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SAN ANTONIO • When Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of the award-winning book turned movie, Dead Man Walking, spoke before a public audience gathered at Travis Park United Methodist Church on Dec. 1, reference was made to her “preaching to the choir” that night. While true to some extent, the Louisiana nun — a relentless opponent of the death penalty — was there to teach the choir “some new melodies,” as she put it.
Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the U.S. was on The New York Times Best Seller List for 31 weeks and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In it, Sister Prejean traced the journey that led her from a comfortable teaching job at a respectable Catholic school in New Orleans to the unexpected role of spiritual advisor to a condemned man on death row. The book was turned into a powerful motion picture by Tim Robbins in 1996, starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, and garnered Sarandon an Academy Award for her portrayal of the nun turned social justice advocate.
Since then Sister Prejean has walked the final walk with four more death row inmates and helped spark a nationwide movement to abolish the death penalty. Her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, is due out on Dec. 28. While her first book pricked consciences on the immorality of institutionalized killing in the name of justice, her second work exposes the horrors of a flawed judicial system, where truth does not always prevail and the disadvantaged innocent can be executed. Detailed are the stories of two such men Sister Prejean came to know.
Prefacing the evening was the last minute stay of execution, only hours before, of Frances Newton by Texas Governor Rick Perry, allowing 120 days for retesting of evidence.
“What has happened with religion and, especially, Christianity?” Sister Prejean asked, pointing out that when Jesus was executed by the state, he did not exhort his followers to seek vengeance, but counseled, “Never to let hatred overcome love, never to return hurt for hurt, pain for pain.” She questioned how his philosophy could become so twisted that the current state of affairs has the followers of Jesus upholding the death penalty and supporting the initiating of war in the name of God. “How could Jesus be taken and perverted and turned into that?” she asked.
Noting it took 400 years for the symbol of Jesus’ execution, the cross, to be embraced by Christians as a symbol of redemption and healing, she related the story of the little cross she wears around her neck. “There were two brothers, Patrick and Eddie Sonnier,” she said, “who were found guilty, convicted and sentenced to death for killing two teenage kids,” referring to the murders as “a terrible, unspeakable horror.” Eddie later admitted that while both had brutalized the victims, he had been the one who committed the actual murders and pleaded for his brother’s life to the governor, to no avail. “Eddie got life and Pat got death,” said Sister Prejean, who gave spiritual guidance to Pat and walked with him to the death chamber.
“I accompanied Pat, and I also have been accompanying Eddie — that night and ever since,” she said. His hands handcuffed, Pat dictated to Sister Prejean a note to his brother just before his execution. It began, “Dear Eddie, don’t worry about me. God and I are straight.” Patrick then begged his brother, always a volatile young man, to try to control his temper. “And Eddie read that note from his brother every night before he went to sleep for three years,” said Sister Prejean.
The next time she visited Eddie he had a present for her. Earning only pennies an hour for his prison work and selling plasma to earn more, Eddie had paid a fellow inmate to make Sister Prejean’s cross, inset with its green plastic “stones.” “I had never gotten a cross before, purchased with someone’s blood,” she said, relating that the cross has become “a symbol of the journey that we have to take as Christians on this mission.” The cross has two arms, she pointed out. “One arm of the cross is the victim; the other arm of the cross is the perpetrator.” Sister Prejean ministers to both, being a founder of “Survive,” a victims’ advocacy group in New Orleans, as well as counseling death row inmates.
She went on to talk of the “culture of vengeance” in our country, where people applaud violence on-screen and quote the biblical scripture, “An eye for eye,” in upholding the death penalty. We are the only country, she pointed out, that invokes the death penalty in the name of victims’ families. It was reinstated in the United States in 1976 under the Rehnquist Supreme Court. “The language has this tone of moral outrage,” said Sister Prejean, “and that even though a life sentence is available, the death penalty is still what must be chosen — and that it is not against the dignity of the human person to be executed.”
She noted that it took her some time to fully grasp the true meaning of Jesus’ words, “I was in prison and you came to me.” The first part of her religious life as a Sister of St. Joseph of Medialle was spent teaching at a very nice Catholic school, aloof from nearby housing projects. “After Vatican II happened,” she said, “we were called to respond to the joys and sufferings of people … but every time that thing about social justice came up, I just didn’t get it.”
She likened her eventual epiphany to aboriginal “fire farming,” in which certain seeds sprout only after they have been through fire. Sister Prejean’s ‘fire’ was a 3-day conference on social justice, whose words she at first resisted. “And then, when the ‘fire’ came, I was, of course, surprised,” she said. “Whenever we’re enlightened, whenever there’s an epiphany, whenever we’re going one trajectory and then we turn, it’s always because of grace and it’s always a gift and it’s always a surprise.”
What struck her was hearing that integral to the good news of Jesus’ preaching to the poor was that they would be poor no longer. “And suddenly, I got it,” she said. She recalled missionaries from Latin America telling how, when they simply evangelized, the government did not bother them, but once they started helping the peasants try to profit from their own labors and began working for social justice, priests began to be killed.
“Geographically,” Sister Prejean said, “I traveled less than a sixteenth of a mile, but spiritually I traveled a galaxy. I left where I was and went to live among the people in the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans.” Her life changed dramatically, as she came to know as friends people who lived in constant fear of abuse by the police and who were leaving high school barely able to read. While the wealthy in New Orleans could afford to send their children to private schools (notably the Catholic ones) the poor floundered in an inadequate educational system that left them fit only for menial jobs.
While living and working in the projects, a friend asked Sister Prejean if she would be pen pal to a man on death row. She agreed, little knowing where it would lead her. “We hadn’t executed anybody in Louisiana since the sixties,” she said. “Neither had you here. There was a moratorium all across this country. I think I’m only going to be writing letters. The ‘sneakiness’ of God!” she observed.
She eventually began visiting the pen pal, Patrick Sonnier. “I was in prison and you came to me” she said, quoting the Scriptures. “I looked at the words and I understood what they meant.” Much later, after witnessing Sonnier’s execution in the electric chair, she went outside and threw up. “People don’t know,” she said. “They don’t know what it means taking a live human being … all chained, hands and feet, eight guards around him, led to a room, strapped down and killed. People just read in the papers the next morning that a criminal was executed.” She says of herself, “I am not courageous. But grace was underneath me and underneath Pat when I accompanied him in those last days…”
To those who say that they are not political, like she once did herself, Sister Prejean is quick to point out that “if we’re doing nothing to change our society, it means we are accepting the status quo — and that is a very political position to take.”
She told of her initial apprehension at approaching the parents of the young man and woman whose brutal murders the Sonnier brothers had been convicted of, and how amazing one of the fathers, Lloyd LeBlanc, turned out to be, reaching out himself to the harassed mother of the convicted men.
Sister Prejean sees a very different attitude taken by the state. “Think of the arrogance,” she said, “of the state of Texas or Louisiana or Virginia saying, ‘We have the wisdom to know when your life should be finished and you should be killed.’ ” She especially censured Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a Catholic who quotes Romans 13 to uphold government’s right to kill “because they’ve been appointed by God to execute…”
She concluded, “We call for a new day. We’re here tonight because we are hoping to build the new society. And it’s formed according to values.” She urged those present to take up this “new melody of the choir” and make a personal commitment by signing the Moratorium petitions at tables in the lobby, to write legislators and encourage young people to do so also. “We have to see prisons as a place of recovery,” she added, noting much needs to be done in the way of prison reform to reach this objective.
Advocating “love rather than hate, life rather than death,” Sister Prejean noted there are signs of hope in that there are fewer death row cases today than ever before. “Texas is standing out more and more in its stark contrast to the number of executions it continues to do,” she said, “even as the rest of the country is starting to put it away, the machinery of death.” |