Everyone's A Victim in This

A family man who "flipped out" is executed in Louisiana

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Over the next five years, however, Rault managed to stave off five dates with Louisiana's electric chair. On death row he re-emerged as an exemplary citizen, teaching fellow inmates to read and write. With an old typewriter perched on his bunk, he batted out articles for prison ministries and corresponded with dozens of other prisoners who had heard his writings on Christian radio broadcasts.

< But appeals have been fast running out for many of the nation's 1,919 death row inmates. The 22 death sentences carried out this year are the most since the Supreme Court reinstated them in 1976; four executions last week set a record for a single week. The pace has increased since April, when the court struck down the so-called McClesky defense, which argued that killers of whites stand a disproportionate chance of being put to death. Indeed, the McClesky defense had been used by Rault as well as the seven men who had been executed earlier this summer in Louisiana's electric chair.

Last week it was Rault's turn. Just past midnight last Monday, the former accountant, now 36, took the short walk from his cell to the small green death room in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He moved onto a podium and read a onepage statement proclaiming his innocence and his love for all. As guards fastened him to the chair with eight leather straps and draped his head with a green canvas hood, Rault managed a final thumbs-up sign.

At 12:10 a.m. Warden Hilton Butler nodded slightly to a man known only as "Sam Jones," who stood hidden behind a cinder-block partition. The executioner proceeded to throw a lever and press two black buttons, and the first 2,400-volt surge of current tore through Rault's 6-ft., 228-lb. frame. Two minutes later the power stopped, and at 12:16 Prison Doctor Alfred Gould stepped forward to pronounce Rault dead.

Yet the execution seemed to provide no immediate finality to a gruesome crime. In New Orleans, Rault's aging, infirm parents attended a small wake and funeral for their son, then retreated in grief behind the doors of their modest bungalow. Observed his aunt, Sister Mary Ruth Rault, a Roman Catholic nun who had been one of the official witnesses at Rault's execution: "This has been five long years of living death for us."

On the eve of the execution, Jane Francioni's family gathered at their trim lakeside home in Slidell, 30 miles northeast of the city, to console themselves and pray. "We are totally spent," sighed Jane's anguished mother Mary Catherine. "It was we who got the life sentence." Her son Norman expressed the grief of all who were connected to the two deaths: "We're victims, they're victims, everyone's a victim in this."

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