Sister Helen Prejean likens her book, Dead Man Walking – which has been the inspiration behind an Academy Award-winning Hollywood film and now an opera – to a child.
‘It’s like a child – it has a life and it goes where it wants to go. I’ve been amazed,’ says Sister Helen of the book’s success.
The account was based on her experiences accompanying convicted murders on death row to their executions. She has now acted as the spiritual adviser to five inmates who have been executed: Elmo Patrick Sonnier (electric chair) in Louisiana 1984; Robert Lee Willie (electric chair) Louisiana 1984; Willie Celestine (electric chair) Louisiana 1987; Joseph O’Dell III (lethal injection) Virginia 1997; Dobie Gillis Williams (lethal injection) Louisiana 1999.
First published in 1993, the book was on the New York Times best seller list for 31 weeks and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It also became the basis for a film by Tim Robbins, starring Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen and Sean Penn as the death row inmate. Sarandon won an Oscar for Best Actress, while nominations also went to Robbins for Best Director, Penn for Best Actor and Bruce Springsteen’s Dead Man Walkin’ for Best Song.
For Sister Helen, it was important to work with people she trusted to tell her story accurately. She worked closely with Robbins and Sarandon on the script for the film, explaining that one of the first things Robbins wanted to nut out was the nature of the relationship between Sister Helen and the prisoner, known as Matthew Poncelet in the film.
‘People would easily say, “Oh, there’s a man and a woman, and there’s supposedly this nun celibacy thing, so there must be something going on between those two”,’ Sister Helen says, explaining that the script kept true to the platonic relationship. But also, she wanted the murder victims’ families portrayed in a balanced way to reflect their struggles, not just ‘caricatured’ as people baying for blood and revenge.
‘And then [there is] the conflict that I still am in, whenever I face a victim’s family when I’m spiritual adviser to somebody on death row who has killed their child,’ she adds.
When it came to her book being translated into an opera, by composer Jake Heggie and playwright Terrence McNally, Sister Helen says she immediately trusted both Heggie and McNally to ‘get redemption at the heart of the story’.
‘Jake was the one I got to know best out of the two,’ she notes. ‘We were on the phone a lot…Jake would call me and say listen to this, I think I’ve written something really wonderful here.’ One of the most moving parts of the opera, which Sister Helen has seen nearly every time it has been performed across the USA, is when the mother of the death row inmate and the murder victim’s family are singing simultaneously. ‘I really did turn it over to them [Heggie and McNally], and my trust was well-founded,’ she affirms.
Sister Helen is passionate about abolishing the death penalty in her home country, where 38 of the 50 US states provide for the death penalty in law. Since Dead Man Walking was published, she has travelled across the US and abroad, independently and alongside the opera productions, lecturing and educating the public about the death penalty. But as well as accompanying inmates on death row, she also counsels the families of murder victims as well.
In her new book, set for release early 2004, she seeks to point out how flawed the death penalty system is in the USA.
‘There’s a tremendous problem now with the death penalty, and I want to show in this book, about the innocent people being thrown onto death row along with the guilty,’ she says. The book, under the working title The Machinery of Death, tells the stories of Joseph O’Dell and Dobie Williams. She also takes on Supreme Court judge Antonian Scallia, who, she points out, is a Catholic and ‘goes for the death penalty every chance he gets.’
The number of possibly innocent prisoners on death row has gained considerable coverage in the last decade. In particular, it was brought to light by a group of journalism students from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Over the past decade, investigative journalism students at the institution have repeatedly uncovered evidence that has proved the innocence of inmates on death row in Illinois, and resulted in their release. The lecturer responsible. Professor David Protess, recently received an award honouring himself and his students for their work, from The Newspaper Guild. In January this year, the then Governor of the US state of Illinois, George Ryan, pardoned four death row prisoners and commuted all 167 other death sentences in Illinois. Previously, in January 2000, Ryan declared a moratorium after the 13th death row prisoner was found to be wrongfully convicted since the state resumed executions in 1977. In the same period, 12 other prisoners were executed.
Sister Helen points out that states like Virginia and Louisiana, which are responsible for a large number of executions, are also former slave states; that many defendants are poor and cannot afford good defense; and that the majority of those executed have been convicted of killing white people. Facts and figures on the Death Penalty Information Centre website confirm this.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International records indicate that more than half the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty (112), while it is still retained by 83. The organisation also indicates that 107 people have been released from death row in the United States since 1973.
Abolishing the death penalty, Sister Helen says, is ‘something that countries are beginning to respect’, especially in light of the international Human Rights treaties for the abolition of the death penalty. ‘That’s the way of the future,’ Sister Helen says, adding in her Southern drawl, ‘so I’m just trying to get my country on the wave!’
For further information on the death penalty in the United States and Internationally, visit the Amnesty International website, or for comprehensive information on USA statistics, visit the Death Penalty Information Centre
