The Hanging of Nora Migues

On the night of September 21, 1937, Honore Migues walked into Coleman Café in New Iberia, Louisiana, carrying a gun. After looking around, he walked to the table where Evelyn Allen Crawford was dining with her husband Forrest. After saying, “Oh, there you are,” he shot her three times. She died three days later in Dauterive Sanitarium. The reason for this senseless act was almost as senseless as the act itself. The Crawfords were married shortly before moving to New Iberia where Forrest was to work on the construction of a sugar mill for the Iberia Sugar Coop. The day before the shooting, Migues, known around town as Nora, took Mrs. Crawford and some other ladies around the area to see the local places of interest. While on the trip, Nora asked her to run off with him and when she laughed him off, he got drunk and shot her the next day. These actions are explained by the fact that he was regarded in town as a nut. A psychiatrist appointed by the State to examine him said he had a psychopathic personality, being self-centered, selfish, disregardful of the rights of others, functionally unstable and having an exalted opinion of himself. After a trial in the old courthouse on Main Street, he was convicted of murder on February 5, 1938. While he obviously had a serious mental problem, it was not sufficient to support his plea of legal insanity or to get the jury to spare his life. On February 8 he was sentenced to death by hanging. After a number of legal proceedings, appeals and requests for leniency, the sentence was carried out on July 19, 1940, when he was hanged in the new courthouse on Iberia Street by being dropped through a trapdoor on the third floor to the second with a noose around his neck. In 1941 electrocution became the method of execution in Louisiana, which was done by an electric chair that was taken from parish to parish in a truck. Nora had the distinction of being the only person executed in the Iberia Parish courthouse. All of this actually happened. A fictional account of what went on during these events is told by Nora’s ghost who dropped from his body when he was hanged and found that he was confined in the Iberia Parish courthouse where he remained for the next seventy-nine years. When he died, all of his mental problems left him and he was able to look back at what had happened through the eyes of a normal, perfectly sane person. While confined to the courthouse, he became learned in the law by attending thousands of trials, visiting the offices of the D.A. and the judges and studying law in the law books in their offices. He became convinced that his indictment by the grand jury and his conviction after his trial were illegal because blacks were excluded from the grand jury and blacks and women were excluded from the jury that convicted him. He supported this with cases of the United States Supreme Court on the effect of the exclusion of blacks and women in criminal proceedings. He wrote his account of what happened before during and after his trial, including his hanging and his conclusions about his illegal conviction, on a computer in the D.A.’s office. For some unexplained reason, this was discovered and when the press was told about it, they jokingly reported that what was found on the computer was written by the ghost of Nora Migues. Someone read the story and hired Jennifer Carter, a lawyer in New Iberia, to take legal action to set aside Nora’s conviction. She filed suit against the State and the D.A. to void Nora’s conviction on the basis of the Supreme Court decisions discussed in what Nora wrote on the D.A.’s computer. Nora’s ghost sat in the jury box in the courtroom as the lawyers argued their cases and as the judge made his decisions. After the final verdict in the case, Nora’s existence took a drastic and unexpected turn.

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