Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  Joseph’s experiences reminded Sr. Helen of Dobie’s trial. “The prosecutors wove a preposterous and convoluted scenario of the crime in which Dobie was the only possible culprit, while the victim’s husband, who was alone in the house with his wife when she was murdered, was never investigated as a possible suspect. Moreover, Dobie’s alleged confession was attested to by two policemen, who claimed to have ‘lost’ the tape on which Dobie confessed. And both Dobie and Joe had previous records, making it easy to believe they could have committed the crimes. They were easy targets,” she wrote.16

  After six years in prison, Joseph used the writ of habeas corpus to ask the US Supreme Court to grant him an evidentiary hearing where he could present DNA testing that contradicted the claim that the blood on his clothes was consistent with the victim’s. Every US citizen is guaranteed the writ of habeas corpus, which asks a federal court to determine if a state’s imprisonment of a person is lawful.

  While the Supreme Court in 1991 decided not to hear Joseph’s petition, Justices Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and Sandra Day O’Connor issued a statement saying that there were serious questions about Joseph’s guilt and his ability to represent himself at trial. “Because of the gross injustice that would result if an innocent man were sentenced to death, O’Dell’s substantial federal claims can and should receive careful consideration from the federal court with habeas corpus jurisdiction over the case,” the statement read.17

  Joseph finally had his evidentiary hearing, and a federal judge ruled in his favor, saying the blood on his shirt and jacket were not a conclusive match to the victim’s. However, in 1996, the Fourth Circuit Court said it was irrelevant that the bloodstains didn’t match, essentially shutting down the DNA angle.

  Another thing that Sr. Helen learned on her journey with Joseph was that district attorneys, often with the hope of furthering their careers, frequently do not tell juries that instead of the death penalty, they can choose life without parole for the accused. Most juries do not want putting someone to death on their consciences. But they also want to ensure that the perpetrator cannot be put back out on the streets. Studies show that when life without parole is an option, the number of death sentences drops.

  The US Supreme Court ruled in 1994 that in some cases juries must be told that they can sentence a person to life without parole. Since this was not the case during Joseph’s sentencing, his lawyers petitioned the court to consider that aspect of his case, but they ruled it was not retroactive to his case. Joseph once again asked the state of Virginia to conduct DNA tests on other pieces of evidence to demonstrate his innocence, but the state refused. Joseph’s execution date was set for July 23, 1997 at 9:00 p.m.

  During the time that Joseph and Lori visited, wrote letters, and worked together, they fell in love and decided to marry. This changed her status at the prison from paralegal working on his case to girlfriend. There were more restrictions on visits by girlfriends. The day before his execution, Lori and Sr. Helen visited with Joseph. The wedding was scheduled for the following afternoon, but Lori worried prison officials wouldn’t allow her to return. As his spiritual advisor Sr. Helen could make a return visit in the evening. During that time she delivered a personal message to Joseph from Mother Teresa. The nun from Kolkata also called Virginia Governor George Allen on Joseph’s behalf saying killing was wrong, and it was against God’s commandments, no matter who or why they were doing it. That cheered Joseph, and they prayed together.

  The last days and hours are always tense, and the condemned and his family get little sleep, Sr. Helen says. “The one thing I know about making it through these last days and hours is that grace never comes ahead of time, it unfurls under you as you need it.”18

  On the afternoon of his execution date, Lori and Joseph married in a brief death house ceremony. Prison staff strip-searched both Lori and Sr. Helen before they entered the death house. Once inside, the minister, Sr. Helen, Joseph, and Lori formed a circle during the ceremony; both the minister and Sr. Helen held Joseph and Lori’s hands because the two weren’t allowed to touch. The newlyweds were allowed to visit together for a time, but then Sr. Helen and Lori had to leave. Sister Helen could return later.

  At 4:00 p.m. they learned that Governor Allen refused Joseph’s petition for clemency. Only a stay from the US Supreme Court could save him. Sister Helen and his lawyers headed back to the prison to be with Joseph. From where she sat in the death house, she could see the death chamber and the gurney through a window. “There it is, cross-shaped, with arms angled downward—Joe O’Dell’s modern, high-tech crucifix. It has a lot of straps, folded neatly across the top of the gurney,” she wrote.19

  Sister Helen was allowed into the death chamber with Joseph while guards strapped him down. Then she moved to a room next door where witnesses would watch the execution through glass. “A guard holds the telephone for Joe to say his last words: ‘This is the happiest day of my life. I married Lori today,’ ” Sr. Helen recalls Joseph saying. He also told Governor Allen he was killing an innocent man and apologized to the victim’s son. “Eddie Schartner, I’m sorry about your mother, but I didn’t kill her. I hope you find out the truth.” And finally he said, “Lori, I will love you through eternity.”20

  In 1996 the people of Italy, who are largely against the death penalty, became interested in Joseph’s case—even Pope John Paul II weighed in. On the night of Joseph’s execution, an estimated five million people in Italy stayed up until 3:00 a.m. to hear of Joseph’s fate. An Italian parliament member had invited Lori to speak around the country about Joseph’s case. After his death in 1997, the town of Palermo, Italy, paid to transport Joseph’s body to its city for burial. Sister Helen and Lori traveled with the body, but before reaching Palermo they stopped in Rome for an impromptu private meeting with Pope John Paul II.

  In a comic moment, Sr. Helen looked at what she was wearing and panicked. She couldn’t meet the Holy Father wearing pants. “In a small parlor, right next to the large room where the pope will come to meet us, I accomplish the quickest change of clothes in my life.” She donned pantyhose, which were uncooperative in the summer heat, a blouse, skirt, and her cross around her neck. But the chain of the cross snapped, so she tied the chain in a knot, threw it over her head, and ran to the next room. What about her hair? “Forget the hair, the pope doesn’t give a hoot about women’s hair,” she told herself.21

  A few minutes later, Pope John Paul II shuffled in. He looked very tired, Sr. Helen recalls. “He walks right up to us, to Lori first, takes her hand in his, and says, ‘I prayed for Joseph at Mass,’ ” Sr. Helen wrote in The Death of Innocents. Sister Helen reached out her hand to him and thanked him for speaking out against the death penalty and for helping the church embrace opposition to it. “He nods, blesses me, and kisses me on the forehead. The burdens that he carries are written in his face and his stooped shoulders. As he turns to leave, I say to him, ‘Take care of yourself.’ ”22

  That was her first meeting with a pope, but not her first interaction with Pope John Paul II.

  Chapter Six

  The Church and the Death Penalty

  In February 2016, Pope Francis called for a moratorium on the death penalty during the Jubilee of Mercy, which ended in November 2016. He said the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” applied to the guilty as well as the innocent. The Catholic Church has not always spoken so boldly and clearly against the death penalty. But Sr. Helen helped change that practice with a letter to Pope John Paul II in January of 1997. That letter influenced change in the church’s teaching on the death penalty as outlined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

  In 1997 Lori Urs, the volunteer who assisted and married death-row inmate Joseph O’Dell, invited Sr. Helen to accompany her on a speaking tour of Italy. Italian Parliament member Luciano Neri had invited Lori to speak in various cities about O’Dell’s case. The Italian people were captured by O’Dell’s case and lobbied
for him. Dead Man Walking was a success in Italy, and Lori told Sr. Helen the Italian Parliament was arranging a visit to the Vatican with a possible meeting with John Paul II.

  That same year, Sr. Helen received an invitation to meet the pope in person at the Vatican with some anti-death penalty lawyers, but declined to go because her closest friend was dying. Instead, she drafted a letter on January 1, and the lawyers delivered it to someone from the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, who handed it directly to the pontiff on January 22.

  “They said the pope read every word of your letter,” Sr. Helen recalls.1

  John Paul II had just been given the final draft of the second edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the universal tool that outlines the church’s beliefs and is used for teaching those beliefs around the world. He was reviewing it for approval. Two years prior, in 1995, John Paul II had released Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), an encyclical letter—a document promulgated by popes that carries the most weight in terms of importance—on the church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life. In this encyclical he left a door open for use of the death penalty. He wrote:

  There is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that [the death penalty] be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God’s plan for man and society. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is “to redress the disorder caused by the offence.” Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfils the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people’s safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behavior and be rehabilitated.

  It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.

  In any event, the principle set forth in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church remains valid: “If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.”2

  John Paul II had pushed the death penalty to the very edge and said, if we have a way to keep society safe, which we do, we don’t need to resort to killing. The death penalty should be rare if not nonexistent. However, Sr. Helen saw those words as a way for people to support the death penalty because they would quote the pope and say, “Well, he didn’t rule it out altogether.”

  In her letter to John Paul II, Sr. Helen explained that his words would be “quoted to death” and that governments would always claim it’s an “absolute necessity to kill the person.”3 She was right. In her home state of Louisiana, New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick Sr. quoted the pope’s words during a BBC interview.

  She also questioned John Paul II on the dignity of the death of the one killed. In the United States and beyond, those subjected to the death penalty were often rendered defenseless ahead of time. In the case of those executed in the United States, prior to their death officials moved them to a waiting room near the “death chamber,” as Sr. Helen called it, with the lights on twenty-four hours a day in a room with no windows and little contact with the outside world. They were defenseless. “Where is the dignity in this death?” Sr. Helen wrote. “It’s the intentional killing of someone rendered defenseless.”

  “What all of the men I have accompanied (three) have said when at last they died was, ‘I am so tired.’ Conscious human beings anticipate death and die a thousand times before they die, no matter what the ‘humane’ method of death may be, even lethal injection, which is supposed to just ‘put you to sleep,’ ” she wrote to the pope.4

  Governments can’t be trusted to be fair in deciding whom to execute, she told John Paul II. “From the time of St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the first to argue that the ‘wicked’ might be ‘coerced with the sword,’ we Catholics have upheld the right of governments to take life in defense of the common good. But, as you point out in Evangelium Vitae, the development in societies of penal institutions now offers a way for societies to protect themselves from violent offenders without imitating the very violence they claim to abhor . . . How can any government, vulnerable to undue influence of the rich and powerful and subject to every kind of prejudice, have the purity and integrity to select certain of its citizens for punishment by death?”5

  She also laid out the emphasis of prosecutors on the poor when seeking the death penalty.

  “The vast majority of people on death row in the U.S.—85 percent—are chosen for death because they killed white people; whereas when people of color are killed (fully 50 percent of all homicides) not only is the death penalty seldom sought, but often there is not even vigorous prosecution of such cases.”6

  Seeing the faces of the condemned and watching them die made their humanity all too apparent, she wrote to the pope. “ ‘I just pray that God holds up my legs,’ each one of the condemned said to me as they were about to walk to their deaths, and from the depths of my soul, from Christ burning within me, I found myself saying to them, ‘Look at me. Look at my face. I will be the face of Christ for you.’ ”7

  Shortly after her letter reached John Paul II, Sr. Helen received word that the Holy See delayed publication of the second edition of the Catechism because there was something about the death penalty. “I went, ‘No! It couldn’t be happening! Is it possible?’ ”8

  Indeed it was possible.

  When the Catechism came out, this is what it said regarding the death penalty:

  Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

  If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.

  Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm—without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself—the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae 56).9

  John Paul II removed the reference to allowing capital punishment for “grave and grievous crimes.” Sister Helen was thrilled.

  When John Paul II visited St. Louis in 1999, he again called for an end to the death penalty. During his homily on January 27 in the Trans World Dome in St. Louis he said, “A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform. I renew the appeal I made most recently at Christmas for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary.”10

  Some years earlier the Catholics bishops in the United States had begun backing away from full support of the death penalt
y. In 1974 the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement saying, “by a substantial majority, [we] voted to declare its opposition to capital punishment.”

  In 1980 the US bishops’ conference released another statement on capital punishment that further questioned its use. They nodded to church teaching allowing for states to decide over the executions, but questioned whether conditions exist for it in modern society. Taking a life denies the offender an opportunity to reform, and studies have not “given conclusive evidence that would justify the imposition of the death penalty on a few individuals as a means of preventing others from committing crimes,” the bishops wrote.

  They continued, “Abolition of the death penalty shows society that we believe that the cycle of violence can be broken; that every person is unique and valuable in the eyes of God—no matter what their transgressions; that only God has the right to take a life; and that it mirrors most of the teaching of Jesus. However, in the same paragraph as the last point, the bishops pointed to early Church teaching that said Christians could be involved in executing the offenders as long as they weren’t ministers of the Church.”11

  In the 1980 statement, the bishops even acknowledged flaws in administering the death penalty, such as biases and racism inherent to the US legal system, but especially the chance for that system to make a mistake.

  “Because death terminates the possibilities of conversion and growth and support that we can share with each other, we regard a mistaken infliction of the death penalty with a special horror, even while we retain our trust in God’s loving mercy,” the bishops wrote.

  Death penalty trials involve lengthy appeals, which hurt both the families of victims and the accused. In the end it doesn’t benefit anyone. They continued: “We believe that the actual carrying out of the death penalty brings with it great and avoidable anguish for the criminal, for his family and loved ones, and for those who are called on to perform or to witness the execution.”12