"Dead Man Walking," Revisited: A Prophetic Argument Against Capital Punishment

In January of 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became a pen pal to Elmo Patrick Sonnier, a death-row inmate who had been convicted, with his brother, of abducting a teen-age couple from a lover's lane, raping the woman, and shooting her and her partner in the back of the head. Sonnier was sentenced to death for the crime; his brother received a life sentence. As Prejean writes in "Dead Man Walking," first published 25 years ago, she is repulsed by his actions, but through their steady correspondence she cannot help but also think of him as a fellow human being. Soon she is not only exchanging letters with him, but visiting him in prison, where she learns that, although he was involved in the crime, it was his brother who committed the murders. When the date for his execution is set, Sister Helen agrees to become his spiritual advisor. She convinces lawyers to take his case, and meets the parents of his victims, who are eager to see the murderer of their children pay the ultimate price of "justice."

As Prejean makes clear in "Dead Man Walking," at the root of this nation's commitment to justice is a belief that suffering is redemptive, especially when that suffering is inflicted by the state. "An eye for an eye" is the phrase Prejean hears each time she pleads for Sonnier’s life to be spared. It is repeated back to her not only by the victims' parents but by the governor, the warden of the prison, the head of the Department of Corrections, the District Attorney, and the chair of the Pardon Board, who refuses to stay Sonnier's execution. "Indeed," Justice Stewart wrote in the majority opinion in Gregg v. Georgia - the case, from 1976, that ended a national moratorium on executions and reinstated the death penalty - "certain crimes are themselves so grievous an affront to humanity that the only adequate response may be the penalty of death." Violence, according to this view, cleanses the world of violence. Murder becomes justice only when we do not call it murder.

The tidy symmetry of "an eye for an eye" might appeal in theory, but Prejean makes clear that it is barbaric in practice. In 1984, in Louisiana's Angola prison, the preferred method of capital punishment is electrocution, but whether an execution occurs by way of hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, the electric chair, or lethal injection, and despite all efforts to make capital punishment "humane," there is, as Prejean writes, "one dimension of suffering that can never be eliminated": "the horror of being put to death against your will and the agony of anticipation." There is nothing "humane" about taking another person's life, she argues. It is nothing less than torture, and certainly nothing more.

When the date of his execution arrives, Elmo Patrick Sonnier is fed his last meal and shaved - his head, eyebrows, and one of his legs - before he is diapered and led to the execution chamber in chains. He steps onto a podium to utter his last words, a plea for forgiveness, which plays through a speaker in the next room, where Sister Helen is seated among those watching the execution through a Plexiglas window. A team of guards secures Sonnier to the electric chair with leather straps. A metal cap is placed over his head; electrodes are attached to the cap and to his shaved leg. Another leather strap secures his chin, and a gray cloth covers his face. Sister Helen finds she cannot watch, and closes her eyes as 3 pulses of electricity enter his body: 1900 volts, 500 volts, then 1900 volts. A doctor rises from where he is seated to perform "the final check." She opens her eyes. Elmo Patrick Sonnier is dead.

In 1993, "Dead Man Walking" spent 31 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book was translated into ten languages, became a feature film starring Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen (a role for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), and, more importantly, ignited a national debate about capital punishment. Since then, public opinion about the death penalty has shifted. A Gallup poll conducted in 1991, 2 years before the book's release, showed that 76% of respondents approved of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder; in 2017, the most recent assessment, that number had dropped to 55 %. Since 1993, 7 states - New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware - have overturned the death penalty, and the governors of 4 more - Oregon, Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania - have placed moratoria on executions.

But elsewhere, in places like Texas, where I live, we have made somewhat less progress. On July 17th of this year, the state executed Chris Young for his part in a failed robbery of a gas station and the shooting death of its attendant, Hasmukh Patel. At the time of the shooting, Young was 21 years old, and had become involved in drugs and gang violence. Before his death, he expressed deep remorse for killing Patel and, ironically, found that he was able to turn his life around on death row, where he stopped a fellow-inmate's assault on a guard, prevented a suicide, and mentored troubled youth outside the prison walls. In a testimonial video recorded before his execution, he notes that coming to death row might have saved him from gang violence: "I'm actually happy I came here first, because the person I am today, I'm really, really satisfied with," he said. Moments later, he became the 8th person Texas has put to death this year by lethal injection, and the 553rd it has executed since Gregg v. Georgia.

And still the state continues. This past Wednesday, Texas executed Troy Clark; the next day, Daniel Acker. Both had consistently insisted that they were innocent of the murders for which they'd been sentenced to death. Clark's case, in particular, has drawn the attention of Sister Helen, who recently noted on Twitter that Clark's girlfriend confessed in detail to her part in the crime but recanted during the trial in exchange for a reduced sentence. Prejean has also described the tragedy of Clark's upbringing, the poverty that frayed both his future and his chance at a fair trial - a theme that echoes in her book. "Capital punishment, as practiced in the United States, is a poor man's punishment," she writes in "Dead Man Walking." "It is overwhelmingly poor people, who kill whites, who are sentenced to die."

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In this sense, America has not much changed. Now, as before, there are no rich men on death row. Moreover, in the past 25 years, it has become increasingly apparent that, while much of the country has evolved beyond the death penalty, the states that remain most committed to it are those that once practiced slavery. Both traditions flow from a fundamental lie: that some people are not human enough to make a legal claim on their own lives. There is no other logic to the death penalty as we administer it. The prosecution seeks the death penalty when it serves them, and agrees to a plea deal when the accused can afford a lawyer who can make the trial sufficiently complex. Justice barely factors into the equation.

Capital Punishment

It is morally easy to feel outrage when the state executes the innocent and the remorseful. But Prejean's challenge, in "Dead Man Walking," is to recognize the horror of executing any person, even one who is difficult to love. 6 months after the execution of Sonnier, Prejean decides to become a spiritual adviser to another death-row inmate, Robert Lee Willie - a man who is not only guilty of his crime but refuses to accept his part in it, blaming his accomplice, the justice system, and even the victims themselves. In television interviews, he declares himself a member of a white-supremacy group and a follower of Hitler. And yet Sister Helen is compelled to recognize his loneliness, his terror, and his humanity. At his execution, she forces herself to keep her eyes open, to not look away.

"If we believe that murder is wrong and not admissible in our society, then it has to be wrong for everyone," Prejean writes, "not just individuals but governments as well." In the quarter-century since the publication of "Dead Man Walking," the evidence remains unchanged: executions do not prevent crime, and taking another person's life is a poor cure for inconsolable grief. Killing is always a moral crime, if not always a legal one. Near the end of her memoir, Sister Helen states her conviction that if executions were made public - if more people knew the truth of the act - "the torture and violence would be unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions." "Dead Man Walking" pulled back that mask. We cannot close our eyes. We must not look away.

Source: The New Yorker, Lacy M. Johnson, October 2, 2018

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde