On April 13, 2012, Sister Helen gave a lecture and Q&A, hosted by Bill Quigley, at the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment. The talk is in three parts.

An Afternoon with Sister Helen Prejean

Sister Helen visited Duke Divinity School in January 2012 and spoke with Faith & Leadership. This video clip is an excerpt from the following edited transcript.

Sister Helen speaks at the Ohio Statehouse along with state Reps. Ted Celeste, Nickie Antonio and Terry Boose.

Salt and Light Television

Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, has been instrumental in sparking international dialogue on the death penalty and helping to shape the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to state executions. At the age of 40, she realized that being on the side of poor people was an essential part of the Gospel. She moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans and began working at Hope House. During this time, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate. She agreed and became his spiritual adviser. She is the author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, published in 1993. The book became a best seller, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and spawned an Oscar-winning movie and an internationally-acclaimed opera.

Join Fr. Thomas Rosica who interviews this remarkable woman religious of our time – a woman who reminds that when the truth sets us free, we may be very uncomfortable.

Now that her story has been told in print, on screen, on the theater stage, and even in opera houses, Sister Helen Prejean finds herself looking back upon her Dead Man Walking experience with her upcoming book, River of Fire: A Spiritual Journey to Death Row. In it, Sister Prejean aims to take the reader back in time with her as she chronicles her personal awakening to the cause that became the source of her international standing today – fighting the death penalty. Appearing recently at the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers Center as part of the organization’s Speaker Series, Sister Prejean gave the packed house an early listen by reading from the book’s prelude before lauching into a passionate and engaging talk.

For well over an hour Sister Prejean opened up about her personal background, life as a nun, and experience with the justice system, easily moving between levity and severity as she spoke. She told the audience that the death penalty must be abolished for a myriad of reasons including moral, ethical, statistical, and budgetary ones; her overall message being that the death penalty is simply too costly in every respect. Sister Prejean also had kind words for Maryknoll itself, enthusiastically extolling the virtues of its members’ missionary work more than once during her talk.

After taking questions and comments from the lectern, Sister Prejean spent another hour or so meeting audience members and signing copies of her two books; 1993′s Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and subsequently adapted into an Oscar-winning film, as well as a stage play and opera) and 2004′s The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions. Reflecting on her day at Maryknoll, Sister Prejean said, “I’m not the one doing the favor by coming here – I will come away from here with the fire burning brighter inside of me from having been here.”

Click here for video of Sister Helen Prejean’s appearance and Maryknoll’s interview with her.

You can also see Sister Helen talk about the Maryknoll Fathers & Brothers’ combined film-and-web project, Execution Chronicles, by clicking here.

President Obama met with the press before his visit with Pope Benedict on July 10. He talked about how he admired Cardinal Bernardine’s “seamless garment” approach to pro-life, that the cardinal included in its scope a wide range of issues – “he was concerned about poverty, he was concerned with how children were treated, HE WAS CONCERNED ABOUT THE DEATH PENALTY…”

Now there’s interesting fodder for a conversation with Pres. Obama. For starters: Aren’t you, too, very, very concerned about the fact that already 135 innocent people have released from death row? How many will it take before we recognize the failed system? Not to mention the shocking, appalling racist application of the death penalty presently carried out in the Deep South states?

Any ideas out there about how we might get a conversation going with Pres. Obama and his wife, Michelle about this issue? Anybody out there want to help us mount a YOUNG PEOPLE’S LETTER WRITING CAMPAIGN to the White House to end the death penalty in the U.S.?

Think boldly. Organize strategically. Act quickly.

Regarding Proposed Amendments to California’s proposed amendments to the lethal injection protocol, Sister Helen writes to Mr. Timothy Lockwood, Chief of CDCR Regulation and Policy Management on June 26, 2009. Sr. Prejean urges:

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.

Here is the full text of Sister Helen’s letter:

A Letter About Proposed Amendments to the Lethal Injection Protocol in California
June 26, 2009

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

From: Sister Helen Prejean, csj
3009 Grand Rt. St. John #5
New Orleans, LA 70119

PUBLIC HEARING
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.

The Edmond Sun

By  Kathy Toppins

EDMOND — Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States,” spoke Tuesday night at the University of Central Oklahoma about her own walk from innocence to outrage as an anti-death penalty activist.

Her book became the basis for the 1995 movie “Dead Man Walking,” starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

The book and movie provide a first-hand account of Sister Prejean’s experience counseling Patrick Sonnier, a man she said was guilty of terrorizing teenagers, but not guilty of murder.

He and his brother, Eddie, each blamed the other for murdering David LeBlanc, 17, and Loretta Bourque, 18, while they were parked near a sugar cane field, Prejean said. The brothers also blamed one another for raping Loretta.

Eddie was sentenced to life; Patrick was sentenced to death.

Patrick had come from a world unfamiliar to the nun. The daughter of a successful lawyer and businessman in Baton Rouge, Prejean said she had lived a privileged life. She wasn’t in touch with poor people.

“I had African-American servants as I was growing up. That was the only way I knew black people,” Prejean said. She attended a segregated, private school.

As a young nun, she did what she thought she was supposed to do about poverty, racism and social injustice — she prayed. She said she didn’t think much about the death penalty.

Through listening to another sister speak in Terre Haute, Ind., Prejean said she came to realize Jesus did more than pray, and so should she.

She responded to that awakening in 1982, when she moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans. She said she lived with struggling African-Americans, where children weren’t learning in the public schools, and she started seeing justice from a different point of view. While living in the housing project, a friend asked then 40-year-old Sister Prejean to be a pen pal with Patrick, a death-row prisoner at Louisiana’s Angola State Prison.

“You know what the problem was? The guy wrote back,” Prejean said. “He had a name.”

They began to write, and it was clear from his letters he had no one to visit him.

“I was so naïve,” said Prejean of that moment when she signed the prison form to be his spiritual adviser. “Little did I know that 2-1/2 years from that moment, I, as spiritual adviser, would stay on at the death house when everybody else at a quarter to six is going to be asked to leave.”

She walked with Patrick to the electric chair and looked into his face as they killed him. “And, I am never going to be the same,” Prejean said.

Crossing the United States for the past 20 years to talk to people about the death penalty, she said she learned “we are not a vengeful people.” Most people want to execute criminals, she said, for the same reason they would amputate a gangrenous limb or kill a rabid dog. Their intent is to protect people.

Prejean said she made a mistake when she first met with the prisoners and their families, but failed to meet with the murder victims’ families.

“They are the amazing heroes in this country that teach us the path of forgiveness,” Prejean said.

After accompanying six more men to their deaths, her experience has led her to believe that death will not heal the family, honor their loved ones or provide closure. “What happens when the family gets home and the chair is still empty?” Prejean asked.

Audience Reaction

Several audience members shared her concern. Ray Jones, a former district judge and defense attorney in three death penalty cases, said, “I don’t think it’s morally right for my state, my government to commit the crime of premeditated murder.”

If revenge is the goal, he said, death row inmates have told him they would rather die than spend 23 hours a day in an 8 foot by 8 foot concrete cell for the rest of their lives. If cost is the issue, he said, studies show multiple appeals are costlier than incarceration. Shortening the appeal process to cut costs is not the answer, either, Jones warned. “Then, we are going to start executing more innocent people.”

Matt Jones, pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church, said, “As a minister, I have a Biblical perspective on the death penalty. I watched ‘Dead Man Walking’ and thought it was a powerful drama about questions that don’t have easy answers.”

He said the Bible contains conflicting evidence on the acceptability of the death penalty. Based on Jesus’ teachings, though, Jones said he believes the death penalty is murder.

“Although the Bible gives examples of state-mandated executions, I think Jesus sheds a new light on that,” Jones said. Jesus called for forgiveness.

“Jesus doesn’t ask us to accept the behavior, but forgive the person. And also, it’s not worth the risk to execute a person who could be innocent,” Jones said.

Pat Hervey said, “I am strongly against the death penalty. That’s a decision I’ve come to in the last 15 or 20 years. I started considering how the death of the convicted felon affected other people.”

She mentioned the felon’s family, the person who has to perform the execution and the public.

“I think it diminishes our civilization to be executing people. It doesn’t bring back the people they have killed. It doesn’t accomplish anything, in my opinion,” Hervey said. “What’s really important here is that each life matters.”

Others were less certain. “I’m still on the fence about capital punishment,” said Karen Dorrell, a former journalist. “I can see where most of the time it would be better to wait, but there are times I can see no justification for fighting the death penalty.”

Dorrell said she wished more juries were offered the sentencing choice of life without parole.

“The thought of some of these people who have done horrible things being released just appalls me,” Dorrell said, noting she is concerned they will commit the same crime again. “That is the catch,” Dorrell said. “I’m glad I don’t have to make the decision.”