Gilbert King was researching entries for a crime encyclopedia nearly a decade ago when he came across the case of Willie Francis. He dutifully boiled it down to a paragraph as assigned. But Willie's story got under his skin. The tale of a 17 year old African-American youth hastily convicted of murdering a Cajun pharmacist for whom he once worked - a boy who did not die the first time he was strapped to an electric chair in St. Martinville, La., on May 3, 1946 - deserved a deeper treatment, King decided. The 1980 graduate of Niskayuna High School, who had built a solid career as a commercial photographer in New York City after leaving a job in publishing, took a trip to Cajun country four years ago. “I started interviewing people in St. Martinville and looking at the court records. Everywhere I went, folks were saying the case against Willie was a sham,” King said. “After that, I just became obsessed with his story.” Last month, his book, “The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder and the Search for Justice in the American South” was published by Basic Books. King set out to re-examine a largely forgotten capital punishment case in the Deep South rumored to be tainted by racism. King divides his time between an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a weekend home in Niskayuna, around the corner from his mother. She's a retired nurse who helped him with research. His late father worked for the telephone company. A brother also lives nearby. King's wife, Dr. Lorna King, is a pediatrician. They have two daughters, Maddie, 13, and Olivia, 11. Sandwiching the book project in between fashion shoots and other commercial assignments, King poured every free moment into his Francis research and made several trips to Bayou country without an advance, before submitting a book proposal. “I didn't care what anyone thought or if I made any money on it. The story just got better and better the deeper I went,” King said. King's interviews of long-time St. Martinville residents, review of court documents and exhaustive research bring to light a dark web of secrets and lies told by powerful whites in the small town that suggest Willie Francis was a victim of community vengeance and a miscarriage of justice. In a dramatic narrative, King describes how Francis was placed in a mobile electric chair known as “Gruesome Gertie” inside a small, red brick jailhouse. His two executioners, an inmate and guard from the state penitentiary in Angola, reeked of booze after a night in the local taverns. The pair miswired the connection of the chair to a generator in a trailer towed behind a 1941 International Harvester K-3 two-ton cornbinder. The switch was thrown and King stiffened beneath the leather straps, rocking and shaking in the chair. He was a stutterer and pleaded to cut the power. “I am n-n-not dying!” he screamed. The press dubbed him “Lucky” Willie Francis. He walked away from the electric chair. But Gov. Jimmie Davis ordered Francis returned to the chair for a second execution attempt six days later. The botched execution made front-page headlines around the country, prompting a flood of letters and telegrams and sympathetic editorials and radio commentaries. They called for a stay of execution for Francis in a case involving the theft of $4 and a watch in the murder of his old boss. An idealistic young Cajun lawyer just returned from military service in World War II took on the racially charged case. He argued it all the way to the US Supreme Court, where it created a rift among the judges. The court held that “accidents happen for which no man is to blame” and that the botched Francis execution did not violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment - not whether Francis was guilty of murder in the first place. Francis' lawyer tried to convince the Supreme Court to hear the case a second time after obtaining affidavits from witnesses stating that the two executioners were drunk. The court declined. Francis was executed. This time, he was dead. But the controversy lingered and the case became a constitutional law touchstone. Supreme Court justices continue to cite the Francis decision, as King noted in a recent op-ed he wrote for The New York Times. In a 7-2 ruling last month, the nation's highest court ruled that Kentucky's three-drug method of execution by lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In that recent ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion cited the 62-year-old Francis case and called Louisiana's first attempt at executing Francis an “isolated mishap” that “while regrettable, does not suggest cruelty.” The state's portable electric chair only failed the first time on Francis and worked without fail after that. King did not anticipate working in publishing, where he spent four years as an assistant at Macmillan, or becoming a commercial photographer and freelance writer. He wanted to be a professional baseball player. A standout second baseman at Niskayuna High, he received a baseball scholarship to the University of South Florida. He didn't make it in college ball, though, and earned an English degree at USF. Over years of toil, King never gave up on his obsession to reconstitute the life of “Lucky” Willie Francis. “Even when publishers told me they liked the story but an execution about a 17-year-old black kid was a difficult sell, I couldn't quit,” he said. – Albany Times Union __
