Dead Man Walking

“If someone I love should be killed, I know I would feel rage, loss, grief, helplessness, perhaps for the rest of my life. It would be arrogant to think I can predict how I would respond to such a disaster. But Jesus Christ, whose way of life I try to follow, refused to meet hate with hate and violence with violence. I pray for the strength to be like him. 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 to torture and kill.”

As strongly as Prejean believes that the death penalty is unjust, she is modest in her own views and those of others. She recognizes that her experiences have allowed her to view violent crime dispassionately and analytically. As strong a case she might make regarding the structural injustices of capital punishment, that may not move someone with a deep emotional urge to wish death upon another. Prejean concludes that this does not mean that moral convictions are fundamentally emotional, only that emotions present their own kind of moral truth, which can be extremely difficult to dislodge.

“The reality of this waiting place for death is difficult to grasp. It’s not a ward in a hospital where sick people wait to die. People here wait to be taken out of their cells and killed. This is the United States of America and these are government officials in charge and there’s a law sanctioning and upholding what is going on here, so it all must be legitimate and just, or so one compartment of my brain tells me, the part that studied civics in high school, the part that wants to trust my country would never violate the human rights of its citizens.”

In her initial encounter with death row, Prejean is immediately struck by the absurd need to maintain a façade of legitimacy and even sanitation. A hospital might present an unpleasant contrast between the smell of cleaning products with rows of ill patients, but Prejean finds that there is something more disturbing about a perfectly healthy man whose government is preparing to kill him.

“Long in advance the condemned man knows that he is going to be killed and that the only thing that can save him is a reprieve…In any case, he cannot intervene, make a plea outside himself, or convince. Everything goes on outside him. He is no longer a man but a thing waiting to be handled by his executioners…This explains the odd submissiveness that is customary in the condemned at the moment of their execution.”

This is a quotation from Albert Camus’s “Reflections on the Guillotine” (1957), a foundational text in death penalty abolitionism. Here Camus explores the extreme degree of dehumanization facing the condemned, so that they no longer behave in a way associated with a typical, rational person. They have been so thoroughly stripped of autonomy over their own fate that to resist in the face of such overwhelming systemic pressure would require resilience beyond the reach of most people. Of course, a person who no longer acts in recognizably human ways may then be easier to kill without doing undue harm to the conscience of the executioners.

“[Millard] says that if Pat Sonnier had lots of money, he would have gotten himself a crackerjack attorney, who would hire top-notch investigators, a ballistics expert, a psychologist to compile profiles of ‘desirable’ jurors, ‘and you can be sure he wouldn’t be sitting on death row today. That’s why you’re never going to find a rich person on death row.’ And often, he says, if a D.A. knows he’s up against a top-notch defense attorney, he’ll think twice about prosecuting for the ‘max’ and maybe losing, and so be much more amenable to a plea bargain-reducing the charge in exchange for admission of guilt—and there won’t even be a trial.”

Social structures do not necessarily require anybody’s specific intention in order for them to work a certain way. The criminal justice system, especially as it pertains to capital punishment, may very well be staffed by mostly hard working, honest people doing their best. But Prejean argues that, as long as the imperatives of the system favor quick resolutions to deal with an overwhelming number of cases, and thereby stops only to consider the most egregious violations, then money alone will make the difference between life and death for a large number of inmates. This is not because anyone is being bribed, but because only money can provide the resources necessary to unearth the evidence that can then in turn divert the system from its standard operating procedures.

“[Llloyd LeBlanc] knows, he says, another side of Elmo Sonner, a side, he is sure, which I have not seen, an evil man who hung around bars with thieves and ‘trashy’ people, who spouted obscenities, who stole, and who abducted teenage kids and raped young women. This is a Pat Sonnier that I have not met or even imagined. I have only met the man in the clean blue denim shirt, the man always so glad to see me, who writes me letters and can’t thank me enough for my love and care. In retrospect I wonder how I could be so naïve. I wish now that I had gone to visit the Bourques and the LeBlancs. Too late now. Their hurt and anger sting.”

Prejean never disputes Sonnier’s basic guilt or the claim that he deserves to spend his entire life in prison. At the same time, she genuinely likes and cares for the person that she comes to know and believes him to be capable of moral redemption, even if he never has a chance to prove that among normal society. Her run-in with Mr. LeBlanc shakes her, not necessarily because she think he is wrong (at the very least, his biases are quite understandable), but because it suggests that his crimes are essential to his being and not the terrible culmination of some extremely poor decisions. His execution renders the question moot by depriving him of the ability to prove either LeBlanc or Prejean right.

“‘I know you’re doing everything you can with the attorneys and the others to save this man from dying,’ she says to me, ‘but as his spiritual advisor you’re the one who has to help him die. Don’t be so absorbed in fighting for him to live that you don’t help him die.’”

Prejean acknowledges that her single-minded dedication to Sonnier’s cause had its drawbacks, not only with respect to the victims’ families, but also with Sonnier himself. As her fellow Sister points out, her role is one of a spiritual advisor. That hardly precludes efforts to prolong his life or even avoid execution—if nothing else, it shows Sonnier that someone cares about him at a moment when the entire machinery of the state is set on his destruction. But given the extreme unlikelihood of clemency, her job is to help him make peace with God, which entails a readiness to die. It is a difficult balance to strike, and another way in which capital punishment places people into extreme moral dilemmas.

“‘Look how shamefully secret this all is,’ Millard says. ‘A few select witnesses brought deep inside this prison in the dead of night to watch a man be killed. If most people in Louisiana would see what the state did tonight, they would throw up.”

Sonnier’s execution marks the tragic climax of the book’s first half, and what makes the killing of a human being even worse, in the view of Prejean, Millard, and others, is the attempt to sanitize it and make it respectable. This requires an elaborate protocol that brings only a relative handful into the inner sanctum of the execution chamber, and then shields even them from the true nature of what they are witnessing. For the vast majority of people, an execution is out of sight and out of mind, and the state works very hard to maintain that illusion.

“Liz’s article about me appears soon after the interview. The headline reads: ‘Controversial Nun Takes Christ’s Directive Literally.’ Controversy was one of the things Liz and I had talked about. It is proving to be one of my main surprises: get involved with poor people and controversy follows you like a hungry dog. (If you’re working for social change, you’re political, but if you acquiesce and go along with the status quo, you’re above politics.)”

Earlier in the book, Prejean mentions she had been reluctant to become involved in social issues for fear of being political. The reactions among some of the public to her activism prove to her that the term ‘political’ is not so much an adjective as a pejorative to implant the idea that someone working for social change is doing so on behalf of a partisan agenda rather than sincerely held convictions. Even people who are not themselves powerful often resist the call to social change for fear of what it might mean for their lives or ideas they have long accepted as right, and so support something like capital punishment even though they were never want to attend an execution.

“Pressing its argument further, the Court ruled that in some instances death as a punishment not only is allowed, it is demanded: ‘Indeed, the decision that capital punishment may be the appropriate sanction in extreme cases is an expression of the community’s belief that certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death.’ At the heart of the Eighth Amendment is the concept that human beings are not to be subjected to cruelty and torture because they possess an inherent dignity. But in Gregg the Court reaffirmed what Furman had determined: retribution—even in its most extreme form, killing, is not ‘inconsistent with our respect for the dignity of men.’”

Looking at capital punishment around the world, Prejean largely finds that it is authoritarian states such as Iran or China who cite it as a necessary evil for stamping out social disorder. Only in the United States is there an effort to weave in the practice with concepts of democracy and human dignity. Prejean finds that majority public support is cited to legitimize a desire for vengeance, even though the state explicitly admits it serves no higher social function than the satiation of bloodlust.

“‘I don’t experience any contradiction with my Christianity. Never thought about it too much, really. Executions are the law, and Christians are supposed to observe the law, and that’s that.’ And then he adds, ‘My wife, she’s a good Christian woman, and she supports the death penalty, and believe me, you can’t find a better Christian woman than my wife.’”

Prejean considers opposition to the death penalty an essential part of her Christian identity, given its teachings on the inherent dignity of all human beings and the fact that its founding figure was the victim of capital punishment. She is therefore surprised when other people, in this case the new warden at Angola, see no conflict at all between their faith and their support for capital punishment. For the latter, ‘Christian’ is more an expression of their own basic decency and commitment to the law, while Prejean is more literal in her commitment to serve the marginalized elements of society.

“Then he picked up the point he had made to me when I met him on the capitol steps—that the only way to be sure we get rid of someone like Willie is to kill him. Elizabeth agrees. ‘That’s the only way we can be sure that he’ll never kill again,’ she says. ‘In prison he can kill a guard or another inmate. Someone like Willie can escape from prison.’ I disagree with these arguments, but the intensity of all the sorrow silences me. I do not offer counterarguments. I just let all the torrents of rage and loss and sorrow tumble over me.”

Speaking with the stepfather of a murder victim, Prejean is aware that her goal is to provide comfort to them as well as to the condemned. While she does not share their views, she is humble about how similar experiences might very well have led her to similar conclusions. If anything, their expressions of rage and vengeance can provide a form of therapy, a focal point for an all-encompassing grief.

“‘I’m gonna be honest with you, ma’am, I believe in the death penalty in some instances, like for people who rape and torture little children. Messin’ over adults is one thing, but little innocent kids? I’d pull the switch on them myself’…here was a man condemned to death by the state and here he is defending the death penalty—not for himself, of course, only for truly heinous killings. And I think of what Camus said, that every murderer, when he kills, feels innocent, that he always feels excused by his particular circumstances.”

As Prejean points out elsewhere, the death penalty in America functions as a symbol of moral outrage and a testament to the idea that there are some crimes so terrible that they merit the ultimate punishment. This idea is so deeply embedded in society that even the very victims of capital punishment adopt it—in this case Robert Willie—and are willing to accept the principle of capital punishment while rejecting its applicability to themselves. For Prejean, this is the ultimate example of an unjust system embedding itself: when it is able to convince its own victims that the practice itself is just.

“I can hear the words San Quentin guards used to yell when a death-row inmate was let out of his cell: ‘dead man walking.’”

Although this is the only explicit reference to the book’s title, the idea behind the phrase is omnipresent in the text. Most people, even if they are very ill, do not know when they are going to die, and thus they have the freedom to think about the future, even a very limited one. A death sentence cuts off a person from all hope and affixes their mortality with such specificity and certainty, Prejean claims, that it deprives them of their full humanity: They are dead even though they still breathe and walk and feel pain.

“I find myself now saying to Robert some of the same words I had said to Pat, words drawn from the same force that taps deep and runs strong, and I tell him that despite his crime, despite the terrible pain he has caused, he is a human being and he has a dignity that no one can take from him, that he is a son of God. ‘Ain’t nobody ever called me no son of God before,’ he says, and smiles. ‘I’ve been called a son-of-a-you-know-what lots of times but never no son of God.’”

Robert Lee Willie cuts an even less sympathetic figure than Sonnier, with less ambiguity as to the degree of his guilt, which is exacerbated by his outrageous conduct toward the media and the families of his victims. The very fact that so many people are eager to see him die makes it all the more important for Prejean to emphasize the core of humanity within even the most despicable person, that all people are capable of receiving and acknowledging unconditional love, and they all deserve a chance at redemption.

“I feel sorry for Marsellus. His boat got caught in a current and he went along. It must have been a terrible ordeal to know all the wheeling and dealing going on and yet sit there, time after time, and look into the faces of the people about to die and then turn down their request for clemency. I ask him about this, about how he feels now, knowing he did this. He is crying. I can hear him choking out his words over the phone, and I think of St. Peter, an apostle of Jesus, who, legends say, cried until the end of his life because he had denied Jesus. Peter cried so much, the legend goes, that tears cut permanent furrows in his cheeks.”

Prejean’s interview with Marsellus, a few years after Sonnier’s and Willie’s executions, turns the tables from the position that he was in relative to the condemned men. While they were guilty of their crimes in a profound sense, and deserving of punishment, he could have seen them as people who were also victims of social forces and bad influences who deserve mercy not in spite of their culpability, but because of it. Prejean believes that Marsellus did wrong by condemning them without sufficient due process, but he still deserves the mercy he denied to others.

“What a spot to be in. Major Coody is not like the governor, the head of the Department of Corrections, the warden, and most of the other guards around here. He can’t persuade himself that he’s just doing his job. My heart goes out to him, and I tell him how I felt watching Pat Sonnier died, and I say that it seems to me that he is someone who is unable to shield himself by rationalization and it may mean that he will need to find another job…it is the last time I will see him alive.”

Most of the guards and other prison officials whom Prejean encounters attempt to detach themselves from the reality of their work. They see themselves as cogs in a machine, performing a function not of their personal design or intent, one that would be readily filled by someone else were they to leave. Major Coody, the supervisor of death row at Angola, is different. He bears the full weight of his responsibilities, and pays a terrible price for it. The job breaks him so thoroughly that by the time he gets out, he is unable to enjoy his freedom, and he suffers a fatal heart attack.

“‘Violence is such a simplistic solution,’ I say. ‘Like these people trying to kill you now. What is your execution going to accomplish other than show that the state of Louisiana can be as violent as you were? And what’s this you said about admiring Hitler? People are reading these interviews and thinking you’re some kind of nut. It’s going to make it easier for people to say “good riddance” when you’re executed. You’re not helping yourself or anybody else on death row by saying things like that.’”

Prejean finds herself in the unusual position of making arguments that she usually reserves for ardent death penalty supporters against someone who is awaiting his own death. Willie may be seeking attention, or perhaps he really does hold racist views, but in any case, it is ironic how he professes the same belief in purgative violence that the state is using to justify his execution.

“But we must remember that such prescriptions of the Mosaic Law were promulgated in a seminomadic culture in which the preservation of a fragile society—without benefit of prisons and other institutions—demanded quick, effective, harsh punishments of offenders…but no person with common sense would dream of appropriating such a model code today.”

The most common argument for the death penalty concerns the old principle of ‘an eye for an eye,’ and while Prejean concedes that in the Book of Exodus such passages are in fact condoning, even requiring, capital punishment, she notes that it is within the context of a society that also enslaves people, prohibits the free worship of religion, and considers women property. If society is willing to let go of all of those Biblically sanctioned practices, she reasons, then perhaps capital punishment should join the list.

“He sits in the chair and the guards begin to strap him in. He watches as they strap his arms and legs. They put the metal cap on his head and the electrode on the calf of his left leg, and they are ready to put on the chin strap and the mask over his face when Robert takes one more look around the room at the world he is leaving. He looks at me and winks, and then they strap his chin, lower the mask, and kill him. This time I do not close my eyes. I watch everything.”

In the film version of Dead Man Walking, the execution of ‘Matthew Poncelet’ (a kind of combination of Sonnier and Willie) marks the high point of drama. In the book, Prejean describes both executions with cool precision. In doing so, she conveys how everything is going according to plan, with a firm effort to suppress any delays of emotion, focusing merely on how a task is performed and the world moves on. The drama lies in the turmoil of waiting to die and the emotional wreckage left in the wake of the person’s death.

“[George] Will says he thinks…some people who see it as a deterrent say we ought to show it on television and make it as grisly as possible, but he believes that would have a ‘very bad coarsening’ effect on the country. Capital punishment, he says, can be done in private and still perform the essential function of expressing the community’s vengeance, not just for the loved ones but for the whole community of Louisiana, which, he believes, was expressing itself last night.”

A Pulitzer Prize winner, George Will is well known for advocating for conservative politics with an emphasis on decency and respectability. He therefore disapproves of coarser voices calling for public executions and insists on a process that can spin the public’s appetite for revenge into a palatable, even noble practice. Prejean similarly agrees that she does not want people executed on television, but she does believe that a people must reckon with the full consequences of what they believe, or at least what they say they believe, rather than put behind closed doors. This merely allows a thoroughly vicious practice to pass itself off as virtuous.

“The fact that mistakes are made will not surprise anyone with even cursory knowledge of the criminal justice system. It has been a sobering discovery for me to see just how flawed and at times chaotic the system of justice is. Examining capital cases, Bedau and Radelet found numerous instances of overzealous prosecution, mistaken or perjured testimony, codefendants who testify against the other to receive a more lenient sentence for themselves, faulty police work, coerced confessions, suppressed exculpatory evidence, inept defense counsel, racial bias, community pressure for a conviction, and, at times, blatant politics—such as the D.A.’s decision to press for the death penalty in a particular case because he’s campaigning for reelection.”

People in power are just like anyone else, and so they make mistakes; the only difference is that there are greater consequences for their errors. Police and lawyers may deserve a degree of empathy for people doing an extremely difficult job, but humanizing them also requires an honest reckoning with their potential to ruin someone’s life through incompetence, malice, or self-interest. The mere possibility, or even likelihood, of executing an innocent man, argues Prejean, should be enough to ban the practice and therefore invalidate any chance of such an injustice occurring.

“Dealing with law enforcement officials is one thing, Vernon and Elizabeth say, and the way they were treated had surprised them, but what had surprised them even more was the way all their friends and even Faith’s friends stayed away from them and very few came to the funeral. ‘I think everyone was denying that this sort of violent death could hit so close to home,’ Elizabeth said. ‘they didn’t want to admit it had happened to Faith because then they’d have to admit that it could happen to them, and people don’t want to face that.’”

Turning to the victims’ families in the book’s final chapter, Prejean learns how their struggles go far beyond coping with the loss of a loved one. They look to law enforcement to punish the offender, and perhaps even to put him to death, but they also have needs for emotional support and other forms of restitution that law enforcement cannot and will not provide, especially when it could interfere with a conviction. Furthermore, when one’s life becomes defined by a singular trauma, it can prove incredibly isolating, as those who do not share it stay away for the sake of preserving their own illusions and those who do share it see in the other person a constant reminder of their agony.

“The truth is that we need to reform our system of criminal justice, and the first step towards that reform is the honest admission that the course we are now pursuing is counterproductive…the death penalty, although it sounds tough on crime, is actually a diversion away from crime-fighting programs that truly make our streets and neighborhoods safe. Texas, for example, has more than three hundred persons on death row and executes more of its citizens each year than any other state, yet its murder rate remains one of the highest in the country.”

Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States is both a memoir and a work of political advocacy, with the latter half of the book dedicating more space to arguments. Ultimately, Prejean finds that the death penalty is symbolic of a greater failure within the US criminal justice system, which, despite the term, is more concerned with retribution than with justice. Halting the killing of prisoners is an important step, but not a sufficient one, as it only represents a small fraction of the many prosecutions where racism and classism are prevalent.