Sister Helen Prejean

I want to share a letter I received from Kurt Rosenberg, the dedicated director of Witness To Innocence. Witness to Innocence is spearheaded by former death row prisoners who have been exonerated and released from death rows across the United States and who are now actively engaged in the struggle to end the death penalty. These courageous people bring a human face to the death penalty that no one else can.

Here’s what Kurt had to say after the recent exoneration of another two men from death row:

It’s become more clear than ever that as wrongfully convicted men continue to be released from death row, the issue of innocence is alive and well in the struggle to end the death penalty. Two more death-row exonerations last week – in the states that lead the nation in having sent innocent men to death row – have brought the nationwide total to 135 since 1973. Just over halfway through the year, there have been five exonerations in 2009, the most in the United States in a single year since 2004.

On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously ordered that Herman Lindsey be set free because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him of murdering a Fort Lauderdale pawnshop worker. Lindsey’s exoneration was the 23^rd in Florida since the reinstatement of the death penalty.

Three days earlier, Ronald Kitchen was exonerated in Illinois when the state’s Attorney General dropped all charges against him. Kitchen and a co-defendant had been convicted of a 1988 murder. He had confessed to the crime after being subject to interrogation by a police unit that used torturous tactics against suspects.

Kitchen’s case is yet another exoneration linked to disgraced former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. Kitchen had claimed that detectives under Burge’s command coerced him into confessing to the murders through torture, including hitting him in the head with a telephone, punching him in the face, striking him in the groin, and kicking him. Years after Kitchen’s conviction, Police Commander Burge was fired after the Police Department Review Board ruled that he had used torture. Burge currently awaits trial on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury in relation to a civil suit regarding the torture allegations against him.

Kitchen’s exoneration was Illinois’ 20^th death-row exoneration. Florida and Illinois rank first and second in the United States, respectively, in death-row exonerations. Last week’s exonerations bring to four the number of death-row exonerations in the last two months. In mid-May, Paul House (Tennessee) and Daniel Wade Moore (Alabama) were also exonerated within three days of each other.

For more information on Lindsey’s exoneration, see: “Florida Supreme Court frees Death Row inmate in 1994 Broward murder” and “Death Row inmate convicted in 1994 Broward murder will be set free”. To read more about Kitchen’s exoneration, see “Burge-linked cases” and “Charges dropped in 20-year-old murder case”.

Kitchen after he was released from prison (photo Chicago Sun-Times)

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Letter to CA Department of Corrections
June 26, 2009

To: Mr. Timothy Lockwood
Chief of CDCR  Regulation and Policy Management

Regarding Proposed Amendments to Title 15, Article 7.5, Sections 3349

Dear Mr. Lockwood,

All of my remarks about the proposed amendments to the lethal injection protocol center around this theme: Keep the window open. Make the torture and killing transparent.

Sadly, it is the personal experience I have had of accompanying six human beings to their deaths at the hand of the state that urges me to give this testimony.

KEEP THE WINDOW OPEN as the execution team goes about strapping down the person to be killed and as they insert the intravenous lines, including cut downs that may be necessary if there is difficulty in finding a suitable vein.

KEEP THE WINDOW OPEN during the administration of the poisonous chemicals and as the person is dying as well as after the person has been killed, as the medical professional verifies the death and as the corpse is put into a body bag and removed. Do not conceal any part of the killing process, and do not hide the identity of the personnel who carry out the killing, including the medical personnel. If we feel no need to protect the identity of legislators who have enacted death as punishment on the statute books or district attorneys who seek and secure death sentences, or juries who sentence people to die or judges who pronounce sentence, why do we hide the identity of those who carry out the killing, including those who concoct and administer the lethal chemicals and the medical personnel who supervise the proceedings?

KEEP THE WINDOW OPEN TO THE MEDIA so the citizens can witness the killings done in their name and which, perhaps, they themselves have called for. Through media coverage let legislators see the killings they have desired and mandated into law, and require district attorneys who procured the death sentences to witness the killing they sought.

DO NOT KEEP OUR EYES FROM SEEING THE DEATH AGONY of the person being killed by use of a paralytic drug. Are you aware that in hearings about lethal injection, veterinarians have testified that in the euthanasia of animals they no longer use paralytic agents because such drugs prevent them from seeing if the animal is in distress as they are dying? Use of a paralytic agent in the killing of a human being may be the most cowardly act of all. Its sole purpose is to hide the death agony from the eyes of those who witness the death. What if, for whatever reason, the sleeping barbiturate does not take effect? What if those being killed at our hands are fully conscious but, because of paralysis, are unable to move a finger or cry out as the potassium chloride burns through their veins and convulses their heart? If these killings are legitimate and legal, why do we take such pains to shield ourselves from seeing the agony they necessarily entail? The curtain that must be removed is not only the curtain on the window of the execution chamber at San Quentin, it is the curtain masking our own hearts toward these killings of our citizens, which we claim to want, yet are so reluctant to face.

I wrote the books, Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents, and give talks around this nation to bring people face to face with state-sanctioned killing and what it does to us all. May my testimony advance the day when the great state of California will forever consign to a museum the instruments and policies and protocols of state killing that we address today.

Sister Helen Prejean, csj

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I put the wrong link to my speech from the DNC Interfaith Gathering in my earlier post. I’ve corrected it in that post, and here it is once more.

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I received many thoughtful comments on my first contribution to the God’s Politics blog, including this one from MNW:

Dear Sister Helen,

Can you write on what you think about torture?

Did you ever, in your wildest imagination, think that the
United States of America would legalize torture?

Can you explain how ANY Christian can support a president
that tortures other humans? Can you explain how ANY Christian can support those
who passed a law to legalize it in the USA?

I don’t get it. I don’t get how any Christian can now
support this president. It’s quite obvious that he has already tortured people
(given that the torture bill includes provisions that pardon him for any crime
he might have committed in this arena dating back to 9-11-01…and for the fact
that this bill wasn’t even a thought until the Supreme Court ruled that he was
in violation of the Geneva Convention) and that he plans to continue to torture
people.

I certainly don’t see Christ in any of it. Can you explain?

You’re on to one of the most important moral issues of our day, MNW. Going along with George W. Bush, Congress recently “amended” the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners to allow torture of terror suspects in Guantanamo. They don’t call it torture, of course. President Bush calls it “alternative ways of obtaining information”. Suspected terrorists can disappear into the black hole of Guantanamo and be held indefinitely without charge.

This nation lost its moral footing on the torture issue when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty in 1976, stating that it is not against the dignity of human beings to kill them for their crimes, even though an alternative life sentence is available.

The definition of torture as stated in the U.N. Convention Against Torture and by Amnesty International is:

“an extreme mental or physical assault against someone who has been rendered defenseless.”

To confine a human being in a small cell for 15 or 20 years to await being taken out and killed is mental torture. To shackle conscious, imaginative human beings and bring them to the death house with the clock ticking away the last days and hours of their lives is mental torture.  To prepare human beings for execution by diapering them, shackling them, and forcibly injecting them with valium to lower resistance, then strapping them onto a gurney and injecting them with chemicals that first paralyze them so they can’t cry out and then throw them into cordiac arrest is mental torture and in all probability physical torture too. We’ve been trying over the last 30 years to sanitize death, make it look like we’re not really killing them, we’re “putting them to sleep.”

The death penalty always involves torture.  There’s no way to kill a human being without causing them extreme pain. Legalizing death doesn’t change anything.

And that was one of our first steps towards this new legalization, this new sanitization of torture. By classing people as other than human (they’re nothing but "terrorists" or "murderers") and hiding them away from public view, we allow terrible acts to be done in our name. There’s nothing Christian about it.

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Here I am, back in my struggling city of New Orleans after a couple of summer months writing a book on Nicaragua. The working title is Going to Nicaragua. Epigraph: “People don’t give a good damn about Latin America” – Richard M. Nixon. SIxty-five percent of U.S. citizens say they don’t follow international news because they feel they don’t have the “background” to understand it.

With this huge challenge, why am I writing a book about Nicaragua? Because I belong to a solidarity group, Friends of Batahola, which helps keep a community center going in a very poor barrio, Batahola Norte, in Managua, Nicaragua. A Sister from our St. Joseph congregation, Margie Navarro, started the Center in 1983 as the U.S.-supported Contra war was raging. Before Margie’s death in 2001 I made a promise to keep the Center going and to write a book about the struggles of the people. In the book, I’ll also tell Margie’s story and my own journey there.

This is my first book not directly on the death penalty, but I see all kinds of connections. U.S. policy supporting the Contra war and present economic “restructuring” programs demanded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank put the majority of Nicaraguan people under another kind of death sentence: a life of impoverishment, disease, and early death. All with U.S. support.

In the book I’ll tell stories of the women who come to the center for sewing, baking, literacy, computer skills, and spiritual support. Almost every one of them has had to overcome obstacles from husbands who accused them of going to the Center to “meet a man.” To get to the Center, one of the women, Rita, jumped out of the back window when her husband barred the front door to prevent her leaving.

As Kurt Vonnegut says, “And so it goes…”

Anybody out there with a wide heart – you are hereby cordially invited to contribute to Friends of Batahola (it’s tax deductible). I’ll be visiting the Center in Managua November 22-29.

This visit to Nicaragua will come shortly after my attending the gathering in Fort Benning, Georgia, November 18-19 to close down the School of the Americas. Over the past twenty years more than 60,000 Latin American military “leaders” have been trained at SOA by the U.S. Trained in torture and assassinations (the torture manual was made public in 1993).

Every year, 10,000 plus people (many college-age adults) attend the teach-ins and sacred ceremony to commemorate the thousands of compesinos killed or “disappeared” in Latin America. I go every year and give a talk. The event has become a matrix for social activists from all over the country. If you’ve never been, you ought to treat yourself.  The event is spirited and grounded. Being with the people and hearing the stories gets your justice-seeking soul energized. Check out School of the Americas Watch.

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