E-Mail This Article to a Friend Still walking Almost a decade after the adaptation of her book Dead Man Walking debuted in theaters, Sister Helen Prejean continues her fight against the death penalty BY TAMARA WIEDER

APRIL 5, 1984 — the day Patrick Sonnier was executed in the electric chair in Louisiana — marked a turning point for Sister Helen Prejean, the first time the nun had accompanied a convict to his death. The experience sparked in Prejean a fierce opposition to capital punishment and spawned her first book, 1993’s Dead Man Walking. The 1995 film adaptation, starring Susan Sarandon as Prejean, received four Oscar nominations in 1996.

Nearly 20 years later, January 12, 2003 — the day Illinois governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of all 156 inmates on his state’s death row, saying, "I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death" — was another watershed moment in Prejean’s decades-long battle against the death penalty. But it wasn’t the end of her fight, by a long shot. In her latest book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions (Random House), Prejean again takes on the issue of capital punishment, this time introducing readers to convicted murderers Dobie Williams and Joseph O’Dell, both of whom Prejean believed to be innocent — and both of whose executions she witnessed.

In fact, over the years, 117 wrongfully convicted people have been released from death row — all the more evidence, Prejean argues, that the death penalty is a flawed and inhumane system of punishment. Combing through race and politics, prosecutorial ambition and misguided Supreme Court justices, Prejean’s The Death of Innocents covers the myriad ways the country’s death penalty is a dangerous failure.

Q: I read the book and it’s pretty incredible —

A: Isn’t it incredible? That we’re in the 21st century and all this is happening in our country?

Q: And it’s amazing how many people don’t really realize what’s going on.

A: No. They have no way of getting close unless people like me, who’ve been in there, are going to tell them about it.

Q: Tell me why this book, and why now.

A: I’d already accompanied three people to execution. And the question was never innocence or guilt. You know, Dead Man Walking raised the moral question: even if people are guilty, is this what we want to do as a society? But then, lo and behold, I’m with Joseph O’Dell, who’s executed, and I believe he’s innocent, and then I’m with Dobie Williams, who’s executed, and I believe he’s innocent, so I said, I’ve got to write this book. I didn’t even know I was going to write the book. And then the more I understood about both Dobie’s case and Joseph O’Dell’s, it’s the courts that are killing people, because they set up the appeals [process] in a way that procedure trumps justice. They never open up the cases again, they rubber-stamp them.

[Justice Antonin Scalia] had given his constitutional thought and his theology at a conference in Chicago, and it was the first time I really had his thought laid out before me. I’d always heard he was so brilliant. I don’t think he’s brilliant at all. I mean, the theology is absolutely appalling. Like a fundamentalist preacher right out of Arkansas. Romans 13, government executes the wrath of God on evildoers. I mean, just un-thought-through, unreflective, truly not what Jesus represented at all. I was appalled when I really began to descend into this thought, and how he approached the Constitution. I mean, did not the framers also call for constitutional protections of due process and effectiveness of counsel and a jury of your peers? All of which he just disregards. The more you descend into his thinking, the scarier it gets, because finally you realize he doesn’t allow for any mitigating. You know, in Atkins [vs. Virginia], he says the mentally retarded, they know right from wrong. Doesn’t matter if you’re a juvenile, nothing matters. [It’s] this kind of myopic, individualistic responsibility for the act. He never takes context: don’t tell me they’re poor, don’t tell me they’re this. He sees all that as an excuse, because he has this extreme view that any individual at any moment should be responding to God’s grace, and can choose always to do good over evil. He doesn’t understand about currents and whirlpools and rivers and things that suck you under. He gives no acknowledgement of culture or families that are broken or an education that only allows you to read at a third-grade level when you graduate, so you can’t get a job. So I descended, and then wrote [the book] as best I could to help ordinary people understand that these constitutional issues are not just for experts; it’s our Constitution, it’s our country. I worked really hard, working with really good people, to help me hone the arguments and state them in a way that ordinary people can come on the journey.

Q: What do you want people to feel when they read the book?

A: First horror. Shock. Sadness. Then anger. And then: no, this can’t be allowed to happen. And then to act. Enough emotion to act. Sign the moratorium petition, or write to their legislator, or do whatever they need to do to begin to say, I don’t need these killings in my name. We can be safe without this. I mean, just look at what’s going on in New York [where the 1995 death-penalty statute was declared unconstitutional in 2004]. In the South these people say, Well, these New York people are supposed to be so smart; if they’re so smart, how could they have written a state statute that didn’t even pass constitutional muster? And look, you know that’s all about politics. You know it was all about [George] Pataki running for governor and trying to get his little edge, claiming that it would deter crime. I hate to see that. I hate to see the politics that are in the death penalty, of using human lives to get political points to win elections.