The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions

Book by Helen Prejean Sister Helen Prejean

Chapter One

Dobie Gillis Williams

When I first met him I was struck by his name, Dobie Gillis, and then when I heard he had a brother named John Boy, another TV character, I knew for sure his mama must like to watch a lot of TV. Betty Williams, Dobie Williams’s mama, is here now in the death house of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a terrible place for a mama to be. It’s January 8, 1999, at 1:00 p.m., and she’s here with family members, two of Dobie’s lawyers, and me, his spiritual adviser, and we’re all waiting it out with Dobie to see if the state is really going to kill him this time.

Dobie’s had eleven execution dates since 1985 and close calls in June and November when the state came within a couple of hours of killing him but had to call it off because of last-minute stays of execution. I feel this is it, they’re going to get Dobie this time, and I’m praying for courage for him and for his mama and for me, too. I’ve done this four other times,1 accompanying men to execution, first with Patrick Sonnier in 1984, walking through this very room on his way to the electric chair, and here we are sitting with Dobie, hoping against hope he won’t have to make that walk through this room tonight. His execution by lethal injection is scheduled for 6:30. About five hours to go.

Dobie’s death is set to conclude a story that began more than fourteen years before, in the early morning hours of July 8, 1984. It was then that forty-three-year-old Sonja Merritt Knippers was stabbed to death as she sat on the toilet in her bathroom in Many, Louisiana, a small town in north central Louisiana. Mrs. Knippers’s husband, Herb, who said he was in the bedroom during the slaying, told investigators that he heard his wife yelling, “A black man is killing me,” which led police to round up three black men, Dobie Gillis Williams among them. He was home on a weekend furlough from Camp Beauregard, a minimum-security detention facility, where he was serving a term for burglary. He had been allowed the visit because he was a model prisoner, not prone to violence.

At 2:30 a.m., police officers seized Dobie, asleep on the couch at his grandfather’s house, brought him to the police station, and began interrogating him. They told him that they would be there for the rest of the night and all morning and all the next day if need be, until they “got to the bottom of this.” Three police officers later testified that Dobie confessed, and at the crime scene investigators found a bloodstain on a bathroom curtain, which the state crime lab declared was consistent in seven categories with Dobie’s, and statistically, that combination would occur in only two in one hundred thousand black people. Investigators also found a “dark-pigmented piece of skin” on the brick ledge of the bathroom window, through which the killer supposedly entered and escaped.

Dobie’s trial didn’t last long. Within one week, the jury was selected, evidence presented, a guilty verdict rendered, and a death sentence imposed.

Now, waiting here in the death house, I pray. No, God, not Dobie. I’ve been visiting him for eight years. He’s thirty-eight years old, indigent, has an IQ of 65, well below the score of 70 that indicates mental retardation. He has rheumatoid arthritis. His fingers are gnarled. His left knee is especially bad, and he walks slowly, with labored steps. He has a slight build, keeps his hair cropped close, and wears big glasses, which he says gives him an intellectual look. His low IQ forces him to play catch-up during most conversations, especially if he is in a group.

Earlier today, Warden Burl Cain asked Dobie if he wanted to be rolled to the death chamber in a wheelchair. “Dobie, we’ll do it your way, any way you want, so if you want the wheelchair, we’ll do that. It might make it easier on you, but if you want to walk, I mean that’s okay, too, no matter how long it takes. We’ll just go at your pace. If it takes a half hour, whatever it takes, it’s up to you, you can have it your way, like at Burger King, have it your way, and we’ll do anything you want to do.”

Dobie narrowed his eyes. “No way. I’ll walk.”

Later he says, “Man! Is he crazy? Let them people use a wheelchair on me? Man! No way. No way.”

The wheelchair is a sensitive issue. When Dobie got rheumatoid arthritis five years ago, his proud, fit body left him. Some of the guys on the Row started calling him “stiff,” and when they’d see a crippled person on TV, there’d be snickers as somebody yelled out, “Who does that remind you of?” Dobie would be silent in his cell.

“I just ignore them,” he’d tell me.

I notice how fast and soft and friendly the warden talks to Dobie. Of course he wants Dobie to use the wheelchair. I can tell he wants the process to go quickly so he and the Tactical Unit—the team responsible for the physical details of killing Dobie—can get it over with as soon as possible. Dobie, it is turning out, is proving difficult in several ways. There had been the last-minute stays of execution in June and November, which meant that the Tac team, Mrs. Knippers’s family members, the executioner, the support staff, the medical staff, and the ambulance crew that removes the body—all these people had to come back and go through it again, which is hard on everybody. Plus, Dobie rejected the offer to eat his final meal with Warden Cain as two other executed prisoners had done. That must have felt like a slap in the face, because the warden felt he was doing his best to show Christian fellowship to these men before they died.

The meal with the other condemned men—Antonio James and John Brown—had gone well, with clean white tablecloths and the menu and guests selected by the prisoner—lawyer friends and spiritual advisers—along with the guests the warden himself invited—a couple of friendly guards and Chaney Joseph, the governor’s attorney (who formulated the state’s current death penalty statute and stands ready to block any legal attempt to halt an execution). At these final meals they had all held hands and prayed and sung hymns and eaten and even laughed, and one of these scenes was captured on ABC’s Primetime Live when a story was done about Antonio James. In the Primetime piece, there at the head of the table was Warden Cain, like a father figure, providing the abundance of the last meal—boiled crawfish—making everything as nice and friendly as he could, even though when the meal was done the inevitable protocol would have to be followed and, as warden, he would be obliged to do his job. In the chamber, he’d nod to the executioner to begin injecting the lethal fluids into the arm of the man whose hand he was holding and with whom he was praying.

The warden is fond of quoting the Bible, and the verse he quotes to justify state executions is Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, which states that civil authority is “the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” Yes, this distasteful task laid on his shoulders is backed up by God’s word, which he tries hard to follow because he takes very seriously the eternal salvation of every man in this prison entrusted to his care. Warden Cain would do anything to avoid carrying out the death penalty, but it goes with the territory of being warden, and he likes being warden and is only a few years from retirement. So he goes along reluctantly and tries to be as nice to the condemned and their families as he can.

He could do what Donald Cabana, the former warden of Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi, did. Warden Cabana quit his job because his conscience wouldn’t allow him to participate in executions. In his book, Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner, he tells of presiding over the execution of two men in the gas chamber at Parchman. The second one, that of Connie Ray Evans, really got to Cabana because he liked the man, and they talked often and long. He tried truthfully to answer Connie Ray’s questions about how best to deal with the gas when it came, telling him to breathe deep, that it would be over faster that way.2 Then, after watching the dying man gasp for breath and twitch and strain against the straps in the chair, Warden Cabana quit the job, and today he gives lectures against the death penalty to anyone who will listen.

Warden Cain could choose to do that. He has confided to one of Dobie’s defense attorneys that he draws the line when it comes to women. Louisiana has one woman on death row, Antoinette Frank, and the warden says, no, he just couldn’t execute a woman, that he’ll quit before he does that. I wonder if he realizes that he’s the first trigger of the machinery of death—he nods and a man dies. The death certificate states the true nature of the deed: “Cause of death: homicide.” Maybe there’s a qualifying word, “legal,” but it’s homicide all the same.

When Dobie turned down the warden’s invitation to share his last meal, he said, “I ain’t going to eat with those people. It’s not like, you know, real fellowship. When they finish eating they’re going to help kill me.” He is the first one up for execution who’s turned down the warden’s invitation, and I’ve heard through the prison grapevine that the men on the Row respect him for it.

We’re all sitting around a table with Dobie in the death house visiting room: Jean Walker, Dobie’s childhood sweetheart; his mama; his aunt Royce; his brother Patrick; his four-year-old nephew, Antonio; two lawyer friends, Carol Kolinchak an...