Dead Man Walking

1. Please discuss Sr. Helen's understanding of her vocation. How does she describe the reform movement within the Catholic Church that brought her to St Thomas? What is her definition of social justice and of the Gospel warrant for the work of the Sisters of St Joseph of Medaille?

2. What conflicting emotions torment Sr. Helen when she becomes spiritual adviser to a killer? How and when does she show empathy for the families of the murder victims (pp.229-231)?

3. Why did Pat and Eddie Sonnier murder David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque?Whom do you believe was most responsible for the crime? In your opinion, do the crimes of rape and murder merit the death penalty? Are they crimes against the state? Is electrocution the most humane way of administering capital punishment?

4. Please comment on Sr. Helen's confession of a merciful God of steadfast love on p.21

I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with blood of those who have fallen victim to God’s Avengers. Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God’s authority and God’s blessing. I do not believe in such a God.

5. According to Millard, how do race and class undermine the fair administration of justice in Southern states such as Louisiana (pp.43-48)? In your opinion, is justice color-blind in Northern states such as Michigan? Please comment on Sunday's Free Press on incarceration in states such as Kansas http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008807130485

6. Where do you stand on the dispute between Archbishop Hannan, the local ordinary in New Orleans, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on the question of the death penalty (p.54)? http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/national/dea.shtml
Which position is more in keeping with the themes of Catholic Social Teaching http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/projects/socialteaching/excerpt.shtml? Which position honors the traditional Church teaching on subsidiarity http://www.osjspm.org/subsidiarity.aspx How does the George Bernard Shaw quote on p.100 about Chaplain Stogumber give credence to both positions?

7. Sr Helen refers repeatedly to the essay "Reflections on the Guillotine" by Albert Camus. Please comment on the following excerpt in light of Sr. Helen's assertion that "the death penalty is potentially relevant to only a very small pool of the 14 million-plus "index crimes" committed in this country every year." (p.129)

Could not justice concede to the criminal the same weakness in which society finds a sort of permanent extenuating circumstance for itself? Can the jury decently say: “If I kill you by mistake, you will forgive me when you consider the weaknesses of our common nature. But I am condemning you to death without considering those weaknesses or that nature"? There is a solidarity of ill men in error and aberration. Must that solidarity operate for the tribunal and be denied the accused? No, and if justice has any meaning in this world, it means nothing but the recognition of that solidarity; it cannot, by its very essence, divorce itself from compassion. Compassion, of course, can in this instance be but awareness of a common suffering and not a frivolous indulgence paying no attention to the sufferings and rights of the victim. Compassion does not exclude punishment, but it suspends the final condemnation. Compassion loathes the definitive, irreparable measure that does an injustice to mankind as a whole because of failing to take into account the wretchedness of the common condition. http://pewforum.org/deathpenalty/resources/reader/21.php

Please hold this thought in tension with the numerous crimes for which the Bible prescribes death as punishment
Dead Man Walking by Sr Helen Prejean (p.195)

8. Why does Sr. Helen keep her eyes open during Robert Willie's execution? How does she re-imagine her role as witness and advocate? How does hardship shape her transformation? Whom does she forgive? By whom is she forgiven (p.245)?

9. In light of the total work, how is the opening quote from Huck Finn a testament to Sr. Helen's ministry

I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come: for I’d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone. – Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

10. Please highlight those elements within the narrative that make Sr. Helen's journey from innocence into experience unforgettable. Why do you think this story lends itself so easily to stage and screen adaptations?

Some passages worth considering



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17845521 (This I Believe: "Living My Prayer")
Dead Man Walking by Sr. Helen Prejean

Opening Quote:

“I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come: for I’d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth, if I left it alone.” – Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain


p.3 I had also learned that the death penalty in the United States has always most rigorously applied in Southern states—mostly toward those who kill whites.

p.4 Almost all the killings here in St Thomas seem to erupt from the explosive mixture of dead-end futures, drugs, and guns. But when Chava describes what Sonnier has done, my blood chills. On November 4, 1977, he and his younger brother Eddie, abducted from a lovers’ lane a teenage couple, David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque. They raped the girl, forced the young people to lie facedown, and shot them in the head.

p.5 I came to St. Thomas as part of a reform movement in the Catholic Church, seeking to harness religious faith to social justice. In 1971, the worldwide synod of bishops had declared justice a “constitutive” part of the Christian gospel.

p.5 The mandate to practice social justice is unsettling because taking on the struggles of the poor invariably means challenging the wealthy and those who serve their interests

p.5 In 1980 my religious community, the Sisters of St Jose[h of Medaille, had made a commitment to “stand on the side of the poor,” and I had assented, but reluctantly. I resisted this recasting of the faith of my childhood, where what counted was a personal relationship with God, inner peace, kindness to others, and heaven when this life was done. I didn’t want to struggle with politics and economics. We were nuns, after all, not social workers, and some realities in life were, for better or worse, rather fixed—like the gap between rich and poor.

p.6 Something in me must have been building toward this moment because there was a flash and I realized that my spiritual life had been too ethereal, too disconnected. I left the meeting and began seeking out the poor.

p.6 I did not then consider the “colored” people who worked for us as poor. They were just, well, “colored” people doing what “colored” people did, which was working for white people, and living where ”colored” people lived, which was usually in shacks out in the country or, in “nigger town” in the city.

p.8 “Well, now, Sister, we know drugs are going to pop up somewhere in every city. At least we know where they are.”

p.11 Before, I had asked God to right the wrongs and comfort the suffering. Now I know—really know—that God entrusts those tasks to us.

p.13 If he were allowed to work, his pay would be two and a half cents an hour. (The abolition of slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution does not extend to the incarcerated)

p.14 Federal court review of capital cases results in a high percentage of reversals—between 1976 and 1990, 40 to 60 percent of such cases were reversed

p.17 Quote from Jeremiah (31:15)
“A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and lamenting: Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were no more.”

p.18 I sense the words he does not say, a reality he scrupulously omits. He never talks about the death the state has in store for him.

[descriptions of electrocutions; only man towalk away from an electric chair alive was 17 year old Willie Francis…eventually executed after Supreme Court split decision]

p.21 The victims are dead and the killer is alive and I am befriending the killer….Have I betrayed his victims? Do I have to take sides? I am acutely aware that my beliefs about the death penalty have never been tested by personal loss

p.21 I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power torture and kill. Te paths of history are stained with blood of those who have fallen victim to God’s Avengers. Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God’s authority and God’s blessing. I don not believe in such a God.

p.23 [friend or spiritual adviser] I have no idea what difference the category will make. I later learn that a spiritual adviser may remain with the condemned man in the death house after 6:00 PM, when relatives and friends must leave. The spiritual adviser is allowed to witness the execution

p.24 [Angola] In antebellum days three cotton plantations occupied these 18,000 acres, worked by slaves from Angola in Africa. The name Angola stuck. Since its beginnings in 1901, abuse, corruption, rage, and reform have studded its history

p.24 [Heel-string Gang] 1n 1951 eight inmates...inaugurated the first reform at Angola by slitting their Achilles tendons with razor blades rather than go to the “long line” in the fields, where they were systematically beaten or shot by guards

p.25 [prison chaplain] He is strictly an old-school, pre-Vatican Catholic, and he shows me a pamphlet on sexual purity and modesty of dress that he distributes to the prisoners
dress code for nuns; flouting authority
p.31 For me, the un-negotiable moral bedrock on which a society must be built is that killing by anyone, under any conditions, cannot be tolerated. And that includes the government.

p.43 In Louisiana it’s unusual for a black man to be executed for killing another black man. Although the majority of victims of homicide in the state are black (90 percent of homicide victims in New Orleans in 1991), 75 percent of death-row inmates are there for killing whites. And when blacks do get death for killing other blacks, their victims typically fit a certain demographic profile: police or security guards, children, more than one person, or, more rarely, women.

p.47 It’s not a fluke, Millard says, that 99 percent of death-row inmates are poor. “They get the kind of defense they pay for.”

p.48 …prosecutors, judges, and juries, most of whom are white, are far more outraged when white people are murdered than when black people are. “White people identify more with other white people, you know what I mean?” he says

p.49 They don’t call Southern states the “Death Belt” for nothing” Millard says. Four states—Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, and Florida—carry out two thirds of all U.S. executions.

p.50 …race, poverty, and geography determine who gets the death penalty—if the victim is white, if the defendant is poor, and whether or not the local D.A. is willing to plea-bargain.

p.54 This had so dismayed the pro-death-penalty Catholic D.A. of New Orleans, Harry Connick, Sr. that he asked Archbishop Hannan “ as official spokesman for the Catholic Church” to give his position on the death penalty in writing. The archbishop had obliged him, setting forth a pro-capital-punishment position and assuring Catholics that they “ can in good conscience endorse capital punishment.” In the letter, which Connick brings to first degree murder trials and reads to jurors, the archbishop also asserts that “ the position of the U.S. Catholic Bishops does not express the official position of this archdiocese.”

p.62 [prayer]
Just this space, this time now, not yet in the rapids, not yet in the fire of debate, the points and counterpoints. Only me here and , you, God of truth, God of life, give me the words, essential words, words to pierce the conscience, to turn the heart.

p.80 words to "Be Not Afraid"

p.100 [Chaplain Stogumber in George Bernard Shaw's Joan of Arc]...I did a very cruel thing once because I did not know what cruelty was like . I had not seen it, you know. That is the great thing: you must see it. And then you are redeemed and saved..."

p.108 Letters [of outrage] to the editor

p.119 [Robert Lee Willie] ...there's a child sitting inside this tough macho dude ."

p.121 I run the fingers of my conscience along the fabric of this accusation [emotionally involved] and feel for the hard knots and tears that guilt brings.

p.123 How is it, I wonder, that the mandate and example of Jesus, so clearly urging compassion and nonviolence, could so quickly become accommodated?

...I can't accept that God has fits of rage and goes about trucking in retaliation

[Camus] solidarity against death and suffering

p.129 Along with media, politicians also distort public perception of crime...The truth is that the death penalty is potentially relevant to only a very small pool of the 14 million-plus "index crimes" committed in this country every year

p.133 "Great as the sea is thy sorrow"

p.147 I guess everybody's got a code of evil, a line beyond which they consider redemption impossible

p.162 Ain't nobody ever called me no son of God before

p.181 Look, no matter what reasons you give to justify killing criminals, when you're there and you see it, when you watch it happen with your own eyes and are part of it, you feel dirty. You're killing a man who can't defend himself and that is just as wrong as what he did.

p.183 [Robert Lee Willie] " The electric chair don't worry me, man. I haven't read much about it but I know electricity will fry your ass. I'm going willingly. I'll hold my head up. I've got pride. I don't run from nothin'"

p.193 John 10:17-18

p.195 numerous crimes for which the Bible prescribes death as punishment

p.197 the death penalty costs too much. Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons

p.201 Psalm 51 (Miserere)

p.205 Ignatius of Loyola, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis of Assisi-- every saint has taught the paradox that lies at the heart of the spiritual life: to love passionately but with freedom of spirit that does not cling even to life itself.

p.211 He looks at me and winks, and then they strap his chin, lower the mask, and kill hi. This time I do not close my eyes. I watch everything.

p.229 But I also realize I'm protecting myself. I've been avoiding the victims because I'm afraid they'll turn on me and attack me. I fear their anger and rejection. Plus, I feel so helpless in face of their suffering.

p.231 Late have I loved thee-- the words of St Augustine in his Confessions well up within me

p.238 [victims' families] Some talk of considering suicide, of staying in bed and sleeping, of numbing the pain with alcohol or drugs. They talk of confusion and bewilderment. But mostly they talk about carrying on



p.241 [black women] Seasoned sufferers, they have grace, tenacity, a great capacity to absorb pain and loss and yet endure. God makes a way out of no way. For these women this is no empty, pious sentiment. It is the air they breathe, the bread they eat, the path they walk.

p.245 Forgiveness is never going to be easy. Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won.

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