An undying fight against execution
Just like in the movie based on her life, “Dead Man Walking,” there is one thing Sister Helen Prejean always says to the death row inmates she counsels moments before their executions:
“Look into my face. I will be the face of love and dignity for you.”
A Catholic nun living among the poor in the St. Thomas housing projects in New Orleans, her story went worldwide in 1995 when Susan Sarandon gave an Oscar-winning performance as Prejean counseling a murderer (Sean Penn) on death row.
Since the movie, which was based on Prejean’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir of the same name, she has accompanied six Louisiana men to their state-sanctioned deaths. She has also been on a nonstop speaking tour to turn popular opinion against capital punishment. During the winters, she goes to a Benedictine monastery in Wyoming to write.
“I think the American people are not bad, vengeful people who want to make others suffer — I think we lead busy lives and don’t reflect much on something that’s out of our realm,” said Prejean, 74, in a phone interview, while taking a break from her annual summer speaking tour, which typically packs in 100 stops at universities, legal offices and faith centers.
On Thursday, she will give a free talk at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco at 7 p.m., on an invitation from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office.
“She’s very much a hero to anyone who works in the justice system, and her stance on the death penalty became the vanguard for the Prop. 34 movement here,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, speaking of the 2012 ballot measure to end California’s death penalty that failed
by about 6 percentage points.
“We wanted to bring her to San Francisco so people would have an opportunity to learn from all she has experienced in the Deep South and all over the country.”
Homicides, costs up
Prejean plans to tell the crowd that homicide rates have doubled under capital punishment, and the cost of keeping more than 3,000 people on death row in special units, with special prison personnel and the decades of legal appeals, is financially and morally bankrupting society.
“Currently, a little more than 60 percent of the nation favors capital punishment, but when you ask them to consider life without parole instead, the approval rating for the death penalty drops to 50 percent,” Prejean said.
These days, Prejean is still a member of Congregation of St. Joseph in Louisiana, and a housemate, Sister Margaret, has been handling her calls ever since the movie came out.
Not a month goes by when a prisoner or murder victim’s family doesn’t request Prejean’s spiritual and legal help, and she can’t explain how she decides who to work with, other than saying the spirit will move her to someone.
She founded a victims advocacy group, called Survive, to extend her reach. From 1985 to 1995, she served on the board of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Prejean traveled to Texas to counsel and advocate for Cathy Henderson, a babysitter accused of killing a 3month-old and on death row for 16 years. In December 2012, new biomechanical evidence was presented that suggested the infant’s head injuries could have resulted from an accidental fall rather than a deliberate blow. The medical examiner recanted his conclusions of foul play, and Henderson was removed from death row. She now awaits a new trial.
Of the six executed people Prejean has counseled, she believes three were innocent. She used their stories as the basis of her 2004 book, “The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions.”
She is currently counseling Manuel Ortiz, who has been on death row for 20 years in Louisiana, on charges he killed his ex-wife for insurance money. Prejean, who contends he is innocent, said the case is based on the testimony of only one man, an enemy who later confessed to the crime. Ortiz’s accuser has since died, but new evidence shows he had several aliases, and worked as an informant for the FBI.
2 final-hours stays
Twice, Ortiz has been brought within 90 minutes of execution, then been granted a stay, she said.
“This whole system is so blooming broken,” Prejean said. “It’s just unspeakable, the torture of what he is going through.”
She said fame has just turned her into more of a servant — to act as a prism to tell the world what is happening behind closed doors.
The movie, in which she consulted constantly with Sarandon and director-producer Tim Robbins, has also spawned an opera that premiered in San Francisco in 2000, and Robbins wrote a play that is performed in high schools and universities nationwide as part of the Dead Man Walking School Theater Project.
Prejean sees culture shifting toward nonlethal punishment, as more people get engaged in the discussion. Since 1940, more than 4,500 people have been executed in the United States, but the rate of executions is slowing.
Maryland on Thursday became the 18th state to abolish capital punishment.
Prejean is most encouraged by young people. College students have been able to persuade judges to exonerate 142 death row inmates through their volunteer legal and investigative efforts.
“Ever since I saw that first execution of Patrick Sonnier, I felt this deep moral obligation to bear witness. Like ElieWiesel says you must bear witness to the Holocaust, I realized that execution is a secret ritual carried out in the middle of the night that people are never going to get close to unless I tell the story.”