TOP STORY: RELIGION AND POPULAR CULTURE: `Too much pain here,’ says author of death penalty bo

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-As a child in the early 1950s, Helen Prejean drifted off to sleep bathed in the security of a middle-class Catholic home, lulled by the sound of her parents murmuring the rosary.”Catholicism,”she said,”was in our DNA.” As a nun 30 years later, her faith, profoundly reshaped, led her to live […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-As a child in the early 1950s, Helen Prejean drifted off to sleep bathed in the security of a middle-class Catholic home, lulled by the sound of her parents murmuring the rosary.”Catholicism,”she said,”was in our DNA.” As a nun 30 years later, her faith, profoundly reshaped, led her to live and work with the poor in the St. Thomas public housing development in New Orleans, where the sound of occasional gunfire jerked her awake at night.

Eventually her midnights came in yet another place: the death house at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where her encounters with three executions-and later with the enduring, unsatisfied pain of crime victims’ families-transformed Prejean into America’s most vocal opponent of the death penalty, and an advocate for increased regard for families ravaged by crime.


It is a journey told in”Dead Man Walking,”her 1993 book that was filmed in New Orleans last summer and is being released nationally this week.

The early reviews are raves; for Prejean, 56, it is a heady moment. She attended a New York premiere;”Prime Time Live”and”Oprah”have come calling. But she is wary of her 15 minutes of fame and said she thinks often of families she knows who have lost children to murderers.”There’s a whole part of me that says, `No, let’s not do this,'”Prejean said.”`Let it all be and let these people heal. …'””There’s too much pain here,”she said.”Too much suffering and injustice”on all sides of America’s embrace of the death penalty.

To her relief, director Tim Robbins and actress Susan Sarandon, who plays Prejean, have been both”brave and fair”with her book and with the complexity of the subject, Prejean said.”Dead Man Walking”explores the psychological terror of the condemned man’s wide-awake slide toward death. But it also confronts the agony he inflicted on his victims years before, their families’ continuing torment, and Prejean’s misplaced compassion in comforting the killers while too long ignoring the families they destroyed.

She thinks the truth, if hard to dig out, is finally laid bare.”It’s a journey into the issue that will bring people to places in their hearts they hadn’t been to before,”she said.”The film brings them there emotionally and helps them see what’s really involved in the state’s killing a person.”The book has more information. If people both see the movie and read the book, I’d say 98 percent would say, `I can’t support this anymore.'” Prejean hardly expected this role when she entered the order of St. Joseph of Medaille right out of high school in Baton Rouge.

The young Sister Louis Augustine wore a habit, taught English and religion to 7th- and 8th-grade girls, then ran a religious education program in Cabrini parish in New Orleans.

Her piety was conventional, personal, vertical.”Just me and God.””I always knew that the way you loved God and the way you loved people were the same thing,”she said.”But that too was one-on-one, a personal thing. I thought, `I’ll just be kind to everyone personally.’ It had not yet occurred to me that if someone is unjustly treated by a system, being kind to them is not enough.” But a radical shift began to occur in the 1970s as her order started questioning whether it had lost touch with the poor. She began to read the Gospels in a new way and came to see Jesus Christ as a radical who meant his message of comfort to the poor to be taken literally. They were to be poor no more.

She moved to the bleakness of St. Thomas with a group of other nuns, running literacy programs and for the first time listening to the experiences of poor people.


It was there in 1982 that an acquaintance asked her to write to Elmo”Pat”Sonnier, a stranger on death row. Sonnier and his brother, Eddie, had been convicted of abducting a teen-age couple on a lovers’ lane in St. Martinville, in rural southwestern Louisiana, in 1977, raping the girl and killing both.

His brother, in what Prejean came to see as one of the almost random quirks that characterize the criminal justice system, got life in prison while Pat Sonnier faced the electric chair.

She accompanied Sonnier to his death, an experience that altered her life.

Two years later she accompanied another killer, Robert Lee Willie, who with another man abducted, raped and murdered 18-year-old Faith Hathaway of Mandeville, a suburban community 30 miles north of New Orleans, leaving her to die in the woods. His accomplice, too, received a life sentence.

Their guilt landed Sonnier and Willie in prison, where they should have remained for the rest of their lives, without possibility of release, she said. But what put them in the electric chair, Prejean argues, were the same factors that drive the justice system’s selection of a handful of prisoners for execution each year.

The death penalty is”99 percent rhetoric,”she said. Of 24,000 homicides in the United States last year, only a few dozen killers, at most, will be executed. Overwhelmingly, their victims were white people, even though the face of the murder victim increasingly is black.

Those few killers are literally doomed by inept lawyering because they could not afford better, she said.”The people with the power and the money and the resources, they’ll never face the death penalty,”Prejean said.


Sonnier, for instance, fought his verdict for years. But his fate was largely sealed at the trial, having seen his attorney for only two half-hour sessions beforehand, she said.

Yet those efforts for Sonnier betrayed Prejean in her early work. Her solicitude shocked and offended people who sympathized with Sonnier’s and Willie’s victims, making them wonder why Prejean seemed to be reading only half the Gospel.

Moreover, she says now, she waited too long to approach Eula and Lloyd LeBlanc and Goldie and Godfrey Bourque, the shattered parents of the teen-agers Sonnier had helped kill.

A furious Lloyd LeBlanc confronted Prejean at a clemency board hearing where she pleaded for Sonnier’s life. Why didn’t you come to us? he asked.

She hadn’t, she said, because she was afraid they would demand her support for Sonnier’s death as evidence of her compassion for them.”I didn’t want to cause them any more pain,”she said.

But that was wrong, she says now.”The church has to be on both sides of this issue.”(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)


The church should step up its opposition to the death penalty, throwing all its moral weight behind a document Catholic bishops adopted in 1980 and making it a campaign like its fight against abortion, she said.

But churches also should be with crime victims more than they are now, Prejean said.”The most shocking thing I found out is how people leave them alone,”she said. Unsure what to say or how to console, friends back off, especially months after the crime when the deep grief begins to set in, she said. They think it odd-morbid-that survivors keep wanting to talk about the crime so many months afterward. They underestimate the depth of the wound.”The church has to be there, just like you’d organize for a fund drive, or the fair or the choir, the church has to organize these ministries at the parish level,”Prejean said.”The key thing I found in healing was the presence of people, just being available for conversation, saying, `I’m here for you.’ … You learn later what to say; you can get some training, but the first step is to be there.”(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In time, when the interviews and the national attention subside, Prejean will go back to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where another death row inmate has asked her to be his spiritual adviser, like Sonnier, Robert Willie and Willie Celestine, another Louisiana prisoner executed in 1987 for the rape and murder of an elderly woman.

She will not identify the man she visits now.”You’d be surprised what happens. People find out he’s alive and call the DA and say, `You ain’t fried him yet?'” She also tried to contact the family of the prisoner’s victim. They have not responded.”I’ve tried; they’re very angry,”she said.

But she will continue to visit the man, and walk with him to his death, if it comes to it.”I’ve been so loaded with love all my life. I really have to do this for the salvation of my soul. I ain’t doing charity. I really need to do this.”

MJP END NOLAN

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