Dead Man Walking Read online

  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

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Notes

  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 journe
y 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

  When 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.

  I look down at the name in horror. Do I really want to know such a man?

  “He’s a Cajun from St. Martinville, Louisiana,” Chava says.

  Which makes the murders all the more vicious, because St. Martinville, at the center of Acadiana, is one of the friendliest, most hospitable places on earth. Here and in the surrounding towns French-speaking people, mostly farmers and fishermen, cook good food, swap stories and recipes, and dance the two-step and the zydeco. They love to talk, even to strangers. If murders are prone to happen anywhere on the face of the earth, this is the place one would least expect.

  I wonder what I can say to this man. What will he have to say to me?

  “We have files at the office,” Chava says, “if you want to read about the case.”

  I take the piece of paper with the name on it back to the apartment in the project where I live with five other nuns.

  A year ago, in June of 1981, I had driven a small brown truck loaded with my personal possessions to the apartment on 519 St. Andrew Street and hoped to high heaven I wouldn’t be shot. We were practically the only whites — all women — among one thousand five hundred residents in the six square blocks of beige brick buildings tucked between the central business district and the garden district. After my first night in the project apartment, I wrote in my journal:

  “Didn’t sleep much. Noisy until about 3:00 A.M. People standing on the corner talking and drinking. Feel nervous, unsettled. Heard a gunshot. Had checked when I got into bed to make sure my bed was under the windowsill in case a bullet came through.

  “Is this New Orleans? I feel like I’m in another country.”

  I came to St. Thomas as part of a reform movement in the Catholic Church, seeking to harness religious faith to social justice. In 1971, the worldwide synod of bishops had declared justice a “constitutive” part of the Christian gospel. When you dig way back into Church teachings, you find that this focus on justice has been tucked in there all along in “social encyclicals.” Not exactly coffee-table literature. The documents have been called the best-kept secret of the Catholic Church. And with good reason. The mandate to practice social justice is unsettling because taking on the struggles of the poor invariably means challenging the wealthy and those who serve their interests. “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” — that’s what Dorothy Day1, a Catholic social activist said is the heart of the Christian gospel.

  In 1980 my religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, had made a commitment to “stand on the side of the poor,” and I had assented, but reluctantly. I resisted this recasting of the faith of my childhood, where what counted was a personal relationship with God, inner peace, kindness to others, and heaven when this life was done. I didn’t want to struggle with politics and economics. We were nuns, after all, not social workers, and some realities in life were, for better or worse, rather fixed — like the gap between rich and poor. Even Jesus Christ himself had said, “The poor you will always have with you.” Besides, it was all so complex and confusing — the mess the world was in — with one social problem meshed with other problems. If you tried to get a handle, say, on improving housing for poor people, you found yourself in a morass of bureaucracy and waste in government programs, racist real estate and banking policies, unemployment — a mess.

  Enlightenment had come in June 1980. I can remember the moment because it changed my life. My community had assembled at Terre Haute, Indiana, to grapple with directions of our ministries for the 1980s, and the chief speaker was Sister Marie Augusta Neal, S.N.D.deN. A sociologist, she described glaring inequities in the world: two thirds of the peoples of the world live at or below subsistence level while one third live in affluence. Did we know, she asked, that the United States, which comprises about 6 percent of the world’s population, consumed 48 percent of the world’s goods? What were we to do about such glaring injustices? She knew her facts and I found myself mentally pitting my arguments against her challenge — we were nuns, not social workers, not political. But it’s as if she knew what I was thinking. She pointed out that to claim to be apolitical or neutral in the face of such injustices would be, in actuality, to uphold the status quo — a very political position to take, and on the side of the oppressors.

  But it was the way she presented the message of Jesus that caused the most radical shift in my perspective.

  “The Gospels record that Jesus preached good news to the poor,” she said, “and an essential part of that good news was that they were to be poor no longer.” Which meant they were not to meekly accept their poverty and suffering as God’s will, but, instead, struggle to obtain the necessities of life which were rightfully theirs. And Jesus’ challenge to the nonpoor, she emphasized, was to relinquish their affluence and to share their resources with the dispossessed.

  Something in me must have been building toward this moment because there was a flash and I realized that my spiritual life had been too ethereal, too disconnected. I left the meeting and began seeking out the poor. This brought me one year later to the St. Thomas housing development.

  I had grown up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the 1940s and 1950s in as solid and loving a family as one could hope for — a mother and father who lavished attention and affection on their children and a brother, Louie, and sister, Mary Ann, w
hom I could spar with and tease and argue with and love. We grew up in a spacious two-story house, were educated in Catholic schools, and traveled extensively across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

  As a child, at Mama’s urging, I knelt by my bed at night for prayers and always included “poor people who have no place to sleep tonight.” But poor people occupied a land somewhere out there with Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel. I did not have any direct experience with poor people.

  I did not then consider the “colored” people who worked for us as poor. They were just, well, “colored” people doing what “colored” people did, which was working for white people, and living where “colored” people lived, which was usually in shacks out in the country or, in “nigger town” in the city. In my early childhood a black couple lived in the “servants’ quarters,” a small house behind ours. The man took care of the yard, the woman in a white uniform helped in the house. They never used the family bathrooms and they always ate in the kitchen. Only whites went to the elementary and high school I attended, and in our church blacks could sit only in a niche of pews over to the side and had to wait until last to receive communion. They had to sit at the back of the bus, and it was a great dare for a white kid to go to the back of the bus and sit with the blacks for five seconds. I had taken on the dare more than once, then rushed back to the front of the bus to amused, giggling friends.

  Yet, even when I was a child there was something in black people that drew me to them. Once, when I was five years old, I remember making my way over to the group of black men Daddy had hired to remove a stump from our front yard, and I watched and listened as they swung axes in fluid motion and moaned bluesy songs and swapped stories about women and drinking and going to jail. This was life so raw, so earthy, so uncushioned, yet so vibrant, so tenacious, so enduring. I was fascinated. Mama was not. She spotted me and told me to get inside.