Last Wednesday at 6:35 p.m. in the execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas, Willie Trottie, 45, was killed by lethal injection. Sentenced to death for the murder of his ex-partner and his brother-in-law in 1993, he became the 1,388th prisoner executed in the United States since 1977.
His name most likely doesn’t mean anything to you. It didn’t mean anything to me either before I received a typed letter from him last fall. He had gotten my address at the newspaper through Marie-Pierre, a woman from Montreal with whom he was corresponding. She had spoken to him of my report on Texas’s death row that was published last year. In it, I had interviewed Hank Skinner, a prisoner who maintains his innocence.
Willie Trottie wrote to me in the hopes of bringing attention to his story. Like Hank Skinner, he had been on death row for 20 years. But unlike Skinner, he didn’t claim to be innocent. He had admitted having committed the horrible double murder he had been accused of — which in no way diminishes the injustice of his fate. The death penalty is not only unfair and cruel when it kills the innocent, but also when it kills the guilty.
For 20 years, the number of cases of miscarriages of justice proven thanks to DNA tests has contributed to the decline of the death penalty in the United States. We can be happy about that. At the same time, as Texas law Professor David R. Dow pointed out to me, there’s bad news in this good news. The fact that people are against capital punishment only when they believe that a person is innocent isn’t really progress as far as civil rights are concerned. “People are always against the execution of innocent people!”*
Pro-death penalty in another life, David R. Dow started to change his mind when he realized that inmates on death row are not different from those who aren’t. They aren’t the ones who have committed the worst crimes. Too often they are people who haven’t had the right to a fair defense — because they are black, because they are Latino, because they are poor. So how do you defend a justice system that violates the same principles it is founded upon?
The story of Willie Trottie — black, poor, abandoned at a young age by an alcoholic mother, and victim of abuse — illustrates the injustices as well as the cruelty of the death penalty system. Judging that he didn’t have access to a defense worthy of that name, the death row inmate had tried to have his sentence commuted due to an unfair trial. In vain.
His last appeal before the Supreme Court was rejected 90 minutes before his being put to death. The appeal focused notably on the trade secrets of the anesthetic used to kill prisoners. The subject has provoked controversy ever since pharmaceutical companies refused to provide pentobarbital to states that use it to execute their prisoners. The shortage is pushing prison authorities to get their supplies secretly from unaccredited pharmacies, which increases the risk of using defective or expired products, leading to botched executions. “We have no guarantee that the drugs used to kill us are appropriate or legal!” Willie Trottie wrote to me.*
In fact, as civil rights defenders have noted, the United States requires more transparency for euthanizing animals than for executing human beings.
Last Wednesday, in Montreal, an hour before Willie Trottie’s execution, Marie-Pierre wrote this on her Facebook page: “I am losing a friend and I’m not there at his side watching over him. And life goes on everywhere.”*
Marie-Pierre, a 34-year-old librarian, started corresponding with Willie Trottie almost two years ago, after having seen Catherine Proulx’s film “Un Trou Dans le Temps” [A Hole in Time], which focused on the prison universe. The documentary made her realize how much prisoners need relationships with people who don’t judge them.
In surfing a site of people opposed to the death penalty, she stumbled upon the name of Trottie. The name intrigued her to start with; Trottie looks like Trottier. Then she read the classified ad he had written up. He said he wanted to see the world through the eyes of people who were not imprisoned. Marie-Pierre found that beautiful. She wrote to him. An epistolary friendship was born.
They exchanged dozens of letters. Long letters in which they talked about everything. About their childhood, their respective friends. About his God; about flamenco, which she was passionate about. About life in prison and life before prison. About his son, his crime. About the tragic train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, about which Willie Trottie added a handwritten note on the back on the letter he wrote me: “My thoughts and prayers are with the families/victims.”*
In April, Marie-Pierre visited him on death row in Texas. For eight hours, they spoke to each other in person, through a pane of glass set up between the inmate’s cage and his friend’s chair. It was the first time that they had seen each other; the last time, too.
She received his final letter on September 11, the day after his execution. It was dated August 31. Willie Trottie thanked her for everything. He said he was holding out hope for a reprieve. But no matter what the outcome, he would stay peaceful thanks to his faith.
Strapped to the execution table, Willie Trottie’s last words before he was injected were apologies to the victims of his crime. “I love you all. I’m going home, going to be with the Lord … Find it in your hearts to forgive me. I’m sorry.”
He was declared dead 22 minutes after the start of lethal injection.
His double murder shattered a family, Marie-Pierre stresses. But his execution only multiplied the tragedy, she says. His son, motherless because of the murder, now has no father. The parents of his ex-wife lost a daughter and a son, killed by Trottie, and now the father of the convicted man has lost his son, killed by the state. To the bodies left after the tragedy in 1993 are added the dead souls of those who are left behind.
*Editor’s Note: These quotes, though accurately translated, could not be ascertained due to the private nature of the communication.
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