Read Dead Man Walking for Free Online Page A

something about Pat Sonnier. In each of his letters he expresses gratitude and appreciation for my care. He makes no demands. He doesn’t ask for money. He does not request my phone number (inmates at Angola are allowed to make collect phone calls). He only says how glad he is to have someone to communicate with because he has been so lonely. The sheer weight of his loneliness, his abandonment, draws me. I abhor the evil he has done. But I sense something, some sheer and essential humanness, and that, perhaps, is what draws me most of all.
    In my next letter I ask him if anyone ever comes to see him, and he says, no, there is no one. So I ask how I might go about visiting him.

CHAPTER
2
    P at’s return letter brims with excitement and he explains that he must
put me on his visitor list so the prison can do a security check. I am to send my birth date and social security number. He tells me that he went back and forth in his mind about which category of visitor to put me in — friend or spiritual adviser — but he has decided on spiritual adviser. I have no idea what difference the category will make. I later learn that a spiritual adviser may remain with the condemned man in the death house after 6:00 P.M ., when relatives and friends must leave. The spiritual adviser is allowed to witness the execution.
    Nothing happens for months, and then I receive a letter from a Catholic priest who serves as chaplain at the prison. He says he has to interview me before I can become Pat’s spiritual adviser. I drive to Angola for the interview.
    It is July 1982. I set out around nine in the morning. My interview is set for the early afternoon. I have a poor sense of direction, so I have carefully written down the route to the prison, which is at the end of a circuitous road, about three hours from New Orleans.
    It feels good to get out of the steamy housing project onto the open road, to see sky and towering clouds and the blue, wide waters of Lake Pontchartrain.
    Highway 66, which dead-ends at the gates of the prison, snakes through the Tunica hills, a refreshing change of terrain in pancake-flat Louisiana. It is cooler and greener in the hills, and some of the branches of the trees arch across the road and bathe it in shadow.
    I think of the thousands of men who have been transported down this road since 1901, when this 18,000-acre prison was established. About 4,600 men are locked up here now, half of them, practically speaking, serving life sentences. “Wide-stripes,” they used to call the lifers.
    Louisiana deals out harsh sentences. In 1977, when the death penalty was reinstated by the state legislature, the life-imprisonment statute was reformulated, effectively eliminating probation, parole, or suspension of sentence for first- and second-degree murder. An eighteen-year-old first-time offender convicted of distributing heroin faces a life sentence without possibility of probation or parole; and the habitual-offender law, aimed at reducing “career criminals,” imposes a life sentence on offenders even for nonviolent crimes.
    About five miles from the prison I see a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree: “Do not despair. You will soon be there.” I make a sharp S-curve in the road and see a clearing, an open sky, and the Louisiana State Penitentiary — Angola. I drive up to the front gate. Several armed, blue-uniformed guards occupy a small, glassed-in office and one of them comes to the car and I show him the letter from the chaplain. They inspect my car — trunk, glove compartment, seats — put a visitor’s sign on my dashboard, and direct me to the administration building about a quarter of a mile inside the prison grounds.
    There are red and yellow zinnias all along the road, and the grass is neatly trimmed. Mottled black-and-white cattle browse in a field of green. I see a column of inmates, most of them black, marching out to soybean and vegetable fields, their hoes over their shoulders. Behind and in front of