By Sister Helen Prejean, csj

Sr. Helen Prejean, a nun in the United States, was asked by a death row prisoner to be his spiritual director. She said yes but never realized what anguish awaited her. Her story has appeared in the famous movie Dead Man Walking. Here she shares it with us.

I went into the women’s room because it was the only private place in the death house. I put my head against the tile wall and grabbed the crucifix around my neck and said, Oh Jesus God, Help me. Don’t let him fall apart. If he falls apart, I fall apart.” I was scared out of my mind. I had never watched anybody being killed right before my eyes.

Just a Pen Pal

I was supposed to be Patrick Sonnier’s spiritual advisers. All I had agreed to in the beginning was to be a pen pal to this man on Louisiana’s death row. Sure, I said, I could write letters. But the man was all alone. The next thing I was saying was, “Okay, sure, I’ll come to visit you.” And when I filled out the prison application from to be approved as his visitor, he suggested I should put ‘spiritual adviser’ Again I said. “Sure” I did not know that at the end, on the evening of the execution, everybody has to leave the death house, everybody but the spiritual adviser.  The spiritual adviser stays to the end.  The spiritual adviser witnesses the execution.

Heart for the Poor

People ask me all the time, “What are you, a nun, doing getting involved with these murderers?” I tell them, “Look at the people Jesus hung out with – lepers, prostitutes, thieves. I got involved with death –row inmates because I got involved with poor people. It took me a while to wake up to the call of the social Gospel of JesusFor years and years when I came to the passages where Jesus was identified with poor and marginal people. I did some mental editing of the Scriptures: ‘poor’ meant spiritually poor. Other members of my religious community woke up before I did and we had fierce debates on what our mission should be and finally I understood. I began to seek out the company of poor and struggling people. And on June 1, 1981, I drove a little brown truck into St. Thomas, a black, inner city housing project in New Orleans, and began to live there with four other Sisters.

Growing up as a Southern white girls right on the cusp of the upper class, I had only known black people as my servants. Now it was my turn to serve them. It did not take long to see that for poor people, especially poor black people, there was a greased track to prison and death row. So when a friend of mine from the Prison Coalition Office asked me one day if I would be a pen pal to someone on death row in Louisiana, I agreed. I knew one thing; if he was on death row in Louisiana, he was poor.

Death Row

When I began visiting Patrick Sonnier in 1982, could not have been more naïve about prisons. He told me about life in a cell measuring six feet by eight and a half on the death row tier where he and 44 other men were confined 23 out to 24 hours a day. He would say how glad he was when summer was over because there was no air in the cells. Sometimes he would wet the sheet from his bunk and put it on the cement floor to try to cool off, or he would clean out his toilet bowl and stand in it and use a small plastic container to get water from his lavatory and pour it over his body. He was on death row four years before they killed him.

Terrible Mistake

I made a bad mistake. When I found out about Patrick Sonnier’s crime – that he had killed two teenage kids, I did not go to see the victims’ families. I stayed away because I was not sure how to deal with such raw, unadultered pain. I was a coward. I only met them at Patrick’s pardon board hearing. They were there to demand Patrick’s execution. I was there to ask the board to show him mercy. It was not a good time to meet. I was powerless to assuage their grief.

It would take me a long time to learn how to help victim’s families. A long time before I would sit up at their support group meetings and hear their unspeakable stories of loss, grief, and rage. I would learn that often after a murder friends stay away because they do not know how to respond to the pain.

Racial Discrimination

In Louisiana, the hangman’s noose, then the electric chair, and now the lethal injection are almost exclusively reserved for those who kill whites. The black or Hispanic families who have loved a one murdered not only do not expect the attorney’s office to pursue the death penalty but are surprised when the case is prosecuted at all, and most of the time they are never allowed to sit on the front row in the execution chamber to watch the murderer die.

Not a Pretty Sight

Patrick had tried to protect me from watching him die. He told me he would be okay. “Electric chair’s not a pretty sight, it could scare you” he told me. But I said, “No, no, Pat, if they kill you I’ll be there. And I remembered how the women were there at the foot of Jesus’s cross, and I said to him, “You look at my face. Look at me and I will be the face of Christ for you.” I could not bear it that he would die alone. I said, “Don’t you worry, God will help me.” And there in the women’s room, just a few hours before the execution, strength was there, like a circle of light around me. If I tried to think ahead to what would happen at midnight, I came unraveled, but there in the present I could be strong. Patrick was strong also and kept asking me, “Sister Helen, are you all right?”

Last Meal

Being in that death house was one of the most bizarre experiences I have ever had because it was not like visiting somebody dying in a hospital where you can see the person getting weaker and fading. Patrick was so fully alive, talking and responding to me and writing letters to people, and eating. I would look around at the polished tile floors, all the officials following protocol, the secretary typing up forms for the witnesses to sign in a hospitals and the final act would be to save this man’s life. I felt strange and confused because everyone was so polite. They kept asking Patrick if he needed anything. The chef came by to ask him if he liked his last meal – the steak, the potato salad, the apple pie for desert.

Thousands Deaths

When the warden with the strap-down team came for him, I walked with him. God heard his prayer, “Please, God hold up my legs.” It was the last piece of dignity he could muster. He wanted to walk. I saw this dignity in him and I have seen it in the three men I have accompanied to their deaths. I wonder how I would hold up if I were walking across a floor to a room where people are waiting to kill me. The essential torture of the death penalty is not finally the physically method of death; a bullet or rope or gas or electric current or injected drugs. The torture happens when conscious human beings are condemned to death and begin to anticipate that death and die a thousand times before they die.

Killing is Wrong

I am not saying that Patrick Sonnier was a hero. I do not want to glorify him. He did the most terrible crime of all. He killed. But he was a human being and he had dignity. He, like each of us, was more than the worst thing he had done in his life. And I can say is this: he died well. In his last words he expresses his sorrow to the victims’ family but then he said to the warden and to the unseen executioner behind the plywood panel, but killing me is wrong, too.”

Death Chair

At the end I was amazed at how ordinary the last moments were. He walked to the dark oak chair and sat in it. As guards were trapping his legs and arms and trunk he found my face and told me that he loved me. his last words of life were words of love and thankfulness and I took them in like a lighting rod and I have telling his story to the world ever since.

“I was scared out of my mind. I had never watched anybody being killed right before my eyes.”

Sr. Helen Prejean lives in Metairie, Louisiana. She is the author of Dead Man Walking. Reprinted with permission from the Tablet, London, (Peace media Service)