When Death is Not the Answer

Signs editor Bruce Manners spoke with Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, about death—and life.

There’s strength behind the gentle Southern drawl of Sister Helen Prejean. Now in her early 60s, Sister Helen is best known as the nun who wrote Dead Man Walking and who was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in an Oscar-winning performance in the film of the same name.

Sister Helen became a committed campaigner against the death penalty in the US after acting as spiritual adviser to and accompanying five men to their execution, three by the electric chair, the other two by lethal injection. She wrote her book because “executions are very secretive” and she believes that if people knew what really happened, they would support her stand.

“In Dead Man Walking, I took people over both sides of the conflict that had happened in my own heart,” she says. “The deepest conflict was dealing with this terrible atrocity that people have done to other human beings, but then watching as the state killed them.”

She’s not convinced the approach in many US states even works for the families of victims, “where you have a government saying, ‘Here’s how we’re going to deal with your pain; here’s how we’re going to honour your loved ones. We’re going to kill the one who killed, and you’re going to sit in the front seat and watch!’”

Waiting with someone in the death house during the last hours, says Sister Helen, brings the realisation that they’re not dying of disease, but of human intervention. And you are powerless to do anything about it. “It either paralyses you or it galvanises you.”
And it brings moments of poignancy. Patrick Sonnier, the first man she accompanied to the chamber, gave her his Bible an hour-and-a-half before his execution. He’d underlined passages from Psalm 31, where it speaks of plots to take life and God being a rock on which we can stand. He’d also filled out the family history in the front, including his date of death, April 4, 1984.
But what if she were to be murdered?

She writes in Dead Man Walking that she is absolutely certain of “one piece of moral ground”—“I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by government—which can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.”

She admits to a “terrible mistake” when she began to work with death-row prisoners. She avoided victim’s families, because she didn’t know how to handle them.

She tells of meeting the parents of two teenagers killed by one of the inmates she visited. It was close to being combat in the Roman Colosseum, she says. Both families were angry. For one family, it had “messed up their life completely.” The father said, “Sister, we haven’t had anybody to talk to. We can’t believe the pressure on us with the death penalty.”

“Now I always offer myself to the victim’s family. They’re in this as well.” Sometimes they don’t accept her offer, and are angry with her for “siding” with the perpetrator, but she attempts to get help for them, often through the organisation Murder Victim’s Families for Reconciliation.

Sister Helen suggests that better than merely preparing the men on death row to die, she accompanies them. She still remembers the terrified look in Patrick Sonnier’s eyes.

“I would be too, if 1900 volts of electricity was going to go through my body. And so I was absolutely firm; I couldn’t bear the thought that he would die alone. Everybody else was there to see him die, and I wanted to be there to say, ‘You know that I respect your life and I will be the face of Christ. Christ doesn’t want us doing this.’”

She has told each of them that she will be there and they should look to her before the hood is lowered or the needle injected. She says she sees a mixture of feelings in their eyes, including fear, but mostly it’s love.

“I’ve accompanied five people to execution and they make their last act to say, ‘I love you. . . .’ I think it’s because people want their last act to be an act of love.”

She tells them, “If they do kill you, I will tell your story across this land until the death penalty is ended and then, perhaps, your death can be redemptive of others in the sense of helping to end the death penalty.”

While it’s this personal experience that drives her, it is also the evidence of unfairness in the system of choosing who is to die, and the mistakes made that keep fuelling her passion.

“One hundred and eighty wrongly convicted people have been freed off death row, not because the courts read it right, but because citizens have gotten involved. That’s kind of pitiful when you have volunteer student groups go and rescue people who were wrongly put there by the courts.”

Her best argument, she suggests, is to tell her story that goes something like this: I meet this man on death row, and when I find out what he did I’m horrified. I’m outraged. Then I ask how he got on death row. (His lawyer was terrible.) Then you look at all the mistakes we’re making. In Patrick’s case, his brother killed the kids. Patrick dies, his brother lives.

Politicians in the US are the only ones in the world who argue for the death penalty, not only as punishment, but that they’re doing it for the victims’ families. It’s the height of hypocrisy. So then she takes them through victims’ families’ stories. Some of them who couldn’t wait to see the person executed come out and say, “He died too quick.” Watching somebody die is not redemptive, she says.

An alternative, suggests Sister Helen, is long-term sentencing for people who’ve committed violent acts. She believes people want to feel safe. If that can be guaranteed, the death penalty is no longer an issue.

Her faith is central to her position: “We don’t have the power to make judgments only God can make. . . . We don’t have the right to say, ‘You’re never going to change.’ The good news of Jesus is that with human beings there’s always hope that they can be transformed and changed.”

Her association with death has taught her about life: “We’re given a short life and we should live to the full. My favourite Scripture quote is Jesus saying, ‘I have come that you may have life to the full.’ It means to love wide and deep, not just people like ourselves, but those considered unlovable—that to me is what it’s all about.”

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