Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  Bud Welch, father of Julie Welch, who was killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, also opposed the death penalty for her daughter’s murderer. “My conviction is simple: More violence is not what Julie would have wanted. More violence will not bring Julie back. More violence only makes our society more violent,” he said.20

  Victims’ families continue to inspire Sr. Helen in her vocation as a witness to state-sanctioned killing. Many people, when they hear of an unspeakable crime, might feel that the perpetrator deserves to die. But they aren’t there to see the execution. “It’s easy to kill somebody when you think of a monster, an animal,” Sr. Helen says. “But it’s really hard to kill a human being, and that’s part of the story that’s in Dead Man Walking.”21

  Chapter Five

  The Death of Innocents

  After working for many years with inmates on death row and looking into the details of their trials, Sr. Helen began to notice patterns of abuse and injustice in the legal system that resulted in innocent people being put to death. She wrote about this in her 2005 book The Death of Innocents: The Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions.

  According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 159 people on death row were exonerated as of June 2017. Before she started ministering to those on death row, Sr. Helen believed that the United States had the best court system in the world. Now she knows differently. She also knows that just because one is a faith-filled person doesn’t mean one’s beliefs are just. For example, Southern states in the Bible Belt have historically and continue to impose the death penalty most often and make up the majority of all executions.

  In The Death of Innocents Sr. Helen featured the cases of two men—Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph Roger O’Dell III. Based on evidence and how their cases had been handled by the justice system, she believes they were innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted. Both men were poor, indigent, accused of killing white people, and had inadequate defenses. Sure, each had run-ins with the law before, but that didn’t mean they were guilty of these particular crimes.

  Dobie was on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola and was the fifth person Sr. Helen accompanied. Dobie faced the same death chamber where Patrick Sonnier was executed, but instead of the electric chair, lethal injection was now the means of execution.

  Dobie was a black man with an IQ of 65 (below the level of 70, when someone is considered to have a mental disability). When arrested for murder, he was home for the weekend on furlough from a minimum-security detention facility where he was serving time for burglary. Prison officials allowed him the furlough because he was a model, nonviolent prisoner.

  On July 8, 1984, Sonja Merritt Knippers, a forty-three-year-old white woman from Many, Louisiana, was stabbed to death in her bathroom. Her husband, Herb, was home at the time and told police he heard her yell, “A black man is killing me.” In response to the husband’s information, police arrested three black men on suspicion of her murder. Sister Helen wrote:

  At 2:30 a.m., police officers seized Dobie, asleep on the couch at his grandfather’s house, brought him to the police station and began interrogating him. They told him that they would be there for the rest of the night and all morning and all the next day if need be, until they ‘got to the bottom of this.’ Three police officers later testified that Dobie confessed, and at the crime scene investigators found a bloodstain on a bathroom curtain, which the state crime lab declared was consistent in seven categories with Dobie’s, and statistically, that combination would occur in only two in one hundred thousand black people. Investigators also found a ‘dark-pigmented piece of skin’ on the brick ledge of the bathroom window, through which the killer supposedly entered and escaped.1

  Prosecutors said evidence pointed to Dobie’s guilt, but Dobie said he was out drinking that night and went home to sleep it off. Dobie’s trial lasted one week, and an all-white jury convicted him in 1985 and sentenced him to death.

  He sat on death row for fourteen years and was scheduled for execution eleven times before he was finally executed on January 8, 1999. He was thirty-eight.

  When Sr. Helen began researching Dobie’s case, she noticed information that didn’t add up. Dobie’s attorney at the trial failed to obtain independent testing of the evidence, which was standard practice, and accepted the prosecution’s determination without question. At the crime scene, blood spatters from Sonja’s eight stab wounds were everywhere, and yet police couldn’t find any blood on Dobie’s clothes or body. The prosecution maintained he fled through a small window in the bathroom, but no fingerprints or blood were found there.

  While Dobie was on death row, attorneys from the Loyola Death Penalty Resource Center (now closed) began investigating his case and hired bloodstain expert Stuart James to analyze the evidence. Using photos from the crime scene, James said that there was no way someone could stab a person eight times, causing lots of blood splatters, without getting blood all over oneself. The killer also couldn’t spring up and vault through the small bathroom window without leaving fingerprints behind. Furthermore, no footprints were found in the bathroom or outside the window. The killer had to leave through the bathroom door, James said. Sonja’s husband, Herb, was never questioned by the prosecution at trial or investigated by police as a possible suspect. It was just one more thing that didn’t add up.

  Attorneys and investigators for Dobie found missing evidence, questionable forensic testing, and other information that raised serious questions about his guilt—including one judge selecting a questionable lab to conduct DNA testing. But the team could not secure his freedom.

  Sister Helen visited Dobie for eight years prior to his execution, and they corresponded regularly outside of her visits to Angola.

  Unlike Pat Sonnier’s handwriting, which was in cursive and heavily slanted to the left with small letters, Dobie’s handwriting looked more like that of a teenager’s with upright characters in cursive and smiley faces after a sentence when he wanted to make Sr. Helen laugh.

  Sister Helen’s letters to Dobie are in the archive at DePaul University in Chicago. She was a faithful correspondent, writing to Dobie at least once or twice a month. Her relationship with Dobie coincided with the making of the movie Dead Man Walking and its national and international release. The events were chronicled through Dobie’s and Sr. Helen’s letters.

  On March 5, 1994, Dobie responded to Sr. Helen’s letter to him that included a photo taken on the set of the movie. The photo cut off half of Susan Sarandon’s face, and Sr. Helen apologized. “And it doesn’t matter that part of her face was cut off by that car door, so don’t sweat it, okay? Okay!” Dobie wrote, adding a small smiley face after the sentence.2

  It turned out the death row inmate also collected autographs. “Sister Helen, I really am looking forward to receiving both Susan Sarandon’s and Tim Robbins’ autographs, plus that personal note you mentioned; and I want you to know that I’ll always be grateful to you for doing this for me! When I receive their autographs, I’ll then have three famous people’s autographs—yours and theirs!” he wrote on February 14, 1994.3

  On March 4, 1996, Sr. Helen wrote to Dobie about the Academy Award nominations for the film Dead Man Walking.

  “Did you hear about our four Academy Award nominations for the film? Susan, Sean, and Tim. Tim was really a surprise—best director nomination and this was only his second movie,” she wrote, adding that Bruce Springsteen received a nomination for best original song.

  Dobie replied: “So Bruce Springsteen got an Oscar award nomination for best original song, huh? Well, I think that’s really great!!”

  Sister Helen often sent him postcards from her travels. She also did that with other inmates and was a faithful correspondent. Each letter was important because she understood they were starving for interaction outside of the prison walls. Sometimes Dobie and the other inmates Sr. Helen visited asked for basic things like
underwear, pajamas, and tennis shoes. They didn’t have any income on death row so were beholden to others. All of the requests were for basic things people on the outside took for granted, including good writing implements. “I really appreciate those good ink pens that you gave me at the seminar! These ink pens that the classification officers issue to us are really sorry,” Dobie wrote.4

  But corresponding with people on the outside came with a sense of loss when their pen pals stopped writing. Dobie mentioned this a few times in his letters. “Sometimes I feel like maybe after all these years of being on death row and in prison, the people that I’ve been corresponding with over the years (including family members) just get tired of writing, and decide not to write me for quite a while, and some of my pen pals just stopped writing altogether! I’m sure that absence really does make the heart grow fonder but too much absence will make one wonder. I can’t hold it against them, however, because after all nobody’s under any obligation to write to me!” Dobie wrote on July 15, 1994.5

  Like other inmates before him, Dobie drew pictures on his letters and envelopes. On March 7, 1996, he drew a large sunshine in yellow marker with a smiling face on the letter, along with flowers and trees on the other pages. “Although you seem to be a naturally cheerful person, I just thought I’d draw a few pictures for you, in this letter, and color them, with the hope that they’ll help to add to your cheerfulness!” he wrote.6

  While Dobie was on death row, Sr. Helen was lobbying for the end to the death penalty, so reporters around the country interviewed him. One reporter had upset him, and he wrote to Sr. Helen about it. The reporter had asked him if he felt any remorse for killing Knippers. “I thought it really unfair of her to have asked me such a question as that, because for her to have asked me something like that just let me know that she just assumed that I’m guilty, without ever having asked me first, whether or not I’m guilty, but at the same time, I was glad that she did ask me that as it gave me a chance to clarify that point; I was most sincere when I told her that (because I DIDN’T kill Mrs. Knippers). I don’t/can’t feel any remorse, but that I can only empathize and sympathize with them (the Knippers family) because I too have a mother and that I know how I’d feel if something like that was to happen to her.”7

  Like with others whom Sr. Helen corresponded, Dobie often told her he couldn’t put into words how much her visits meant to him. They meant a good deal to Sr. Helen as well. On one occasion in February of 1996, bad weather forced Sr. Helen to leave the prison before seeing Dobie. “It was TERRIBLE being so close to you there at Angola but having to leave before I could see you because of the freezing roads. That was a first which I hope will never be repeated. . . . I want to reschedule our visit NEXT WEEK,” she wrote on February 5, 1996.8

  Sr. Helen even developed the habit of drawing her own pictures on her letters to Dobie. Even though he was executed in 1999, his correspondence to Sr. Helen ended in 1996, possibly due to an onset of rheumatoid arthritis.

  By the time of his execution, the arthritis had taken over his body, gnarling his hands and causing great pain in his left knee. In his last hours, Dobie phoned family members telling them he was grateful for their support along the way. “I have noticed this same spirit of gratefulness in every person I have accompanied in this bizarre death process,” Sr. Helen wrote.9

  In the death chamber after they hooked up the IVs that would administer the killing cocktail, the warden asked Dobie if he had any last words. “I just want to say I got no hard feelings for anybody. God bless everybody. God bless,” Dobie said.10 What’s the official cause of death written on the death certificate? Homicide.

  While Dobie was on death row, Sr. Helen corresponded with Feltus Taylor, another inmate on the tier with Dobie. She wasn’t his spiritual advisor and visited him only periodically after he reached out to her. Unlike Dobie, Feltus admitted to committing the murder he had been convicted of—killing a former coworker as he robbed his former workplace in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He also shot his former boss and permanently paralyzed him. Feltus plead guilty to the crime.

  Feltus was on death row when Dobie was executed and wrote to Sr. Helen offering condolences. “Well, I’m sorry that you lost Dobie on Friday night. I know it must be hard on you and his family,” he wrote on January 11, 1999.

  Feltus said he felt down and then up on Friday because he knew that all of Dobie’s struggles were now over. “And sometimes I wish that it was me instead of him because a lot of times I wish all of this stuff was just over with, you know.” But Feltus was also curious about the process of execution as someone headed for the same fate and wrote: “How does it makes you feel when you sit and look at something like that? Did he look to be okay with everything? Did he look like he was in pain while it was going on? It’s so hard to think you’ll be alive, then all of the life is taken away from you in that way.”11

  As only a death-row inmate might wonder, he wrote, “I think about how it must feel to lie on that bed and to know that you want to be getting off of it, have to be hard. But it’s what we are faced with every day.”

  When she first began her ministry to people on death row, Sr. Helen assumed everyone was guilty like Feltus and had received a fair trial. But years of working with prisoners and their attorneys taught her that wasn’t always the case, and flaws in the criminal justice system could lead to the conviction of people innocent of the crime in question. They may be guilty of other crimes, but not that one.

  Sister Helen also learned that what happens during the trial is crucial to whether or not a person’s conviction could be overturned later on, no matter what new evidence was revealed. Virtually no court will revisit material presented at the trial and upon which the jury ruled. “With so much in the balance as you go to trial, you better have a skilled, energetic lawyer who thoroughly knows the law and how to conduct an exhaustive investigation and is aggressive enough to get hold of the original police report with its fresh, uncensored reporting of facts and eyewitness accounts,” she wrote in The Death of Innocents.12 Dobie didn’t have that defense.

  Just four years after Dobie’s execution in 2002, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that would have spared his life. In Atkins v. Virginia, the highest court in the land determined that executing those with mental disabilities, whom they termed “mentally retarded,” (an IQ of 70 or lower) violated the Eighth Amendment banning “cruel and unusual punishment.”

  Dobie’s death rekindled the fire burning within Sr. Helen to witness to these injustices. She promised Dobie before he died that she would tell his story, and she did in The Death of Innocents. In that same book, she also told the story of Joseph Roger O’Dell III.

  Sister Helen was pulled into Joseph’s case by Lori Urs, a volunteer at a Virginia Innocence Project who, with investigators, looked into his case and found a large amount of exculpatory evidence kept from the jury in his trial.

  Joseph, a white male out on parole, was convicted of the murder, rape, and sodomy of Helen Schartner, a forty-four-year-old secretary who was bludgeoned and strangled to death after she left a Virginia Beach nightclub on February 5, 1985. Joseph had also visited the club that night. The next day, after hearing about the murder, Joseph’s girlfriend and landlord called the police saying she found his bloody clothes in a garbage can. Crime lab testing said the blood on his clothing was similar to the victim’s and arrested him.

  Joseph maintained that the blood on his clothes came from a fight he was in the night of the murder. While he did visit the club where Schartner was last seen, he visited other bars too—getting into a fight outside one of them—and didn’t get to his girlfriend’s home until 7:00 a.m. the next morning. Despite being assigned an attorney by the court, Joseph chose to represent himself at trial. When Sr. Helen learned of this by reading documents Lori Urs had sent her, she wondered why the court let him do it. She also wondered later how “every court in the land would fail to render a judgment of ineffec
tiveness of counsel.”13

  Joseph said he didn’t trust his attorney so he fired him. Through her investigation, Lori found that this attorney withheld exculpatory evidence from Joseph from the outset. During the trial, the prosecution presented its forensic evidence and expert witnesses saying Joseph, who had served time previously for other crimes, was guilty. They also produced Joseph’s cellmate at the time of his arrest who said Joseph confessed to the killing. Joseph was convicted and sentenced to death at Mecklenberg Prison in Boydton, Virginia.

  Joseph did have a violent past. He had served time in Florida for attempted kidnapping and later killed a fellow inmate while serving time for a different crime in a Virginia prison. But Sr. Helen didn’t believe he murdered Schartner.

  Often people who are innocent believe all they have to do is tell their story and a jury will believe them. That was true in Joseph’s case. What they don’t anticipate is how the prosecution’s job is to get a conviction, and how the prosecution will do everything they can to make that happen. With 159 death-row prisoners exonerated at the time of this book’s printing, Sr. Helen hears more and more stories of just what the prosecution will do to ensure that their version of the crime prevails—even if the person is innocent. Personal ambition or politics can play a part in how aggressive the prosecution is to get a conviction.

  Sometimes the injustice seems to be rooted in arrogance, such as when the Virginia Supreme Court—“whose task it is to make sure that a petitioner’s constitutional rights are respected during trial,”14 Sr. Helen recounted—refused to hear Joseph’s petition on account of word choice. His lawyers typed “Notice of Appeal” on the title page of his petition instead of “Petition for Appeal.” Two words made the court not hear the case of a man the state wanted to kill. “To what level of moral bankruptcy has the judiciary system fallen that a court can do this to a man scheduled to be killed by the state?” Sr. Helen wondered.15