Christa Pike drama revives old Louisiana case
The failed attempt to execute Christa Pike in Tennessee raises the question of whether the state can try again. The Supreme Court will almost certainly have to answer that question, for the second time. The first time was 80 years ago, when Willie Francis was convicted of murder in St. Martinville and the electric chair didn’t work right.
His strange tale began in November 1944, when Andrew Thomas, a prominent druggist in St. Martinville, was shot in his yard. Francis was convicted in state court in September 1945 and was sentenced to die.
Under state law in those days, executions were done in the parish where the crime was committed. The state had a portable electric chair that was taken wherever it was needed. In May 1946, a guard and an inmate from the state prison brought it to St. Martin Parish, set it up, and wired it to a portable generator. Neither the guard nor the inmate had ever hooked up an electric chair before. Some people say they got drunk before they began their work. For whatever reason, they did something wrong.
The chair did not deliver enough current when they pulled the switch and Willie Francis survived. When a date was set for another try, Bertrand DeBlanc, his attorney who later became district attorney for the 15th District, argued that to try to electrocute him again would constitute double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment. He took the case to the Supreme Court, where the justices said it was “unique in judicial history.”
In the formal language of the Supreme Court documents, “Francis was prepared for execution and on May 3, 1946 … was placed in the official electric chair of the State of Louisiana in the presence of authorized witnesses. The executioner threw the switch, but . . . death did not result.”
Testimony by Sheriff Leonard Resweber and St. Martin de Tours pastor Father Maurice Roussève, two of those “authorized witnesses,” is a little more graphic. According to Father Roussève, “After he was strapped to the chair, the Sheriff … asked him if he had anything to say, and he said nothing. Then the hood was placed before his eyes. Then the officials in charge of the electrocution were adjusting the mechanism, and when the needle of the meter reached a certain point on the dial, the electrocutioner pulled down on the switch.”
Sheriff Resweber said, “I saw the electrocutioner turn on the switch and I saw . . . [Francis’s] body tensed and stretched. I heard the one in charge yell to the man outside for more juice . . . and the one outside yelled back he was giving him all he had.”
Francis said afterward that he had difficulty breathing, that his mouth felt like it was full of peanut butter, and that he felt a “tickling” all over.
It took a year for the case to get to the Supreme Court, which decided five to four against Francis. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the majority opinion that “accidents happen for which no man is to blame.”
He continued, “Even the fact that petitioner had already been subject to a current of electricity does not make his subsequent execution any more cruel in the constitutional sense than any other execution. The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the proper consummation of the sentence [does not] . . . add an element of cruelty to a subsequent execution.”
Justice Harold Burton wrote for the four dissenting members. He said Louisiana law, “prescribes expressly and solely for the application of a current of sufficient intensity . . . and for the continuance of that application until death results. There can be no implied provision for a second, third, or multiple application of the current. . . . [Another attempt] exceeds any punishment prescribed by law. There is no precedent for it. What then is it, if it be not cruel, unusual, and unlawful?”
Willie Francis was not 20 years old when he became famous in death on May 9, 1947, and the question raised by Justice Burton did not arise again until this month.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
