Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States
By Helen Prejean, C.S.J.
Harper Collins, 1994. 278 pp., $19.95
Reviewed by Stephanie Wilkinson
Whenever a United States death-row prisoner is shackled and moved from one part of the prison to another, the guards of each section call out a "warning" — "Dead Man Walking!" So far has the dehumanisation process gone that prisoners awaiting execution are referred to as if they are already dead. Helen Prejean has taken this as the title for her book.
Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun, has lived and worked in Louisiana all her life. In 1982, while she was working in St Thomas, a New Orleans housing project of poor black residents, she was asked by Chava Colon of the Prison Coalition to become a penfriend to a death row prisoner. She felt that being a spiritual counsellor to a man awaiting execution fitted in with her work, so she started writing to Patrick Sonnier, the condemned killer of two teenagers.
She grew to know Sonnier and saw the terrified human being that this repentant killer had become. She is appalled by the inhumane conditions of his prison and also the terrible anguish he suffers in the long countdown to execution — and she describes the execution in detail.
She sees the moral struggles of the public officials who have to carry out the killings that the law demands, but in which they do not personally believe.
She comes to know how unreliable and arbitrary the justice system can be, and the terrible financial cost involved in capital cases — money which would more effectively reduce crime if it were used for education and welfare programs. She begins to ask how society can benefit by copying the same violent killings it claims to condemn.
She also sees the devastating grief and rage of the victims' families, whose need for retribution she understands. Her condemnation of capital punishment results from inspection of the ethical and legal issues involved, and she extends compassion to both the criminals and the people whose lives they destroy.
This deeply moving book enables is written in an easy to read style and will enlighten many people who have not previously understood all the factors involved in state killing. She says, "For me the unnegotiable moral bedrock on which society must be built is that killing anyone, under any conditions, cannot be tolerated — and that includes the government".
The book contains a section of detailed notes giving names and addresses of organisations from which further information may be obtained.
[Stephanie Wilkinson is coordinator of Australians Against Executions.]