A note from Sister Barbara from her experience in the death chamber
Note: The following account was first published on our site on October 30, 2022. It is still timely, as a federal execution is now scheduled for Joseph Corcoran on December 18, 2024.
“Charity consists of loving sincerely persons whose inclinations are most opposed to ours, in pardoning those who injure us.” — Saint Mother Theodore Guerin
I watched a man die. He wanted someone to be there for him. Someone not on the killing team. I am the Justice Promoter for the Sisters of Providence at St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, and I was talking about watching as Mr. William Emmet LeCroy, Jr. took his last breath as he laid strapped down, flat on his back, on a slightly tilted cruciform table in a room full of windows. I recited the Divine Mercy Chaplet which “Will” had requested, and I wondered if the Warden, the U.S. Marshal, or the Executioner were silently praying. I knew Will was.
The bishops of Indiana, along with numerous other bishops across the U.S., have spoken out against the death penalty. So have religious communities across the country, including my own, the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods.
Will mailed his last words to me which, as providence would have it, came the day after he was executed. At a press conference the morning of Sept. 24, when Christopher Vialva would be executed later that day, I spoke aloud William’s last words. He quoted from his spiritual guides: Thomas Merton, Pema Chodron, and others.
From Kahlil Gibran, in The Prophet, Will identified an essential truth: “But I say that even as the Holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.”
I believe Will LeCroy can teach us an essential truth: Who among us deserves to be labeled, judged, discarded even, according to the worst thing we ever did? Rather, are we not called to honor human dignity and extend God’s loving design to all creation and all persons?
I still stand by the statement I made at Will McCrory’s execution: My faith and the teachings of our Church compel me to say No! to the death penalty and to work to abolish it.
Surely just as we know that God loves us always and is never far from us, so are we called to love one another always, no matter what. Let us move towards Advent with a renewed commitment to truly be brother or sister to all members of the human community.
“Timber“
William E. LeCroy Jr. – 2011.
William LeCroy was executed by the federal government at 6 p.m., on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020. The following is a poem Will wrote and sent to Sister Barbara, who served as his minister of record.
From this barred window,
Browning at the edge of a grass field,
I behold those crooked pines,
Lines of sap oozing freely
Down the barkless spots on their trunks,
Perhaps weeping, remembering a time
In youth when they were green.
Orange bands bright like nooses
Strangle them, condemn them.
No longer part of the living eco-system,
Different somehow – infested, an eyesore,
Or carriers of fungus or death rot contagion –
They are marked for death, quarantined,
Anxiously awaiting their executioners.
Do they contemplate that fate?
Are they conscious, struggling to breathe,
Senses atwitter, ever vigilant,
Listening for the thwock! Of looming axes,
Whose vibrations tremble every dry, brown needle?
And when they have joined the fallen
Paralyzed and prone on the forest floor,
Lingering in death unbeknownst to others
To be hacked in pieces and hauled off,
Do they scream sharply when heaped upon the pyre?
Finally consumed. Just ashes. Dead and gone.
Will there be something more for them
Than numbing oblivion, finality?
Is there someplace eternal, fertile,
Beside a tranquil river with lots of sunshine
Waiting to greet the roots of their spirit?
Or can they focus only upon the culling
Coming along today or tomorrow or the next,
To all living things eventually,
Even the men here on death row,
Isolated, graying, dying like those pines?
Perhaps they are resigned in knowing
That much too soon, to even the mighty,
Something comes along to cut us all down.
And maybe they dread only the arbitrary waiting.
Call to Action
- Death Penalty Action and signing petitions https://deathpenaltyaction.org/
- DeathPenaltyInfo.org https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/
- Catholic Mobilizing Network https://catholicsmobilizing.org/
- Rev. Bill Breeden, our guest on this episode, specifically mentions: https://lifelines-uk.org.uk/
Indiana has made the devastating decision to resume executions, with Joseph Corcoran scheduled to be executed on December 18th—just weeks before Governor Holcomb leaves office. We cannot stay silent in the face of this inhumane act. Sign the petition today and share it within your networks to help send a clear message: we do not support the death penalty.
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