Sister Helen Prejean on Capital Punishment, Justice, and Meeting Victims’ Families
Sister Helen Prejean is probably not the archetype that comes to mind when you think of a nun, yet she is probably the country’s best-known living Catholic layperson, famous for her anti–death penalty activism.
In the early 1980s, Prejean met a prisoner on death row—Elmo Patrick Sonnier—after an activist asked her to write him a letter. It was a life-altering experience. She served as Sonnier’s spiritual adviser and accompanied him to his death, which inspired her work against capital punishment. This story was immortalized in her 1993 book, Dead Man Walking, which in turn inspired a movie starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Prejean. Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera of the same name premiered in 2000 and opened the New York City Metropolitan Opera’s 2023 season for its first performance there. Prejean, who is now 85, is also the author of The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions (2004) and River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey (2019).
In October, Prejean spoke with Reason‘s Billy Binion about her opposition to the death penalty, how she connects with crime victims, her response to Christians who believe the death penalty is just, and her attempts to reach across the political aisle.
Reason: In 1984, you were in the Louisiana death house waiting to witness your first execution. A guard asked, “What’s a nun doing in a place like this?” Forty years later, how would you answer that question?
Prejean: There was the theory of what the death penalty is supposed to be. And then I watch this human being I had known for two and a half years, strapped into a wooden oak chair and electrocuted to death, and it was called justice. And it seared my soul. Then I began to learn about how it works. What are we doing here? Is this accomplishing what they say we’re supposed to be doing?
That guard was surprised that there would be a spiritual adviser in the room?
I had to be on the other side of the glass with Pat Sonnier. But now [Texas] actually allows spiritual advisers to be in the room, as I was on February 28, [2024], with Ivan Cantu in Texas. He asked me to be with him. These people just keep coming to me right now with these requests, like, “Will you be with me when they kill me?” And what are you going to say, right? And so I say yes to it.
That was so surreal to be with Ivan Cantu. The two key witnesses in this case had recanted. They were bringing this out, that they had lied at his trial. His last words were to the victim’s family who’d come to watch him die: “I didn’t kill your son. I didn’t kill your daughter. If I’d known who did it, I would have helped you.” It is so unreal.
Patrick Sonnier was convicted of rape and murder. How did you come to connect with him, and what was that correspondence like?
First of all, you got to understand that I immersed myself with struggling African-American people in New Orleans. I awakened to justice and to the struggle of poor people. And that was a deeply held faith thing. That’s the gospel of Jesus, very radical. I had moved into the inner city with African-American people who became my neighbors for the first time in my life. Because when I grew up in the Jim Crow days in Baton Rouge, I only knew black people as our servants. Black people didn’t go to school with me. And we’d never mix with black people socially. And I was with them, and I saw the other America. I saw the suffering.
While I was there working at a place called Hope House, a friend of mine from the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons had a clipboard—and everybody he met that day, he’s asking them to be part of a project. He bumps into me. He goes, “Sister Helen, you want to be a pen pal to somebody on death row?” And he’s all poised with this little clipboard. And I said, “Yeah, I could write some letters.” I thought I was only going to be writing letters. I didn’t know they were going to kill this guy. I had no idea about criminal justice or law. So here was this name, Patrick Sonnier. “Will you write him a letter?” “Yeah, I’ll write him a letter.”
And you know what the problem was? He wrote back. And there was a connection, a human connection.
Were you not expecting him to write back?
No, I wasn’t. Because the guy who actually gave me his name said, “You know, he’s kind of a loner, he doesn’t write back. Maybe I ought to give you somebody else.” I said, “Give me that guy.” Something in me was drawn to that guy. I said, “Give me that guy. Even if he doesn’t write me back, I’m going to write to him.” And I knew what the essence of my letters was going to be: You are a human being and you got a dignity nobody can take from you. I didn’t even know his crime yet, but I know that Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the inalienable right to life every human has. So that’s how it started.
So then you end up meeting him in person?
Yeah, scary.
Were you nervous?
Very nervous. Very, very nervous, Billy. I walk into the Louisiana State Penitentiary. They have a big green sign: “By stepping onto prison property, you subject yourself to dog sniffing, body search,” all [of that]. I went, “Can’t play the nun card here. They don’t give a hoot about nuns. What am I doing?” And then the guard said, “Yeah, I’ll take you to your man.” He would walk and there would be these clanging gates behind us. Then they locked me in a room. “We’ll go get your man.” I wait for him. I hear him coming with a guard. I can hear the leg irons scraping on
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