Dead Man Walking
Authors: Helen Prejean
ACCLAIM FOR
Sister Helen Prejean’s
DEAD MAN WALKING
“An immensely moving affirmation of the power of religious vocation.… Stunning moral clarity … a profound argument against capital punishment.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“An intimate meditation on crime and punishment, life and death, justice and mercy and — above all — Christian love in its most all-embracing sense.… [Prejean] never shrinks from the horror of what she has Seen.… She never resorts to something so predictable as pathos or a play for sympathy.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“A remarkable writer … Prejean’s manner of describing the tortured relations among prisoners, criminal-justice officers and victims’ families would be the envy of many novelists. Even if your own views on capital punishment are set in concrete, you are sure to be moved by the force of Prejean’s personality and commitment.”
—
Glamour
“Painful and powerful … [Prejean’s] practical moral courage is heroic.”
—
The New Yorker
“Providing a gritty look at what really happens in the final hours of a death row inmate … Prejean takes readers to a place most will thankfully never know … adeptly probing the morality of a judicial system and a country that kills its citizens.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“An impassioned condemnation of capital punishment.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This arresting account should do for the debate over capital punishment what the film footage from Selma and Birmingham accomplished for the civil rights movement: turn abstractions into flesh and blood. Tough, fair, bravely alive — you will not come away from this book unshaken.”
— Bill McKibben
“It is [Sister Helen Prejean’s] experience that is important in the book — the need to serve life in a context of death. She tells her story with a quiet eloquence, not indulging in diatribe or personal attack.… Here is one voice for life. We really should need no other.”
— Garry Wills,
The New York Review of Books
Sister Helen Prejean
DEAD MAN WALKING
Helen Prejean, C. S. J., is a writer, lecturer, and community organizer who was born in Baton Rouge and has lived and worked in Louisiana all her life. She has lectured extensively on the subject of capital punishment and has appeared on
ABC World News Tonight, 60 Minutes
, BBC World Service radio, and an NBC special series on the death penalty. Her articles have appeared in publications including the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the
St. Petersburg Times
, the
Baltimore Sun
and the
St. Anthony Messenger
. She is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1994
Copyright © 1993 by Helen Prejean
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
. Excerpt from
Resistance, Rebellion and Death
by Albert Camus, translated by J O’Brien Copyright © 1960 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Five lines from “The Warning” from
The Panther and the Lash
by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1967 by Arna Bontemps and George Huston Bass.
Reprinted by permission of Alfred A Knopf, Inc.
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc
Excerpts from
Wild Justice The Evolution of Revenge
by Susan Jacoby. Copyright © 1983 by Susan Jacoby. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prejean, Helen.
Dead man walking an eyewitness account of the death penalty in the United States / Helen Prejean.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78769-9
1. Capital punishment — United States. 2. Capital punishment — Religious aspects. I. Title.
HV8699.U5P74 1994
93-43877
v3.1
To my mother, Gusta Mae, and my father, Louis, who loved me into life
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank those who helped me write this book.
Jason Epstein, my editor at Random House, took a chance on a first-time author and guided me through three revisions. Finding him was a great surprise. I didn’t know that a top-notch editor at such a large publishing house cared enough to work so patiently with a neophyte author. Julie Grau, Maryam Mohit, and Mallay Charters, Jason’s coworkers, have also been immeasurably helpful. Gloria Loomis, my energetic, dedicated literary agent, with her coworkers, Kendra Taylor and Nicole Aragi, have been a steady source of encouragement and support during the two years it has taken to write this book. Jason DeParle, Lisa and Michael Radelet, Bill McKibben, and Sue Halpern have been with me through all three revisions, offering invaluable advice.
A host of people read the manuscript and offered suggestions: Liz and Art Scott, Tom Dybdahl, Judy Rittenhouse, Mary Riley, Millard Farmer, Ronald J. Tabak, Leigh Dingerson, Richard Dieter, Hugo Adam Bedau, Ronnie Friedman Barone, Bill and Debbie Quigley, Magdaleno Rose-Avila, Charles McGowan, Rosemary Lewis, and members of my religious community — Sisters Jane Louise Arbour, Julie Sheatzley, Barbara Hughes, and Jean Fryoux.
Many helped me get information: Neal Walker, Nicholas Trenticosta, Gary Clements, Barbara Warren, Alice Miller, Howard Zehr, Russ Immarigeon, Marc Mauer, Wilbert Rideau, Ron Wikberg, Sam Dalton, Ginger Berrigan, Michael Kroll, Dianne Kidner, Gerald Bosworth, C. Paul Phelps, Howard Marsellus, Peggy Norris, Pam and Keith Rutter, Allen Johnson, Jr., Jonathan Eig, Janet Yassen, Jonathan Gradess, Dennis Kalob, Michael Small, John Craft, Bob Gross, Bill Pelke, Karima Wick, Lloyd LeBlanc, and Elizabeth and Vernon Harvey.
I have received immeasurable support and encouragement from the staff at Hope House in New Orleans: Odessa Carew, Idella Casimier, Don Everard, Sister Lilianne Flavin, O.P., Ethel George, Brother Virgil Harris, S.C., Elaine Henry, Jarldine Johnson, Shirley Lemon, Patricia Robinson, Patrick Stevenson, Thero Stevenson, Melvin Thompson, and Brother Brendan Wilkinson, F.S.C.
Joan Benham, Shelley Garren, and Dennis Ambrose at Random House painstakingly worked on the manuscript and Walter Weintz, Bridget Marmion, Carol Schneider, and Becky Simpson worked hard to publicize the book.
Finally, I am grateful for the love, friendship, and moral support I have received from my religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, and from my family, and my good friend, Ann Barker.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I’ve heard that there are two situations that make interesting stories: when an extraordinary person is plunged into the commonplace and when an ordinary person gets involved in extraordinary events. I’m definitely an example of the latter. I stepped quite unsuspectingly from a protected middle-class environment into one of the most explosive and complex moral issues of our day, the question of capital punishment.
It began ten years ago when I wrote a letter to an inmate on Louisiana’s death row and the man wrote back. Thus began a ten-year journey that led me into Louisiana’s execution chamber and then into advocacy groups for homicide victims’ families. I began naively. It took time — and mistakes — for me to sound out the moral perspective, which is the subject of this book.
There is much pain in these pages. There are, to begin with, crimes that defy description. Then there is the ensuing rage, horror, grief, and fierce ambivalence. But also courage and incredible human spirit. I have been changed forever by the experiences that I describe here.
DEAD MAN WALKING
I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come: for I’d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone.
— Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
CHAPTER
1
W
hen Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition asks me one January day
in 1982 to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate, I say, Sure. The invitation seems to fit with my work in St. Thomas, a New Orleans housing project of poor black residents. Not death row exactly, but close. Death is rampant here — from guns, disease, addiction. Medical care scarcely exists.
I’ve come to St. Thomas to serve the poor, and I assume that someone occupying a cell on Louisiana’s death row fits that category. I had learned that back in 1977 at a lecture by John Vodicka, one of the founders of the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons where Chava now works. I had also learned that the death penalty in the United States has always been most rigorously applied in Southern states — mostly toward those who kill whites. The Prison Coalition office is near Hope House, where I teach high-school dropouts, and Chava and I run into each other fairly often.
After he has written the name of the death-row inmate he says, “Maybe I ought to give you someone else. This guy is a loner and doesn’t write. Maybe you want someone who will answer your letters.”
But he’s already written the name and I say, “Don’t change it. Give me his name.” I don’t know yet that the name on this tiny slip
of white paper will be my passport into an eerie land that so far I’ve only read about in books.
I look at the name and address that Chava gave me: Elmo Patrick Sonnier, number 95281, Death Row, Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola.
Almost all the killings here in St. Thomas seem to erupt from the explosive mixture of dead-end futures, drugs, and guns. But when Chava describes what Sonnier has done, my blood chills. On November 4, 1977, he and his younger brother, Eddie, abducted from a lovers’ lane a teenage couple, David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque. They raped the girl, forced the young people to lie face down, and shot them in the head.
