Southern Voices: “It’s Hard Emotions”

Fourteen hours before his scheduled execution last November, Dalton Prejean’s life story was staged like theater in a bright, white-tiled room in an administration building at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

I was in the audience, playing the bit role of a newspaper reporter. The stars were Prejean, his family, the family of his victim, and the five-member pardon board that would decide whether to recommend death or life in prison. If it came to an execution that night, I was to be a witness.

Prejean was a 14-year-old black boy when he shot and killed a white cab driver. He was 17 when he did the same to Donald Cleveland, a white state trooper. For the latter crime, he was sentenced in 1979 to be executed. As we all came together 10 years later, Prejean’s lawyers expressed little hope that their client would live into the next day.

I came prepared to witness our government’s most controversial social service: the death penalty.

The first person I met in the hearing room that morning was Ann Forbes, mother of the dead state trooper. She wore a soft white dress that glowed in the sunlight shining through heavily barred windows. She had a gentle smile and kind words. “I’ve lived and breathed this ever since it happened,” she said, and explained that she only wanted Dalton Prejean dead because that’s what she had been promised.

Mrs. Forbes sat flanked by her daughter, her daughter-in-law, and her two grandchildren. Donald Cleveland Jr., a pudgy 13-year-old with a fresh crew cut, showed none of the same emotion as the women.

Across the aisle sat the friends and family of Dalton Prejean. Bernadette Prejean said she married Dalton and conceived his child after his arrest but before his consignment to Death Row. They later divorced.

She sat with her nine-year-old son, Dalton Jr., who wore a sweater almost identical to the one worn by the victim’s son. The two never looked at each other. Both stared at the floor a lot. I stared a lot at them, looking for clues of emotion. It seemed painfully obvious that victims filled both sides of the room, their emotions overlapping in the aisle.

I found myself growing anxious for events to unfold. I wanted to stop fretting over whether I would be sickened — or worse, unmoved — by the execution.

I wondered what Prejean would be thinking at the moment he sat in “Old Sparky,” as the warden calls the electric chair. How amazing, I thought, that one minute his brain would be firing messages to his nerve endings telling his body to sit, breathe, clench his teeth, and perspire, and the next minute he would be dead. Gone.

 

St. Jude

Then Dalton Prejean walked into the room. I jotted these notes:

“Short. Shorter than me”

“Hair in two pony-tails”

“White Converse high-tops”

“Gray sweatshirt. Jeans”

“Shackled feet make him seem to saunter”

“Long goatee”

“Smiles at family”

He took his seat without a word. I moved to get a better view of his face as the testimony began.

A childhood friend, her voice cracking, said Prejean had been abused by the aunt that raised him. She said children teased him for his big ears and slow, soft speech.

His mother said “he wasn’t a normal child.” She said her son once attacked her with a two-by-four while she was nine months pregnant. “I say these things being I’m his mother, and I believe Dalton needs some help.”

Prejean wiped his eyes, but otherwise showed little emotion. Even as his brother retold the events of the night of Cleveland’s shooting, Prejean sat still. He wept a little at what was sad. He smiled a little at pleasant memories. And every few minutes, he checked his watch.

After three hours of testimony, pardon board officials broke for lunch. Prejean’s friends and family gathered around him. He spoke in a hushed voice, mentioned that everyone except him seemed to be gaining weight. He seemed relaxed, almost as if he were unaware or unconcerned about his impending execution, now less than 11 hours away. It was almost as if he were trying to make it easier for his family. Or maybe he really didn’t care.

When he stepped away from his family to talk to a prison guard, I approached him and introduced myself.

“What is that you’re wearing around your neck?” I asked, pointing to a silver medallion.

“The cross of St. Jude,” he said, identifying the patron saint of lost causes.

“Is it tough sitting here, listening and waiting? What do you think about?”

“It’s just hard emotions being a human being,” he said. “It just is. I just don’t like seeing my family go through all of this.”

“Do you have a feeling about how it’s going to turn out?”

“I’m being neutral. I’m just presenting my case with all the facts.”

I thanked him and he returned to his family. We all ate the same prison lunch — baked chicken, stuffing, yams, and lima beans. I made a note to find out what his final meal would be and include that in my story. For some reason, readers always want to know the last meal, as if it reveals something inherently human about someone we otherwise deem inhuman.

I was beginning to think of Dalton Prejean as dead.

 

Another Reprieve

After lunch, the hearings seemed likely to continue for several hours. I took out my portable computer, went to the back of the room, and began writing a story for our early editions. It said Prejean was on his way to almost certain execution.

At the witness stand was Nancy Goodwin, Prejean’s spiritual counselor, who said Prejean had grown a lot in his 10 years on Death Row. She said many people were touched by his life and many would suffer if he died.

Next was Sharona Hill, a former California convict who became Prejean’s pen pal last year. She said she was in love with Prejean; that his letters had helped her turn her life around. By now, most of the reporters and television crews had gone, and those who remained were fidgeting and talking among themselves.

At 2:08, the testimony came to an abrupt halt. The prison warden whispered in the ear of the pardon board chairman and a 10-minute recess was announced. The room buzzed with a rumor that soon proved accurate: A federal judge had issued Prejean’s ninth stay of execution. Suddenly all bureaucratic decorum exploded in a thundering wave of emotion.

“It’s not fair,” Donald Cleveland’s daughter screamed.

Donald Jr.’s face turned red. He shook his head back and forth, as if he could make the tears go away. He couldn’t, and ran out of the room.

Someone dropped a can of Coke and it fizzed across the floor. Spectators stood up abruptly, dropping coffee cups.

Prejean’s family tried to rush toward him, but so did two prison guards. While the relatives reached to hug him, the guards handcuffed him and hurried him out of the room. He said nothing, but a single tear rolled down his face and disappeared into his beard.

The Prejeans wept in joy and the Clevelands wept in sorrow. I think I breathed a sigh of relief.

When everyone had gone home and Prejean was back in his cell, I sat in the grass outside the prison gates and wrote my article for the next day’s first edition. I included the quote from Prejean:

“It’s hard emotions being a human being.”

 

Swatting a Fly

Six months later, on May 18,1 found myself back at the prison. This time there would be no stay of execution. This time Dalton Prejean was going to die.

The cinderblock walls of the Death House were yellow and smelled as if they’d just been painted. Prejean walked into the place barefoot. The distance from the door to the electric chair was about five paces, and he took them without pause.

Prejean moved smoothly from the white formica floor to the black rubber mat under the chair. The chains around his legs, arms and waist had just been removed, but without the shackles, he took the same small, shuffling strides.

He didn’t look at the electric chair, except for a quick glance to judge its distance. He just stopped, pivoted, and slid into the seat like a commuter taking a place on a bus.

In the seconds it took for his body to turn and his knees to bend, I thought I saw strain in his eyes. Before I could double-check, the look was gone and Prejean stared calmly into the face of the man strapping him to the chair.

Then he looked at the warden in the comer of the room. The warden gazed at the clock over Prejean’s head.

The condemned man was wearing a white short-sleeve undershirt and blue jeans. The left leg of his pants had been cut off below the knee and his calf had been shaved to make for a better electrical contact. His odd-looking ponytails had been cut off, too, revealing gangly ears on a small, pointy head.

When the guards fastened him in the chair, they had to pull the wide, leather straps extra tight to secure his scrawny body. His toes barely reached the floor.

Prejean craned his neck as a guard attached the main electrode to the top of his head. Here, for the first and only time, he grimaced. When that was done, he looked forward again, this time through a window into the witness pool.

That’s where I sat, along with two wire service reporters, three state troopers, a defense lawyer, a longtime friend and counselor of Prejean’s, a doctor, and a coroner. All of us were silent, except the two wire service reporters, each of whom had seen several executions. One of them tried to swat a fly on the window facing the death chamber. “Here comes the first execution of the night,” he said, missing the insect with his notebook.

 

2,000 Volts

When Prejean was all strapped in, he stared at his attorney, who held up a small wooden cross. Then one of the guards dropped a hood over his face. It happened so quickly he had no time for a parting expression. He could no more control the dropping of the mask than he could steady the motion of the second hand on the clock behind his head or the darkness yet to come.

When the clock reached five minutes past midnight, an electrician checked all the connections to be sure the hardware would work. Then he switched on an exhaust fan to keep the room from filling with the smell of Prejean’s burning flesh. The fan started up with a loud clack, but Prejean didn’t flinch.

His fists were clenched, his chest heaved rapidly. I looked for clues to what might be going on in his mind. It was something I’d pondered often in the months before the execution.

How could I hope to understand a mind like Prejean’s? I knew he had done some unthinkable things at a remarkably early age. What was going on in his mind when he attacked his pregnant mother with a two-by-four? What was he thinking when he killed the cab driver when he was 14?

After the murder of the cabbie, doctors determined Prejean was mildly retarded and potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, they turned him loose, without supervision, and Prejean eventually killed again, his mind bent by drugs, alcohol, and cough syrup.

His brain damage seemed to have left Prejean unable to inhibit himself. Like a top, he spun with speed and force, but usually without direction. Give him drugs and a gun and it was a pretty good bet someone would get hurt. Sober him up and surround him with authority figures and he never strayed from proper behavior.

Unchecked, it was a frightening, dangerous mind. Shackled and institutionalized, it was gentle and predictable.

With a mask over his head and extermination only seconds away, Prejean’s mind was still functioning, still firing thousands of orders to the rest of his body with the miraculous speed of thought. I marveled over it, remembering how George Orwell once marveled at a man who stepped around a puddle on his way to the gallows.

Prejean’s fists remained clenched, heeding his mind’s message. Unconsciously, his lungs responded to the orders from his brain to breathe. His nostrils took in air and probably smelled the same fresh paint that I did.

His heart pumped blood more quickly than usual. His arms, legs, and chest felt the pressure of the tightly drawn leather straps. He decided not to scream, not to writhe, not to resist.

While all this and a thousand things more were going on in Prejean’s brain, the warden softly nodded and the executioner threw a switch. Two thousand volts of electricity hit Prejean, snuffing out all brain activity and causing his body to jerk violently. His body seemed to try to rise from the chair, only to press against the straps. Then came 500 volts more and another spasm. Then 2,000 volts again. A spark shot from Prejean’s left leg. After one more jolt of 500 volts, he was still.

We stared at Prejean for exactly five minutes before the coroner and prison doctor approached to examine the body. The coroner was wearing a tuxedo. They lifted the hood, peered into half-open eyes, and checked for a heartbeat. They declared him dead at 12:17 a.m.

 

“One World Less”

I left the witness room and walked down the same white-tiled hallway Prejean had just crossed.

Before we could leave the Death House, each witness had to sign three copies of a form letter verifying that we had seen a man die. As the papers went around the table, one state trooper smiled; another ate a cookie; Prejean’s counselor wept.

All I could think of was something Orwell wrote after the execution of the man who sidestepped the puddle:

“He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world: and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.”