Book Review: If At First You Don't Succeed, Fry Again

The Execution of Willie Francis
by Gilbert King
Basic Civitas Books, 300 pages

As the U.S. resumes lethally injecting Death Row inmates after a brief hiatus, “The Execution of Willie Francis” is a timely reminder of the absurdity of the capital punishment system.

Francis, 18, died in Louisiana's electric chair in May 1947 for murdering a Cajun pharmacist. The case would have been unremarkable but for the fact that, a year before his fatal date with “Gruesome Gertie,” he survived a botched execution.

“How'd it feel, Willie?” a reporter asked him.

“Plumb mizzuble,” he replied.

Francis's appeal of his death sentence reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which, on a 5-4 vote, ruled that re-electrocuting him would not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. “The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the prompt consummation of the sentence cannot, it seems to us, add an element of cruelty to a subsequent execution,” the plurality opinion in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U. S. 459 (1947), said.

Last month, the Supreme Court cited Resweber in finding that lethal injection procedures in Kentucky do not violate the Eighth Amendment.

“Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of 'objectively intolerable risk of harm' that qualifies as cruel and unusual,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote in Baze v. Rees.

But as author Gilbert King shows in his book about Francis's case, what the young African-American went through was objectively intolerable.

“What assurance, gentlemen, does this boy have that he will go to his death in a humane manner, quickly and painlessly?” his attorney, Bertrand DeBlanc, asked the Louisiana Board of Pardons. “Supposing that the chair doesn't work a second time? Suppose it doesn't work the third time? ... How long does the State of Louisiana take to kill a man? If we want to make it cruel, let's do it right, let's boil him in oil. Why not burn him at the stake?”

The Supreme Court, in fact, was deeply conflicted over sending Francis back to the electric chair. After casting the deciding vote against him, Justice Felix Frankfurter -– a champion of “judicial restraint” -- even made a clandestine attempt to persuade Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.

Francis himself put a stop to the legal machinations. “I'm ready to die,” he told DeBlanc on the morning of his death. “And the sooner the better.”

Since the re-execution, King observes, “the name of Willie Francis has been relegated to the footnotes of capital punishment texts and Supreme Court citations, where it remains today. The boy who was named Willie Francis has been long forgotten.”

But by remembering him, King should make us all consider whether, in our administration of justice, we have really made any progress since 1947.

By Matthew Heller
5/11/08