practical argument against the death penalty. It is a powerful testimony to the destructiveness of our system of punishment. And more importantly, it is a narrative that describes the death penalty in very human terms, a book that helps us all get to know the names and faces of those caught up in the macabre process we call capital punishment.

Her journey begins ten years ago in a New Orleans housing project where Prejean worked, taught, and walked with the poor. It carries us through the executions of two Louisiana death row prisoners whom she befriends and whose lives she fights to save. Along the way, we are introduced not only to these prisoners but also to the condemned inmates’ families, the families of the murder victims, prison officials and guards, chaplains and church leaders, lawyers, elected officials (“Politicians feel like they’ve got to get a little blood on their hands in order to be re-elected,” Prejean says), pardon board members, and witnesses to the executions.

As we get to know these people, as we hear them agonize or make excuses about their place or role in the death penalty process, we see clearly that state-sanctioned killing is a brutalization that mars each of their lives, and indeed, mars our lives as well.

Woven into Prejean’s account are the sobering facts about the death penalty: that it is a lottery which affects primarily the poor, the luckless, and people of color; that nearly three-fourths of those sentenced to die are there because their victim was a white person; that most defendants were improperly represented by trial lawyers and some awaiting execution have no attorney at all; that it costs more money to execute someone than it does to keep that same person in prison for life; that there are innocent men and women executed; that the system usually ignores or exacerbates the many needs of a murder victim’s family.

Over and over Prejean tells us that until we face these harsh facts and come to know the issue in human terms, we are not entitled to have an opinion on capital punishment and call it just.

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“By choosing to kill,” Prejean writes, “Americans diminish themselves financially, socially and spiritually.” We legitimize retaliation as the way to deal with conflict, and we all pay a price when we allow state killing to be carried out in our names. In this sense the death penalty means cruel and unusual punishment not only for the condemned prisoner but for the innocent as well, for all of us. The picture Prejean lays before us shows that the death penalty only allows us to extend the pain, to continue to blame one another, to turn against one another, to hate better.

“To understand the death penalty,” Prejean explains, “is to come to understand three of the most important, deepest wounds in this society. And that’s racism—white life is much more prized than black life in this country; the assault on the poor, the separation from them; and that it’s okay to use violence to try to solve problems.”

Dead Man Walking, which at its most basic is the account of a middle class white nun’s relationship with two condemned Louisiana prisoners, is a remarkable story of a courageous, committed, and compassionate woman of great faith who allows not only murderers into her life, but also most of the other actors who must participate in the grisly business that is the death penalty. As Prejean walks with Pat Sonnier and Robert Willie to the electric chair at the Angola Penitentiary, she reaches out to their victims’ families, prison officials, and others—many of whom despise her views on capital punishment. She has an amazing capacity to listen to her adversaries, to engage them in dialogue and debate, and to embrace them as fellow human beings struggling for recognition, an explanation, and justice.

Twenty-two years ago, writing in Furman v. Georgia, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that “informed public opinion” about the death penalty was anything but informed “ [sic] …the American people are largely unaware of the information critical to a judgment on the morality of the death penalty… if they were better informed they would consider it shocking, unjust and unacceptable.”

“Perilously close to simple murder,” is how recent convert, justice Harry Blackmun, the lone—and departing—death penalty opponent on the Supreme Court, characterized the 1993 execution of Leonel Herrera.

Sister Helen Prejean believes deeply that capital punishment shocking, unjust, and unacceptable and says it is her ambition to turn public opinion against the death penalty.

Dead Man Walking is a testimony to what one person can do affect change, to reshape the debate on an issue that tests the moral fiber of our society. Her book, though painful and difficult to read, ultimately reinforces the value and sanctity of human life.

Dead Man Walking challenges the reader, forcing she or he to confront and grapple with an issue that, after reading Sister Helen Prejean’s story, remains in the abstract no longer.

John Cole Vodicka directs the Prison and Jail Project for Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia. He has actively been involved against the death penalty for more than twenty years.

Testimony to the Power

Reviewed by John Cole Vodicka

Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, pp. 28-31

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyon (University of North Carolina Press, Duke University Center for Documentary Studies, 1992, 192 pages).

There is a photograph in Danny Lyon’s book that disturbs and challenges me every time I look at it. It is one in a series of snapshots Lyon took through the barred windows of the Leesburg, Georgia stockade in the summer of 1963, his camera trained on a cellblock crammed with young African American girls who had been arrested by Americus police earlier in the day. The girls had been demonstrating and now were being held, all thirty-two of them, in a jail cell with no beds and no working sanitary facilities.

“The floor was cold,” thirteen year-old Henrietta Fuller wrote at the time. “You lay down for awhile and soon it starts hurting you so you sit up for awhile and it starts hurting so you have to walk around for awhile. The smell of waste material was bad. I went to the bathroom there to urinate, but didn’t have a bowel movement during the entire nine days I was there. I urinated where the water from the shower drains down.

“At night the mosquitoes and roaches were at us. In the middle of the week the white man gave us some blankets. Two or three of us slept on one blanket.”

The photograph of some of these young girls shows a dozen or more of them staring from their cell into Danny Lyon’s camera, which he held through the broken glass of a barred window. All of the girls are standing—that is, all but one. This one girl, who looks to be no more than ten or eleven years old, is sitting against the wall of the cell, her face almost hidden completely in the shadows.

But there she is, sitting and looking at the camera, at you and me, her face all at once young, innocent, determined, and frightened. She bravely waits—having encountered the white man’s wrath once again—for her

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freedom, to be recognized as a human being. Her eyes tell you that she is now certain the cell door will soon be opened, that she and the other girls will be released from captivity. And with their freedom, she hopes, will eventually come the liberation of African Americans throughout the South.

Just days after this photograph was taken, it and others were placed in the hands of a U. S. Congressman, who, according to Danny Lyon, entered them into the Congressional Record. “Word quickly came back to Americus, and the girls, who were being held without charges, were released,” Lyon writes. “In Americus, my pictures had actually accomplished something. They had gotten people out of jail.”

Danny Lyon’s photographs of the civil rights movement are now chronicled in an important and inspiring book, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. The photographs were all taken between 1962 and 1964, when Danny Lyon was one of several “movement photographers” for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Lyon’s photographs, all in black-and-white, and an accompanying text that includes his narrative as well as notes taken at SNCC meetings, affidavits, and transcribed interviews, present many of the events and images of the civil rights struggle that are largely unfamiliar to all but those who participated in the movement. As Julian Bond writes in his foreword to the book: “[Lyon] saw and recorded the movement: the people who made it, those who would maim and kill to stop it, and those who watched—respectfully, resentfully, or angrily—as it passed by. Dusty roads were the movement’s most likely location, not Capitol malls and monuments. We all remember fire hoses and police dogs. Danny Lyon makes us remember the people and the forgotten places, too.”

Danny Lyon was a twenty-year-old University of Chicago history student in 1962, when he packed his cameras in an army bag and hitchhiked south. Arriving in Atlanta, he hoped to find SNCC headquarters, but learned that the occupants of the now-empty office were in Albany. So he boarded a bus to make the 150-mile journey into southwest Georgia.

“Near me,” Lyon writes, “was another standing passenger, a very smartly dressed man with glasses and a goatee. He said if I was going to try to reach the SNCC people, I ought to do it in the daylight and not at night. Police, in and out of uniform, stood around the parking lot as the bus pulled into Albany. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I was pulled aside by a plainclothesman. ‘Where you going?’ I was asked. ‘That’s the white part of town,’ he said and pointed, ‘and that’s the nigger part of town.’ Wyatt T. Walker, the gentleman I had been speaking with, walked off in one direction and I went off in the other. In the morning I walked over to the black side of town to find the Albany movement.”

Wyatt T. Walker, an SCLC leader and organizer, is one of the many familiar faces Lyon captured on film. Others include James Forman, John Lewis, June Johnson, Bernice Reagon, Charles Sherrod, Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Martin King, Jr., Bob Zellner, Fannie Lou Hamer—all recognized heroes whose immense courage both inspired movement participants and encouraged bystanders, in the North and the South, to get involved.

But Danny Lyon’s photographs also give us the faces of hundreds of others who are unknown to most of us, and it is these pictures that make Memories of the Southern Civil Right Movement the powerful historical document it is.

Lyon and his camera are there to capture the crowds of African Americans who lined the Birmingham streets along the funeral route for the four girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In the faces of the mourners we can see not only the grieving, but also the angry determination to push on for justice.

Lyon’s photographs show us teenage demonstrators in Savannah lying on the sidewalk, waiting to be arrested. In one of these, a white man, neatly dressed, stands almost

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nonchalantly within a few feet of where African American demonstrators are being carried by police into waiting paddy wagons. Who is this white bystander, hands in pockets, looking on as dozens of youngsters are claiming their right to full citizenship?

There is a series of photographs of the mass meetings held in Danville, Virginia. One shows hundreds of people standing outside a cinderblock church, the crowd so large it has spilled out into the yard. Lyon tells us that during this meeting, word came that the police and a tank were waiting up the road. Hearing this, the meeting broke up, with two carloads of SNCC workers the last to leave the church. The SNCC cars were stopped by heavily armed police, Lyon writes, and the passengers were told to get out. The entire SNCC staff was forced to spreadeagle and allow themselves to be patted down.

“That night,” writes Lyon, “arrest warrants were issued for twenty-two SNCC workers under a state law originally passed after Nat Turner’s rebellion and used to hang John Brown: ‘Inciting the colored population to acts of war and violence against the white population.’ I believe at that time the crime was punishable by death.”

In another image later in his book, the driver of a vehicle is attacking a demonstrator who is blocking traffic on a downtown Atlanta street. Again, there they are—white bystanders looking on approvingly while a black man is choked and beaten only yards from where they watch. What are these white folk thinking?

Again in Atlanta, Lyon’s camera is somehow up close in the middle of a demonstration blocking traffic to protest unfair hiring practices. A mob has begun to abuse the demonstrators with kicks, blows, and burning cigarettes. But this time the photograph shows a white woman who has walked by and confronted the mob, and for awhile,

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has held them at bay. Lyon writes: “When someone (from the white mob) yells, ‘If you feel that way, why don’t you marry one of them?’ (the woman) sits down and joins the demonstrators.”

The photographs in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement are certain to stir deep feelings, whether the viewer lived through the tumultuous 1960s or not. As Julian Bond writes, Lyon’s photos “capture the heat and excitement and despair of those two hopeful years. “These pictures, taken three decades ago, serve as reminders not only of our segregated past and the human courage it took to bring Jim Crow to its knees, but also heighten our awareness of just how far we still need to go to overcome the barriers of racism. When I look at that photograph of the young girl in the Leesburg stockade, I am made to realize that although the cell door opened for her in 1962, she is still not free in 1994. This snapshot challenges me in the here-and-now.

Danny Lyon’s sensitive and inspiring book invites us not only to remember this piece of our past, but to call up from within the same rage that moved so many back then to action. It is testimony to the power of grassroots movements. It looks back but at the same time prods us forward. It is a book that, as Lyon writes of SNCC, “is a model for any [one] that wants to turn America into what it could be, but is not.”

John Cole Vodicka directs the Koinonia Prison and Jail Project in Americus, Georgia.

The Unfinished March

Reviewed by John Cole Vodicka

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000 pp. 36-37

William S. McFeely, Proximity to Death, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000.

During the past year the debate over capital punishment has intensified and it appears that many Americans are beginning to seriously question whether the US should continue to execute members of our society.

In recent months we’ve been made aware of the alarming number of innocent people condemned to death; seen a study showing that two-thirds of all death sentences in the U.S. are reversed on appeal because of serious prejudicial trial errors; read about mentally ill and juvenile defendants who are exposed to execution; heard eyewitnesses tell us that condemned men and women have been literally tortured to death when the execution apparatus malfunctions; and have had confirmed that there still exists tremendous racial disparity in who the State determines can live and who must die.

Even some of the most conservative, law-and-order voices among us seem troubled by the United States’ rush to execute. Earlier this year the National Review published a front page article subtitled, A Conservative Case Against Capital Punishment” Columnists George Will and James Kilpatrick have called for a reexamination of our use of the death penalty. The conservative Christian Pat Robertson and other Christian Coalition leaders have intervened on behalf of condemned prisoners. And most dramatically, Illinois’ Republican Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions in his state after more than a dozen death row convicts were found to be innocent; Ryan has said he doubts there will be anyone executed in Illinois while he remains governor.

All this hopeful news brings to mind what I thought was an overly-optimistic comment a colleague of mine made twenty years ago when executions were being rapidly carded out and public sentiment favoring the death penalty was hovering around 90 percent “Support for capital punishment may be a mile wide,” my friend said, “but it is only an inch deep.”

William S. McFeely’s latest book, Proximity to Death, an intimate chronicle of a Georgia-based law project’s valiant and often successful efforts to save condemned prisoners in the South, ought to further aid in the death penalty abolitionists’ goal to change the hearts and minds of those who still believe in the legitimacy of death as punishment.

McFeely–a noted historian who was the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities, emeritus, at the

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University of Georgia, and is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Grant, as well as Frederick Douglass and Sapelo’s People–makes a convincing argument for the abolition of the death penalty mostly by telling stories about the work of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a small cadre of lawyers and investigators “living in one corner of the country to carry a large responsibility …who are on the unfinished march toward racial justice.”

McFeely’s own introduction to the Southern Center’s work came when he agreed to testify in the death penalty sentencing trial of Georgia prisoner Carzell Moore. Steve Bright, the Center’s director and one of this country’s most brilliant death penalty abolitionist lawyers, wanted McFeely to tell the jury about the racist origins of the Georgia state flag (which contains the old Confederate symbol and is displayed prominently in every Georgia courtroom) and to talk about the history of lynchings in Georgia. Carzell Moore is a black man and Bright always insists that juries and judges hear about the region’s brutal racial history–“a century-long chain of killings of black men by white men”, as McFeely describes it–while connecting it to present-day Georgia, where robed members of the Ku Klux Klan still celebrate in front of the prison when executions occur, where black men are eleven times more likely to receive the death penalty than white men, and where, of Georgia’s 59 district attorneys, all are white but one.

Driving away from the Carzell Moore trial and traveling back to Athens, Georgia, McFeely thinks aloud about what he’s just witnessed: “As a historian, I deal with events safely in the past. It is not simply that I’ve had a glimpse into the world of the courtroom; rather, I hear the old nineteenth-century issues of race and inhumanity that I’ve written about before reverberating from today’s courtroom walls.” McFeely comes to understand that the anti-death penalty effort in the South is not far apart from the antislavery movement 160 years ago.

From this point on McFeely decides to spend more and more time with Steve Bright and his Southern Center cohorts, traveling throughout Georgia and Alabama, sitting in courtrooms, visiting the Center’s condemned clients in prisons, talking with jurors who held some of these prisoners’ lives in their hands during trial, meeting with and discussing the death penalty with defense lawyers, district attorneys, judges, newspaper editors, and others who are enmeshed in the capital punishment ritual, each in “proximity to death.”

We’re introduced to nearly all who work out of the Southern Center’s Atlanta office, who McFeely calls the “protectors of life, lawyers fighting to overturn the Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye.” We sit in courtrooms or prison visitation rooms with McFeely and four of the prisoners the Center represents–Kenny Smith, Tony Amadeo, William Brooks, and Carzell Moore–and learn of these prisoners’ humanity, their remorse for the horrible crimes they committed, their longing to live, even if it is in prison, and make things right. (“My clients are more than the worst things they ever did in their lives,” Bright tells McFeely.) We meet, all too briefly, some of the early heroes of Georgia’s anti-death penalty movement before Steve Bright and the Southern Center for Human Rights appeared on the scene: Millard Farmer, Patsy Morris, Gary Parker, and George Kendall, are but a few.

By the book’s conclusion the reader cannot help but admire the courage, tenacity, and compassion of everyone connected to the Southern Center for Human Rights. Not only have we gotten to know them and those they are trying to save from execution, but we have also been given story after story and reason upon reason to rid our country of the death penalty.

“For a nation capable of better to allow its states to take one life as revenge for another life is to practice violence. not combat it,” McFeely concludes. “The death penalty is the very antithesis of Civility. It represents a yielding to hatred in a world too full of hatred and killing.”

There have been nearly six-hundred executions carried out in the U.S. since 1983; today nearly four-thousand men and women occupy death row cells across the land. Yet McFeely–like my colleague who twenty years ago estimated support for the death penalty was “only an inch deep” is optimistic that one day capital punishment will be no more, thanks in large part to the people at the Southern Center for Human Rights, “who will not go away…this tiny band finally will not be beaten.”

William S. McFeely’s Proximity to Death, is a powerful little book that both disturbs and inspires. It does indeed give the reader hope that capital punishment will one day be abandoned.

John Cole Vodicka is head of the Prison and Jail Project in Americus, Georgia.