Sister Helen Prejean applauded West Virginians who have
maintained their death penalty-free policies for more than fifty years now
despite being surrounded by states who employ capital punishment including
Virginia, notoriously referred to as one of the “killing states.”
“I don’t know how West Virginia
did it,” Prejean says to an attentive audience. “I call you like a little
energizer bunny for human rights, because you have the death penalty all around
you in West Virginia and you never went for it. I don’t know why. I’m sure it’s
because the people are so wonderful. You got good people, salt of the earth
people.”
A self-proclaimed southern storyteller, Prejean told a crown
of more than 250 people about how 30 years ago she came to work towards abolishing
capital punishment. She described her experiences as a spiritual advisor to
death row inmate Patrick Sonnier that lead her to write the book Dead Man Walking.
“You know William Faulkner, when he got the Nobel Prize for
literature—a southern author—and in his speech, when he got the Nobel Prize, he
said the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with
itself. Well here’s a human heart in conflict. My own.”
Prejean also talked about her second book published in 2004,
Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account
of Wrongful Executions. In it she describes more encounters with death-row
inmates including time spent as a spiritual advisor to Joseph O’Dell in
Virginia, a man many now believe was wrongfully convicted. Prejean described
how thousands of Italians inundated the Virginian Governor with letters trying
to convince him to stay the execution. She says even Mother Theresa called.
“He had Mother Theresa on the phone! Mother Theresa of
Calcutta! The people in the office—I wasn’t there—but the people in the office
said he was holding the phone and saying, ‘but Mother…but Mother,’ and she’s
letting him have it! We think, Mother Theresa, servant of the poor, but when it
came to killing a human being, she’s letting him have it on the phone!”
Prejean said it was through this experience that she gained
an audience with Pope John Paul II. She and many other Catholics appealed to
the pope to take a stronger stance against the death penalty. Soon after, the
pope did change the wording of the Catholic catechism, so that according to
Catholic doctrine, the death penalty was no longer an acceptable form of
punishment.
Over the years, Prejean says the public has been conflicted
when grappling with the subject of capital punishment.
“Most people have this ambivalence, on the one hand,
outraged over the crime, want to see justice done, but on the other hand, know
that you can barely trust government to get the potholes filled much less set
up a system where you’re gonna decide who lives and who dies. And more and more
now we’re conscious of the mistakes.”
“139 lucky people who’ve been able to come off of death row
that could show their innocence—but how many people are gone?” Prejean wonders.
“Because it’s only poor people selected. So you have innocent and guilty mixed
up together, and that’s impacting the consciousness of the American public.”
Prejean says since the days she began working to educate the
public about the realities of capital punishment, she and others have seen
changes in policies throughout the county.
“Beginning in 2001, death penalty sentences were cut in
half. Prosecutors are seeking it less, juries are voting for it less. Even
Texas, like Harris County in Houston used to get 48 death sentences a year. And
now that there’s life without parole, and the jury has to be told that, even
when it’s a horrendous crime, they don’t want it in their hands that they’re
killing a fellow human being.”
“And they know that we can be safe,” she continues. “The
public can be safe because they will really get life without parole. The public
can be safe without imitating the killing! When you think of it, we’re letting
their behavior determine how we respond. Where else in the criminal justice system
do you do that?”
Prejean’s next stop is California to help push Proposition
34, which would abolish the death penalty. She says 700 people in the state are
on death row waiting an average of 20 years for their executions, and if the
death penalty is abolished, California stands to save a billion dollars in the
first five years.
“It’s counter intuitive that the death penalty could be more
expensive than somebody in prison for life without parole, but every fiscal
study that’s been done and even the prosecutors themselves say that a capital
case is the Cadillac of the criminal justice system.”
Prejean gave two talks while in Wheeling;
one at Wheeling Jesuit
University, and the other at her
sister congregation’s house at Mount St. Joseph Chapel.