Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun who has ministered to death row inmates and written two books on the death penalty, discussed her opposition to the ultimate punishment during a lecture Monday, March 14. Details...
Prejean, a New Orleans native, has been involved in the fight against the death penalty since 1981, when she met Patrick Sonnier, a death row inmate at Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary.
She told the McCrary Theatre audience how she began corresponding with Sonnier by mail, accepted his invitation to visit him on death row, and eventually became his spiritual advisor. She said she had no idea how the encounter would change her life.
“What I didn’t know then was that a few years later, in 1984, a few minutes past midnight on a night in April, the state of Louisiana would execute Patrick Sonnier,” Prejean said. “And I didn’t know that at 6 o’clock the night before an execution, the inmate’s family must leave the death house, and only the spiritual advisor remains with him.”
Though Sonnier did not want her to witness his death in the electric chair, Prejean said she told Sonnier that she “would be the face of God” in his final moments.
“My face was the last thing he saw before they placed the hood over his head, a hood that’s there to protect the witnesses from seeing what happens to someone’s face when 1,900 volts of electricity are sent through their body,” Prejean said. “There is no dignity in the state taking the life of someone who has been rendered defenseless.”
The author of the New York Times bestseller “Dead Man Walking” and the recently released “The Death of Innocents,” Prejean said the death penalty “gets to the core of who we are as a society. The myth of our culture is that violence is what makes justice prevail.”
Instead, she said her encounters with the families of murder victims over the years have convinced her that the death penalty does not bring about “closure, justice, peace, or any of the other buzzwords you hear for it.” She said Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of one of Sonnier’s murder victims, told her he would never be able to move on if he was consumed by hate.
Prejean believes ending the death penalty would force everyone to begin examining the root causes of crime and analyze why minorities and poor people make up the majority of the prison population.
“One in every three African American men ages 20-29 is in the prison system,” Prejean said. “We’re going to take (the death penalty) off the table, and then we can start talking about life. Then we will be forced to examine why there are more than 2 million people in our prisons today.”
She also praised efforts in North Carolina to place a two-year moratorium on executions to study potential flaws in the justice system. Prejean hopes the moratorium, if implemented, will become permanent.
“We may be holding you in North Carolina up as an example of people who gradually moved away from the death penalty and chose to go down another road.”