Louisiana recently started executing death-row prisoners after more than 20 years of not doing so (save a “voluntary” execution in 2010, when a prisoner waived his right to appeal and said he wanted to die). John Corley, an award-winning writer who is incarcerated at Louisiana’s Angola prison, reflects on how MAGA politics have re-invigorated the practice of state killing in Louisiana and elsewhere, and what it means for the tenor of life in institutions like Angola:
Dalton Prejean Jr, who is serving time for manslaughter, found Hoffman’s execution particularly painful. When he was ten years old, in 1990, his father died in the penitentiary’s electric chair. “The day it all went down, it was almost like reliving the moments leading up to my father’s execution,” Prejean told me. “At ten o’clock the news reporter announced that Hoffman was dead. My heart skipped. I couldn’t believe they had actually killed somebody. Was what he did so bad that he just couldn’t be allowed to go on living? Wasn’t there anything about him that was redeemable?”
Twice a week, the inmate counsel substitute Gary Boudreaux makes rounds on the five death row tiers. He knows each of the surviving men housed there. “There was no tension on the row because the guys believed the execution wouldn’t happen,” Boudreaux said. “It had been so long, and they have good lawyers. They just didn’t think executions would come back.”
A week after the execution, Boudreaux returned to the row. The atmosphere was “totally different.” The men now knew that Governor Landry “is serious about executing people, and the state will execute people. There’s no doubt in their minds about that any more.”
When Steven Judy was executed for rape and murder in 1981, he was little more to the public than a monster. To Traci and Randy Carr, he was something else: a hero and a protector. After all, he was their foster brother. For The Guardian, Masha Hamilton—who covered the Judy trial as a young reporter more than 45 years ago—returns to Indiana to meet the Carrs, and to take the measure of the hole rent in their lives by Judy’s actions and disappearance.
Her mother has begun appearing again in her sleep: Mary holding her, comforting. Almost as if speaking aloud what had been buried for decades had called her mother back.
“Everyone hated Steve, and we were told we should too,” Traci says. “For a long time, I thought we did something wrong, and I was ashamed. People treated us like we had raised a murderer. It’s still how people remember us. I don’t think Mom ever got to grieve properly. I don’t think any of us did.”
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