Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  As she left the prison that August day, trying to determine if Pat meant what he said, she heard on her car radio that he was granted a stay while the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard his petition. Two months later, in October, the court denied his petition. Time was running out so Sr. Helen contacted Millard Farmer, an attorney she had heard of who defended death-row prisoners. Between Farmer and Sr. Helen, they pulled out all the stops, working the courts, the governor, and church leaders. Sister Helen asked the state’s Catholic bishops to write to Louisiana’s then-governor Edwin Edwards. On February 21, 1983, the US Supreme Court denied Pat’s appeal. His new execution date was set for April 5, 1984.

  Pat’s anxiety over his future surfaced again in his letters to Sr. Helen. He was “not doing so great with my nerves” because a court had denied his appeal. “For I heard it on TV yesterday and even though I already knew that they were going to turn me down it still kind of got to me. I don’t know why it got to me for it had never did before,” he wrote. It’s important in prison not to show emotion so he says he tries to keep himself together “for I don’t want to let it show that it’s getting to me because these people here enjoy seeing that it bothers you.”11

  He also wrote that he was worried about how his daughter Star, his mother, and his brother Eddie were taking the news. Just like anyone else, inmates have families, and many worry about them. In Pat’s case, he worried most about his daughter. “Well the thing that I find the hardest is not being able to be there watching Star growing up and how Star will take it if I should be executed for that’s the hardest thing for me Sr. Helen!”12

  In the meantime, the lawyers arranged a hearing with the state’s five-member pardon board, appointed by the governor. But clemency was denied again. At the request of Sr. Helen, her fellow Sisters of St. Joseph began making arrangements for Pat’s funeral, including finding a suit for his body. The sisters agreed that Pat could be buried among the sisters in their plots, and they found a funeral home willing to donate its services.

  The correspondence between Sr. Helen and Pat ended with his final letter to her dated April 1, 1984—just days before he was put to death in the electric chair. He thanked her for everything she did for him, which included working with lawyers to get him off death row and visiting his family back home.

  “I just thank God above for sending you into my life, for since I’ve met you my life had meaning. And I was so very blessed when you came into my life, and want to tell you that I love you and that our friendship meant so very much to me Sr. Helen!”13

  He asked her to look after his family and told her she was the most important person in his life, but not in a romantic way, he clarified as he had done on other occasions. He didn’t want to give the wrong impression. “Because I know that I mean a lot to you because you have done everything in your power to save my life and I know this is true because I’ve seen it and I’ve felt it deep down in my heart and soul, Sr. Helen!”14 He closed by wishing her a happy birthday. Her birthday was April 21.

  Two days before Pat’s scheduled execution, Sr. Helen visited the prison, stopping by to see Eddie first. During the time she was writing to and visiting Pat, Sr. Helen struck up a correspondence with his brother Eddie. Eventually Sr. Helen also became Eddie’s spiritual advisor and began visiting him.

  Eddie handed her a letter addressed to the governor saying they were killing the wrong brother. Prisoners weren’t allowed to bring letters to the visiting room so Sr. Helen showed it to the guard. Eventually the prison warden gave permission for Sr. Helen to take the letter. The guards told her that word in the prison was that they were executing the wrong brother.

  In his first few letters, also handwritten in pen on lined paper, Eddie addressed the letters “Sr. Prejean,” but called her “Mrs. Prejean” throughout, as if he were not exactly sure she was a nun.15 When filling out the form to request her as his spiritual advisor, he wrote that the form asked if she were married, and he wasn’t sure of that answer.

  Since Eddie was not on death row, he was allowed to earn money working in nearby cotton fields, and twice a week he “bled” to earn money to send to his brother, Pat, who was not allowed to work. Sister Helen arranged for money to be sent to Pat so Eddie didn’t have to sell his blood anymore.

  “To ask people to share with my brother so that I wouldn’t have to sell my blood, it brings tears to my eyes for no one in my family but my mother even cared if I was getting sick because I was selling my blood,” Eddie wrote on February 7, 1983.16

  Even though he wouldn’t be killed like his brother, the burden of a life sentence without parole weighed on Eddie, especially when his mother asked during a visit when he would be coming home. “I tell you what Sr. Helen I wish they would have went ahead and killed me instead of taking the death sentence away and giving me life. For it’s killing me slowly every day, Sr. Helen,” Eddie wrote on April 24, 1983.17

  While in prison together the brothers had been writing one another, but prison officials weren’t delivering the brothers’ letters. Eddie sent a letter to Pat through Sr. Helen where he again admitted to killing the young couple.

  “I sure hope he [Pat’s lawyer] can find something that will make them people understand that you didn’t do the killings, that I did. You know bro, you should never said that you did the killings just to try and get me off. Because now they don’t want to believe that you didn’t do it.”18

  Next, Sr. Helen visited Pat. They were both tense. Guards watched his every move and would continue to do so until his execution. They didn’t want him killing himself before his execution. “They’re not going to break me,” he told Sr. Helen. “I just pray God give me strength to make that last walk.”19

  The day after Pat was executed, his funeral Mass took place at a funeral home in Baton Rouge, the same one where Sr. Helen’s uncle had been laid out years earlier. It was where she had first seen a dead body. Roselawn Cemetery, also in Baton Rouge, was Pat’s final resting place, right alongside deceased Sisters of St. Joseph. While his mother didn’t attend the funeral—she felt it would be too difficult for her—Pat’s daughter Star was there, and the prison let his brother Eddie come, complete with the requisite shackles around his hands and feet. Bishop Stanley Ott, the then-bishop of Baton Rouge officiated.

  Reporters at the cemetery questioned Sr. Helen about her feelings for Pat. Was she in love with him, they asked. “No, I tell them, I loved Pat as a sister loves a brother, as Jesus taught us to love each other; it was not a romantic relationship.”20

  The call from God to dedicate her life to ending the use of the death penalty came to Sr. Helen after leaving what she calls the prison’s “death chamber” at Angola.

  “When I came out, I had watched a man be zapped, killed in an electric chair, and it was in the middle of the night,” Sr. Helen recalls. “And then I realized, it was so clear and it stuck. That’s how I knew it was grace. I can have great ideas, but if they don’t stick then they’ll never be a commitment. These were the words of it: ‘People are never going to be close to this. This is a secret ritual done in the middle of the night. They’re going to read the papers the next day and say justice was done. Look at the terrible crime. Pat and his brother had killed two innocent teenagers in cold blood. It was outrageous.’ ”21

  God brought Sr. Helen in as a witness to what happens when the state executes its people. And God called her to take people on this journey so they can also make it in their hearts. Most people, at one time or another, when they hear of a horrible crime, feel that the perpetrator deserves to die. “They don’t see it. It’s easy to kill somebody when you think of him or her as a monster, an animal,” she says. “But it’s really hard to kill a human being and that’s part of the story that’s in Dead Man Walking.”22

  Chapter Four

  Dead Man Walking

  Sister Helen left the death chamber on April 5, 1984, knowing God was telling her
to be a witness to the secret ritual of legal execution and to share her experience with the world.

  When you are raised in the South, talking is what you do, and storytelling comes naturally, especially to Sr. Helen. So she went on the road, telling the story of Patrick Sonnier’s execution to anyone who would listen—church groups, social justice sympathizers, university crowds. She thought, “Let me get on the road, talk about this, and bring people through the experience.”1 And she told stories to bring listeners over both arms of the cross.

  While initially some of the sisters in her community questioned her association with “murderers,” the entire congregation supported and stood behind her new ministry.

  In 1990 the community took a public stance against the death penalty and adopted a statement that read in part, “We cannot uphold a practice which permanently banishes some of our members from the human family by killing them. . . . As followers of Jesus Christ we reaffirm his way of compassion, which calls us to overcome hatred with love, to meet evil with goodness, and to forgive rather than avenge ourselves on those who harm us.”2

  A short time later people started to say to Sr. Helen, “You should write a book about this.” At the time she didn’t understand what power a book could have to advance the message of the injustice of the death penalty. To her, writing a book meant withdrawing to a cave for two years scribbling away in solitude. Then, who would read the book?

  But she began to write. The first thing she wrote was an essay for St. Anthony Messenger magazine about going to pray with the father of David LeBlanc, who was murdered by Patrick Sonnier. She and Lloyd LeBlanc prayed the rosary at a little Catholic church during an hour of Eucharistic adoration. It was a compelling Catholic story because it involved praying the popular Marian prayer of the rosary, and she was the spiritual director to the man who killed LeBlanc’s son.

  After that first essay, she continued to write. Slowly the structure of the book began to form in her mind, but Sr. Helen wasn’t sure God wanted her to write a book in the first place. One of her religious community’s mottos is “Don’t get out ahead of grace,” and she wasn’t about to do that. She wanted a clear sign from God. After all, books on the death penalty already existed. Why would hers be needed?

  She decided to send some of her writing to her friend Bill McKibben, who had published several books on environmental issues. He liked what he read and gave her the name of his literary agent in New York City. That was Gloria Loomis; the agency she worked for had been around since the 1940s and specialized in books of social importance.

  Next thing Sr. Helen knew, she had an agent. She sent Loomis a proposal and a couple of chapters for what would become Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. (Prison guards used to call out the phrase “Dead man walking” as they led a prisoner to the death chamber.)

  Loomis loved it and walked the proposal down the street to Random House and Jason Epstein, the publishing house’s editorial director at the time. After reading the proposal and sample chapters, Epstein invited Sr. Helen to New York City to discuss the book. “It was the most intelligent conversation I had with anybody about the death penalty,” Sr. Helen recalled. “And he said, ‘We’ll give you a contract.’ ”3

  The nun from Louisiana left the offices of Random House with a contract under her arm to write a book and an advance of about $20,000 that would go to her community. That was 1991. She said to herself that day, “Well, God, this must be what you want me to do.”

  The reality of the whole whirlwind experience—that a never-before published Catholic nun now had a contract with a big-time publisher to tell a story about the death penalty—took some time to sink in, but she had great aspirations for the book. She told the New York Times Magazine: “I want the book to be a bridge between the poor and nonpoor. . . . I am hoping that when people of good will read it, they won’t allow the death penalty to continue.”4

  Two years later she finished the book; Epstein was with her along the way as a hands-on editor. After she wrote the first draft, the two sat down and talked it over. He used his expertise to shape the book.

  Some of the best advice Epstein gave Sr. Helen was to talk about Patrick and Eddie Sonnier’s crime early on in the book and not bury it. “You wait far too long in this story before you talk about the crime and how horrified you were that these two teenagers were killed,” he told her. If she didn’t introduce it sooner, readers would easily dismiss her story and say, “Oh, she’s a Catholic nun. She believes in Jesus so this was easy for her.” They would think she couldn’t really face the crime head on and would expect every spiritual platitude from her. “If you don’t stand in the horror of that crime in the first ten pages, then no one is going to read your book,” Epstein told Sr. Helen.5

  Random House released Dead Man Walking in 1993, but Sr. Helen, then age fifty-three, still had doubts about its success. What were the chances of success for a book by a Catholic nun on the death penalty, which at the time was at its peak in the number of executions in the United States?

  However, the book had the editorial director of Random House personally pulling for it. After the new books for that year were announced, Epstein stood before the publishing house’s sales representatives and held up Dead Man Walking. He said, “See this book? This book is going to do what Rachel Carson did with Silent Spring. It’s going to change the discourse on the death penalty.”6

  The next thing Sr. Helen knew she was doing lots of interviews with the news media and big promotional events. The book received rave reviews.

  The New York Times said of the book, “Sr. Prejean, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental; her accounts of crime and punishment are gripping, and her argument is persuasive. But it is her personality that makes this book so powerful. Quoting Gandhi and Camus, reflecting on her childhood in Baton Rouge in the 1940s and 50s, grappling with her responsibility to the families of murder victims, she almost palpably extends a hand to her readers. Here I am, she seems to be saying; where are you on this issue?”7

  She made an appearance on the Today Show, and the New York Times Magazine did a profile on her. This was noteworthy because she was an unknown, first-time author. The interview was published May 9, 1993, and written by Sue Helpren. “Its power comes as much from the relentless pace of her narrative as it does from the undistorted portraits she draws of the men whose deaths have been scheduled by the state,” Helpren wrote. “She doesn’t suppose their innocence, doesn’t appeal to the possibility that somehow they are there by mistake. She embraces their guilt, and from that embrace argues that ‘people are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their life.’ ”8

  That quote—“people are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their life”—became the most popular one attributed to Sr. Helen, and she has repeated those words countless times since.

  In Sr. Helen, Random House recognized an author who would be on a permanent book tour. For as long as she was able, Sr. Helen would be on the road taking people through the experience of the death penalty and promoting Dead Man Walking. That has been the case ever since.

  In 2006 Random House published her sequel to Dead Man Walking, titled The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, which profiled two men unjustly accused and convicted of crimes and sentenced to death. The publisher was committed to ending the death penalty in the United States like she was and told her that in Dead Man Walking they began the discourse with the American public for ending the death penalty. In The Death of Innocents they would finish that discourse and bring it to an end.

  Dead Man Walking sat at number one on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-one weeks and earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination. An international hit, the book was also translated into ten languages. In 2013 Random House Penguin Group released a twentieth anniversary ed
ition with a foreword by humanitarian Archbishop Desmond Tutu and afterwords by Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

  At the time of the book’s original release, Sr. Helen didn’t know actress Susan Sarandon or actor/director Tim Robbins, but they would play a major role in her future.

  After the book achieved such success, Sr. Helen’s congregation, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, signed a film option with a producer. However, a film never panned out. Leery of how nuns had been portrayed in movies in the past, the congregation and Sr. Helen wanted a realistic portrayal of the events and were careful with whom they wanted to make a film version. Sister Helen was advised that if she gave her story to someone to make into a film, she must be able to trust them because they could change the whole thing if they chose to.

  Then movie star Susan Sarandon read Dead Man Walking and reached out to Sr. Helen. The Hollywood actress believed the book would make a great movie, and she wanted to play the part of Sr. Helen. In interviews, Sarandon has said she was a little wary of meeting a nun because she didn’t have fond memories of them from her days in Catholic school. The actress immediately inspired trust in Sr. Helen.

  Sarandon said her then-partner Tim Robbins should direct the film, and Sr. Helen said okay. Sarandon gave a copy of the book to Robbins, who starred in such films as The Shawshank Redemption and The Player. She wanted them to make it into a movie together. Robbins took his time reading it, however, since he was working on The Player. It all came down to what he called an “altercation on Sixth Avenue in New York” where Sarandon asked him if he was going to read the book. If not, she would find someone else to help her make the film. Susan Sarandon told news media that she wanted to portray Sr. Helen because she wasn’t a hero. She was just a regular person in over her head.