BOOKS: ​“The Execution of Willie Francis”

Author Gilbert King, in his forth­com­ing book The Execution of Willie Francis, details the sto­ry of a young African-American man who endured the elec­tric chair twice before being exe­cut­ed for the mur­der of a white man in Louisiana. In 1946, an all-white jury con­vict­ed Francis, who was 17, and sen­tenced him to death. The first attempt to exe­cute him by elec­tro­cu­tion did not work, and Francis was returned to his death row cell where he remained for almost anoth­er year while the U.S. Supreme Court con­sid­ered whether a sec­ond elec­tro­cu­tion would con­sti­tute cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment.

Noted death penal­ty author and activist Sister Helen Prejean describes The Execution of Willie Francis as ​“pro­found.” She writes,

Gilbert King trans­forms abstract argu­ments over Louisiana’s right to re-exe­cute a con­demned youth into a pro­found sto­ry of flesh and blood. His impas­sioned por­trait of the unlike­ly bond between two young Catholics, Willie Francis and his undaunt­ed lawyer, Bertrand DeBlanc, is more than a heart­warm­ing affir­ma­tion of love and human­i­ty. It’s a vital­ly impor­tant sto­ry and if you want to bet­ter under­stand America’s trou­bling lega­cy of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, read this book.

The Execution of Willie Francis will be released March 31, 2008 and comes at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is review­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of lethal injec­tion prac­tices in Baze v. Rees.