Two families, a dark night, a prison execution

c. 1996 Religion News Service ANGOLA, La. (RNS)-The Harveys arrived first last Thursday, having driven up the 120 miles from Mandeville, La., in their blue pickup. They pulled off the highway where it ended at the prison gates. Nearby, a dozen guards on beefed-up execution duty stomped about to keep warm in the soaking cold. […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

ANGOLA, La. (RNS)-The Harveys arrived first last Thursday, having driven up the 120 miles from Mandeville, La., in their blue pickup. They pulled off the highway where it ended at the prison gates. Nearby, a dozen guards on beefed-up execution duty stomped about to keep warm in the soaking cold.

Beyond the razor wire, far out into the night, gleamed the lights of the vast Louisiana State Penitentiary. The Death House was out there, miles back. Inside, Antonio James, 15 years a resident of Angola, waited with his attorney and a spiritual adviser for the prison officials to come for him, strap him on a gurney and kill him quickly at midnight with a fatal dose of poison.


Inside, all would be procedure, as sterile as possible, stripped of both compassion and anger.

Outside the gates, people continued to arrive for reasons deeply felt.

“We’re here for the victims,” said Elizabeth Harvey, who had come with her husband, Vernon, to bear witness. “Tonight everyone’s going to be thinking about him, Antonio James. We’re here so that somebody talks about Henry Silver and Alvin Adams, the victims.”

Both were killed in separate armed robberies in 1979 barely three weeks apart. Each robbery involved James and a partner. In each, James said his partner did the shooting. But juries found James guilty of both murders; the jury in the Silver case voted for the death penalty.

The Harveys know the Death House. Each was there 12 years ago to see the electrocution of Robert Lee Willie, who raped and murdered their daughter, Faith Hathaway.

Now they come to all the executions.

“In that movie they had people giving a little cheer at midnight, when it happens,” Mrs. Harvey said. “There’s no cheering out here. This is a serious thing. It’s a serious thing to take a life. Any life.”

The movie she referred to was “Dead Man Walking,” a wrenching exploration of the death penalty issue in America.

Filmed at Angola, using the stories of Willie and the Harveys, among others, the movie has momentarily made Louisiana the landscape against which America continues its brooding debate over the death penalty.


Seventy-seven percent of Americans support capital punishment, according to a recent Gallup poll, but “Dead Man Walking” has reinvigorated the conversation.

“We’ve got to make sure we keep it,” Mrs. Harvey said. “And we might lose it if we don’t stand up for it.”

James’ execution would be the first at Angola since the movie’s release. And it would be well-documented.

A camera crew from public television’s “Frontline” wired Mrs. Harvey for sound; another from ABC’s “Primetime” and a third, an independent crew hoping to craft a project for the Discovery Channel, checked their gear and occasionally bathed a scene in a pool of light.

The crews were up near the gate when Antonio James’ family arrived in two vans about 10 p.m. A dozen or more people-mother, brother, son, niece and godchild, assorted relatives and friends-piled out and stood uncertainly in the middle of the road.

Many of them had been with James earlier in the afternoon, had said their goodbyes. The men looked drawn; some of the women occasionally sobbed. There was no place else to go, nothing to do but wait in the middle of the dead-end highway.


Someone told James’ son, Tony, about the Harveys, sitting bundled in folding chairs up the road toward the gate. He seemed astonished. “They come to every one?”he said.

Disturbed, he detached himself from his group and walked over to the Harveys. A confrontation. Lights snapped on. Prison guards were suddenly all around the periphery, in check but alert, ready.

Young James sounded baffled. “What are you here for? Do you understand this? Do you even know this man’s name?” “Antonio James,” Mrs. Harvey said, levelly.

“And look at you, you’re old people. You know better. I’m only 19, but I would never do anything like this, come out here like this.” He shifted his weight back and forth, agitated. “This is so sad, so sad. And what’s this for, to stop the killing? This won’t stop any killing, not at all.”

“We’ll be out here until we stop having murder victims,” Mrs. Harvey said.

Tony drifted back to his family, still baffled, shaking his head and drawing deep breaths.

The damp cold settled in. No one spoke of the time, but everyone seemed to keep track on his own.


By 11 p.m., Sister Helen Prejean had arrived-the author of “Dead Man Walking,” the prison ministry memoir on which the film was based.

She had not prepared James for execution, as she did three other prisoners. But she knew him, and friends in her anti-death penalty community would be with him until the end.

Earlier Thursday (Feb. 29), Prejean stood in a packed hall at Georgetown University, in Washington, lecturing against the death penalty. Now night found her out in the middle of the Louisiana countryside, in slacks and tennis shoes, looking lost in a long overcoat.

“Some crazy world,” she said.

Occasionally the James family gathered into a circle of clasped hands and prayed, usually with Prejean leading. Thin, quavering voices sang “Amazing Grace” with camera lights shining on downcast faces and boom mikes dangling overhead.

“O God, we ask that our prayers may surround him, and that he may feel our love with him in that room,” she prayed.

Midnight. No official word, but everyone knows the moment. Now women in tears; two collapsing, sobbing on the asphalt, men trying to hold them up. Tony, weeping, punches a school bus parked off the road. Prejean gently rubs the back of James’ mother, Grace, who is dry-eyed, silent.


The Harveys haven’t moved. Nor are they jubilant. Someone says the Jameses are grieving now, as the Silvers and Adamses grieved in 1979.

“But there’s a difference, isn’t there?” Mrs. Harvey said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the Silvers had a chance to say goodbye, like they did?” nodding in the direction of the James family. “Wouldn’t it be nice if they could have their loved one those extra years, like they did?

“Antonio James made a choice. This is the consequence of that choice.”

More minutes passed, uncertainly. About 12:45 a.m., Capt. Richard Barton took a telephone call near the gate and strode toward the Jameses with the news. “Antonio James was pronounced dead at 12:27 a.m.,” he said.

The Harveys left quietly, heading back up the dark, twisting highway without attracting much attention.

Prejean and her companions waited near the gate for their colleagues to drive out from the Death House. They would come out much later and embrace, quietly.

The Jameses, learning that Antonio James’ body would not be coming out the gate that night, began to gather themselves together and slowly shepherded each other to their vans.


They backed out and headed into the dark. Behind them, 10 guards stood abreast across the highway, silhouetted by the prison lights.

MJP END NOLAN

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