Buddy Roemer was seated at his desk in the Louisiana Governor's mansion last Thursday afternoon, the same lonely desk he would return to late that night. "If you're a Governor, or ever dreamed to be, this will be your most difficult decision," he said in a soft yet intense voice. "It won't be balancing the budget, it won't be paying for judges, it won't be taxes, it won't be how to protect the environment. All those are important. But the most difficult will be the decision to take a single human being's life."
There was nothing abstract about Roemer's words. The human life in his hands was that of Dalton Prejean, 30, a semiretarded killer scheduled to die in the electric chair shortly after midnight on Friday morning. Prejean was just 17 when he murdered a state trooper in 1977. His execution would be the first under a 1989 Supreme Court ruling permitting states to impose capital punishment for acts committed by 16- and 17-year-olds.
When Prejean lost his final legal appeal as expected Thursday evening, only the Governor, with his power of clemency, could spare him. "If it were just a question of law, there wouldn't be the anguish involved," said Roemer, lapsing into near biblical cadences even as he glanced at his watch to see if was time to pick up his nine-year-old son Dakota and take him to baseball practice. "The law having been writ, a human stands under the tree. The courts having ruled, I stand with him. I have to make a decision."
There are few powers or burdens akin to the clemency laws that force Governors to be the final arbiters for the condemned. Judges and juries can take refuge in their assigned roles in the legal system. The executioner can say with truth that he is only doing his job. But for a Governor, there is no refuge save his conscience and moral code.
Acts of clemency have become a rarity in a political environment that rewards unflinching toughness. Only lame-duck Governors like Arkansas' Winthrop Rockefeller in 1971 and New Mexico's Toney Anaya in 1986 could afford the moral luxury of commuting the sentences of everyone on death row. Former California Governor Edmund (Pat) Brown wrote a 1989 book reliving his clemency deliberations, in which he saved 23 men from the gas chamber and spurned appeals from 36 others, including Caryl Chessman, whose 1960 execution sparked major protests. "The longer I live," declared Brown, now 85, "the larger loom those 59 decisions about justice and mercy."
Roemer was already familiar with such decisions. On the day he took office in 1988, there was an execution scheduled for that evening -- a grotesque welcome-to-power gift orchestrated by the outgoing Edwin Edwards, whom Roemer had defeated. "He knew that would affect me," the Governor recalls. He allowed it to proceed. Prejean was the fourth man to die in the electric chair during Roemer's two years in office. Last August, however, Roemer at the last minute blocked the execution of Ronald Monroe because of lingering doubts about his guilt. A lawyer close to the Monroe case cracked last week, "There was only one shot for clemency with Roemer, and we took it."