Families Divided Over Louisiana Governor’s Order to Consider Sparing All Death Row Inmates

Brett Malone was put at ease when he heard that Louisiana's Gov. John Bel Edwards directed the state pardon board on Wednesday to consider clemency for 56 of the state's 57 death row inmates — including the man who murdered his mother.

Mary Ann Shaver Malone was killed in December 2000 by Jeremiah Manning, who has an intellectual disability but was sentenced to die after a one-week trial.

"Do we return a bad deed with another bad deed or do we try a different tack?" Malone, 55, says in an interview with The Messenger. 

"The death penalty is just not justice to me," he continues. "And to a lot of people, rather, it's dangerous; it's retribution, it's not justice."

In his unprecedented move for Louisiana's justice system, Edwards, a Democrat who is not up for reelection due to term limits, paved the way to commute sentences for nearly every person on death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The prisoners simultaneously filed a clemency plea in June after a bill to abolish the death penalty failed during Louisiana's legislative session. Edwards, who'll be out of office in January, supported the ban.

“I am guided by my deep faith and taking my pro-life stance against the death penalty,” Edwards wrote in a letter to the pardon board on Wednesday. 

The decision comes in response to Louisiana's Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry — a front runner to become the state's next governor and a supporter of the death penalty — who issued an advisory to the board last month that the death row inmates' applications for clemency were not valid due to a missed deadline.

Malone had been one of the advocates fighting for the lives of the inmates, even testifying before the Louisiana legislature to express his opposition to capital punishment and writing to the governor to spare the life of his mother’s killer and all the others facing death. 

After years of therapy, Malone said forgiveness is what freed him from the resonating rage after the loss of his mother.

“Killing is wrong, and killing other people is also wrong,” he said. “What harm is there in allowing people to live a long life in prison?... Hell, life in prison is one hell of a punishment.”

But for the families of other victims, the idea of clemency means injustice.

Wayne Guzzardo's daughter Stephanie was murdered in Louisiana in 1995.

Todd Wessinger was convicted and sentenced to die for the crime. During appeal after appeal, Guzzardo and his wife had to relive the horrific details of their daughter's death. The trauma, he says, stretched on for years.

"She begged for her life and he said, 'Shut up b----,' and shot and killed her," Guzzardo said through tears at a hearing earlier this year while giving testimony to the state legislature against abolishing the death penalty. 

"I’ve been fighting for my daughter for 28 years,” he tells The Messenger. “But Edwards is the king right now and he could do whatever he wants to do, but I don’t like it, it’s wrong and it’s a slap in the face to those of us who have lost people we love."

The Louisiana governor cited his Catholic faith in his directive to the state's pardon board, saying the death penalty is "inconsistent with Louisiana’s pro-life values, as it quite literally promotes a culture of death."

Guzzardo, also a Catholic and a part of the same parish as Edwards, says religion should not interfere with the law — and that Edwards is misguided in applying his faith to the entire state.

“Why do we even have 12 jurors anymore? Why do we have trials anymore if he can do this?" Guzzardo says. "He was against the death penalty from day one, but now to do this when he’s leaving is something else."