c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS (RNS)-The death penalty debate yields a bitter side effect-the fresh agonies it inflicts on victims’ families, who are trying to heal the most fearful emotional wounds.

Moral arguments over the basic dignity even of killers, doubts about judicial competence, and the years of public attention a killer receives while his victim lies forgotten-all seem perversely to elevate a murderer over a victim who was certainly innocent.

And so it is with the debut of the movie”Dead Man Walking.””This puts us back to stage one. It hurts,”Elizabeth Harvey said softly from her home in Mandeville, a New Orleans suburb.

Elizabeth and her husband, Vernon, are the mother and stepfather of Faith Hathaway, an 18-year-old who was abducted, raped and stabbed to death in 1980 by Robert Lee Willie and Joseph Vaccaro.

Faith Hathaway becomes Hope Percy in the movie; her parents, like the Harveys, are stung by Sister Helen Prejean’s opposition to the death penalty for their daughter’s killer.

In the years since Hathaway’s death, the Harveys became the New Orleans area’s most visible supporters of the death penalty. Every execution found them outside the gates of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola bearing placards of support for what was happening inside.

But over the years, Prejean kept in touch; a fragile relationship took hold, nourished on the occasional note or telephone call, including one last week.

Two years ago, Elizabeth Harvey got the state’s permission to bury an unclaimed newborn girl found washed up from Lake Pontchartrain. She buried her next to Faith. Prejean helped.

Now Vernon Harvey is ill, beset by a series of strokes.”I feel like we’re being exploited,”Elizabeth Harvey said last week.”All we have is pain. What right do they have to dig up our pain and make money off it?” She said she may see the movie.”I’ve never been one to stick my head in the sand. I had to fight to find out about Faith”after authorities recovered her body and seemed to shunt the Harveys aside during their investigation.”With things like this coming up, how can it not be painful? But it’s just a fact of life.” Harvey’s daughter died alone, although in the movie, with its composite characters, Faith dies with a teen-age boyfriend abducted from a lonely lovers’ lane near rural St. Martinville, La., in 1977.

That scenario, too, was a real crime, and the girl’s name was Loretta Bourque, the daughter of Goldie and Godfrey Bourque. By several accounts, they remain shattered by the experience and keep their privacy. They did not return several messages left on an answering machine.”They’re still angry. They say every time this comes up, it revives all the memories,”Lloyd LeBlanc said.”To me, it’s history now.” LeBlanc is the father of David LeBlanc, the boy Loretta was with that night when Pat Sonnier and his brother, Eddie, stepped out of the dark, took them in the woods, raped Bourque and shot them both.

It was LeBlanc who first confronted Prejean at a clemency hearing in 1984 for ignoring their pain in comforting the imprisoned Pat Sonnier.”I told her, `If you’ve been honoring the right God, then who have I been honoring?'” Yet Prejean and the LeBlancs have forged an extraordinary relationship since then.”Lloyd LeBlanc’s the exception,”Prejean said.”He shows us all how to live as a Christian.” Like the other parents, Lloyd LeBlanc, 66, remains a supporter of the death penalty, just as he was before he lost his son 18 years ago. He watched Pat Sonnier die in the electric chair and, unlike Prejean, still believes Pat, not Eddie, killed his son.

But he has forgiven the Sonniers. Shortly before their mother, Gladys, died, he sought her out, gave her a Christmas basket of fruit and told her he bore her no anger.

Occasionally, he and Prejean drive eight miles through the predawn darkness to a country chapel for an hour of silent prayer, a ritual he has practiced every week since 1987. They did so again last month.

Together, he said, they pray for the dead children, for the executed Sonnier, his imprisoned brother and their dead mother.

Then they return to the house, where Eula LeBlanc cooks breakfast. She is still grieving over her lost David, but is helped immensely by the presence of four grandchildren, he said.”We’re two of God’s children, and we do have a good relationship,”LeBlanc said of Prejean.”She’s doing her job and she’s made amends, I’d say so.”People tell me I’m crazy”to forgive.”I tell them this is the way I was brought up, and you’re not going to change it. I think I’m living the way the Lord wants me to.” MJP END NOLAN