Q&A Sister Helen Prejean is still walking BY TAMARA WIEDER

April 5, 1984 — the day Patrick Sonnier was executed in the electric chair in Louisiana — marked a turning point for Sister Helen Prejean, the first time the nun had accompanied a convict to his death. The experience sparked in Prejean a fierce opposition to capital punishment and spawned her first book, 1993’s Dead Man Walking. The 1995 film adaptation, starring Susan Sarandon as Prejean, received four Oscar nominations in 1996.

Nearly 20 years later, January 12, 2003 — the day Illinois governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of all 156 inmates on his state’s death row, saying, "I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death" — was another watershed moment in Prejean’s decades-long battle against the death penalty. But it wasn’t the end of her fight, by a long shot. In her latest book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions (Random House), Prejean again takes on the issue of capital punishment, this time introducing readers to convicted murderers Dobie Williams and Joseph O’Dell, both of whom Prejean believed to be innocent — and both of whose executions she witnessed.

In fact, over the years, 117 wrongfully convicted people have been released from death row — all the more evidence, Prejean argues, that the death penalty is a flawed and inhumane system of punishment. Combing through race and politics, prosecutorial ambition and misguided Supreme Court justices, Prejean’s The Death of Innocents covers the myriad ways the country’s death penalty is a dangerous failure.

Phoenix: Tell me why this book, and why now.

Prejean: I’d already accompanied three people to execution. And the question was never innocence or guilt. You know, Dead Man Walking raised the moral question: Even if people are guilty, is this what we want to do as a society? But then, lo and behold, I’m with Joseph O’Dell, who’s executed, and I believe he’s innocent, and then I’m with Dobie Williams, who’s executed, and I believe he’s innocent, so I said, I’ve got to write this book. I didn’t even know I was going to write the book. And then the more I understood about both Dobie’s case and Joseph O’Dell’s, it’s the courts that are killing people, because they set up the appeals [process] in a way that procedure trumps justice. They never open up the cases again, they rubber-stamp them.

Q: What do you want people to feel when they read the book?

A: First horror. Shock. Sadness. Then anger. And then: no, this can’t be allowed to happen. And then to act. Enough emotion to act. Sign the moratorium petition, or write to their legislator, or do whatever they need to do to begin to say, I don’t need these killings in my name. We can be safe without this.

Q: You mention juries handing out "wrongful death sentences," but really, you don’t believe that any death sentences are right.

A: That’s the other argument. That’s the argument of Dead Man Walking. We have a way to keep our citizens safe without killing people. So why kill? Whereas before, people who were against the death penalty had to give reasons for being against it, now I want to challenge the people who still want the death penalty — with all the mistakes, where we have the alternative of life in prison, well, tell me now why you still want to kill people? You’ve got a broken machinery, you have politics filtered through the whole thing, you have [pro-death-penalty] climates in some parts of the country, clearly it’s an uneven distribution of justice. Now tell me again why you still want to have death?

Sister Helen Prejean talks as part of a series on capital punishment, at Alfond Hall Auditorium, St. Joseph’s College, in Standish, May 3, at 7 p.m. Call (207) 893-7708.