Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O’Dell

The author of The Death of the Innocents is Sister Helen Prejean, who is perhaps better known for the Hollywood film Dead Man Walking, in which Susan Sarandon starred. According to reviewer David Rose (2006), this is Sister Helen’s compassionate account of the executions of two men, Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O’Dell. Sister Helen makes an effort to convince the audience that Williams and O’Dell were both unjustly executed.

Sr. Helen is a Roman Catholic nun who has dedicated her life to opposing the death sentence because she thinks it is immoral and against the law. She acted at spiritual counselor to both Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O’Dell, and it is with a sense of outrage that she wrote this book. Perhaps this question from the book best expresses Sister Helen’s main message: “Honorable people have disagreed about the justice of executing the guilty, but can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent?” (Prejean 2005)

Dobie Gillis Williams

Sister Helen first met Dobie Gillis Williams back in 1991. He was being held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, convicted for raping and stabbing a lady named Sonja Merritt Kippers in Many, Louisiana back in 1984. In the small Louisiana town of Many, 43-year old Kippers was stabbed to death in her own bath room. While she was being stabbed, her husband heard her saying, “A black man is killing me.” Dobie, along with three other black men, was rounded up by the police. Since Dobie is already a convicted thief just home from a minimum-security detention facility, his trial did not last long. Within one week, the jury declared him guilty, and a death sentence was imposed. The prosecutor in the case stands by the conviction. By the time his final execution date was set in January 1999, Dobie already had eleven execution dates since 1985, but each time, they were called off because of last-minute stays of execution (Prejean , 2005).

By the time of his execution, Sister Helen had known Dobie for eight years. He was already 38 years old at that time, and he had rheumatoid arthritis. He walks with a shuffle, his fingers are gnarled. Perhaps the most telling characteristic of Dobie, and perhaps the most compelling reason why Sister Helen felt that he shouldn’t have been executed, is that he has an IQ of 65. Now this tells us that Dobie’s IQ is below 70, which is indicative of mental retardation. In fact, less than two years later, the Supreme Court made a ruling that executing a man with an IQ of 65 is unconstitutional. Another disturbing thing about this is that his court-appointed lawyer neither investigated the prosecutor’s contrived crime scene prior to his trial, nor challenged it during his trial (Oleson, 2005).

Joseph O’Dell

Joseph Roger O’Dell was arrested on February 6, 1985 for the murder, rape, and sodomy of Helen Schartner. O’Dell was convicted in 1986 of rape and murder in the state of Virginia. His conviction was based largely on the testimony of a jailhouse informant. O’Dell argued that he should have been allowed to tell the jurors during his trial that if they didn’t give him the death penalty, he would have to get a life sentence instead (The Associated Press). Sister Helen mentioned in the book that she was appalled when she found out that on a regular basis, district attorneys try to keep juries from knowing about life-without-parole sentences. To quote lines form the book:

Prosecutors Test and Alberi not only blocked Joe’s jury from knowing about Virginia’s life-without-parole sentence, they also deliberately misled them into thinking that Joe would be walking the streets again if they didn’t vote to kill him.“(Prejean, 2005)

Albert Alberi and Stephen Test were prosecutors in O’Dell’s trial seek the death penalty to see any lesser sentence as a failure for the justice system and a God-fearing juror to protect society from a dangerous criminal.

O’Dell unsuccessfully sought out court-ordered DNA testing for more than ten years, the evidence that would have proven his innocence in court. His unsuccessful appeals went through the Virginia Supreme Court, Federal District Court, and the Supreme Court. Somehow, he wasn’t able to get evidence until his execution in July 1997. His letters were sent with stationery with the address P.O. Box 500-Death Row. Disturbingly, the state of Virginia destroyed the evidence in 2000.

O’Dell’s innocence was put into question leading up to his execution through lethal injection in July 1997, with anti-death penalty groups around the nation rallying for him. His cause was also championed by then-Pope John Paul II, Mother Theresa, and the Italian government (The Associated Press, 1997). The United States Supreme Court rejected his last-minute appeal. Before his execution, 55-year old Roger O’Dell married Lori Urs and requested Virginia Governor George Allen to preserve evidence, reasserting his innocence. We now know that Governor Allen didn’t keep the evidence. He also addressed the victim’s son, saying that he didn’t kill her.

Conclusion

These two cases very clearly show that there are several faults in the judicial system of the United States, according to ”The Death of Innocents“ author Sr. Helen Prejean. In the preface, Sister Helen expresses her disappointment in the court system of the United States. She brought up issues such as ”coercion“ and hearsay of confessions, missing evidence from crime scenes, and many others. According to the book, United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom Sr. Helen had an ensuing confrontation, does not make the execution of an innocent prisoner any easier because he created procedural barriers and even introduced new evidence in post-conviction appeals. According to the Supreme Court’s view, it is very probable that a convicted person can be executed when a lawyer misses filing a deadline or prevents compelling testimony. In the book, Sister Helen also questions why each of the fifty states, even though they were bound by same constitution and guidelines, implement the death penalty differently. She describes the way that capital punishment is meted out in the United States as capricious and arbitrary (Prejean, 2005). Now there is indeed something fundamentally flawed about a judicial system that trivializes the lives of human beings by creating seemingly irrational barriers to a prisoner’s execution. When Sister Helen started visiting condemned inmates, she presumed the guilt of all inmates on death row. What she discovered is that after working with so many of them, many innocent people can end up on death row. In her own words, ”It’s practice demeans us all“ (Prejean, 2005).

Bibliography

Oleson, K. (2005). The Death of Innocents: An eyewitness account of wrongful executions.

Justice Denied: The Magazine for the Wrongly Convicted. 2005: Issue 30, page 27. Retrieved, April 3, 2017, from http://www.justicedenied.org/issue/issue_30/death_innocents_jd30.pdf

Prejean, H. (2005). The Death of the Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions.

New York: Vintage Books/Random House, Inc.

Rose, D. (2006). The Killer Question. The Guardian. January 22, 2006.

Retrieved April 3, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2006/jan/22/society

The Associated Press. (1997). Man Executed Despite Protest from the Pope. The New York

Times, July 24, 1997. Retrieved April 3, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/24/us/man-executed-despite-protest-from-the-pope.html