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To U.S. Death Row Inmates, Today's Election is a Matter of Life or Death

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You don't have to tell Daniel Troya and the 40 other denizens of federal death row locked in shed-sized solitary cells for 23 hours a day, every day, that elections have consequences. To them, from inside the U.S. government's only death row located in Terre Haute, Indiana, Tuesday's election is quite literally a matter of life and death: If Kamala Harris wins, they live; if Donald Trump wins, they die. "He's gonna kill everyone here that he can," Troya, 41, said in an email from behind bars. "That's as easy to predict as the sun rising."
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Sister Helen Prejean: "the Bible belt and the death belt are the same"

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Sr. Prejean, Paris, 2007
Prejean sees the problem is a US “culture of violence” that needs to change. There is a “seesaw” view of the world, “justice means, he’s dead- he dies.” Prejean has seen the pressure this puts on the families of victims to ask for the death penalty. Society says, “you have to be for the death penalty or it looks like you didn’t love your boy”she explains.

Prejean’s formidable drive is rooted in her religious principles. “The heart of a vocation to follow Jesus is clearly to see the transcendence of goodness and dignity of a person - a person is more than one act,” she says. It is this loss of dignity on death row that Prejean describes more than once, as “unspeakable.” “The demeaning way you live... strip searched every time you leave your cell...denied your medication.” You get “1,000 signals a day that you are disposable human waste.”

In a country where religion is so influential in politics, Prejean has come up against many of her peers, who denounce her teachings. “When a nation believes it is blessed in the eyes of god, there is an arrogance that we are special people and are doing right” Prejean says. There is a right-wing Christian view that “the more Christian you are the more you believe in the death penalty, because you know you should be punished for your sins..that God wants pain for pain.”

The answer to this is “relentless dialogue.” Educating people, working through their “biblical illiteracy.”


Source: NewStatesman, Feb. 6, 2013
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