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 the floor. And then I see him. He was in something as small as a telephone booth with this heavy mesh screen. And I looked at his face. I thought his face was going to be mean. Because if you kill somebody, aren’t you mean? I mean, aren’t you? And I could not believe how human he was. And he was smiling. He said, “Thank you, Sister, for making that long drive.” And so we began.

What were your feelings on the death penalty before this?

The traditional Catholic teaching was under the Fifth Commandment, thou shalt not kill—[with an] exception for the state to be able to keep society safe by executing violent murderers. I never questioned it. I had no reason to question it. But then once I moved to Hope House, once I began to meet people and saw that what happened to poor people was very different from what happened to people with resources, I began to look into it. I began to meet human rights lawyers who had taken these cases, and they became my teachers. And then I began to learn.

That experience of actually being with somebody executed—because you know it’s a semisecret ritual. It’s behind prison walls. Very few people ever witness this. And that was it. I was thrown into the fire.

There’s this saying in Latin America: “What the eye doesn’t see, the heart can’t feel.” And I saw. And I felt. We had to stop the car because I had to throw up because of what I’d seen. That’s how I became a witness. People are never going to see this. They’re going to say, “Well, it was justice. Look what he did. He deserves it.” I was the one who had been there, so I had to be the one to tell the story.

There was another death row inmate you counseled during the same period named Robert Lee Willie, who was convicted of raping and murdering an 18-year-old named Faith Hathaway—crimes for which he was unrepentant. Hathaway’s parents, Vernon and Elizabeth Harvey, ended up becoming activists on the other side, in favor of the death penalty. What was your relationship with them like, and how do you talk with victims who have experienced these enormous losses?

That’s a really tough one, Billy, because their pain and their trauma is so great. And I haven’t suffered like them. I haven’t had somebody kill my child. So I’m off kilter in a way when I’m encountering them, because it’s always a kind of guilt I feel.

I know what my principles are, but with Pat Sonnier, I had not reached out to the victim’s family. And I regretted that. Afterward the father of the boy had said to me, “Sister, you’ve just been visiting with those brothers, but you didn’t once come to see us. I had nobody to talk to.” And I realized, you can’t just put victims in this category. So when I took on Robert Lee Willie, I went to go see the Harveys, just to go visit with them. Because I wanted to get to know them and I wanted to hear them, just listen to them.

It was one of the saddest, hardest afternoons of my life. I went to their house. There was Faith’s picture hanging on the wall. She was just 18. And this man now that I’m going to be the spiritual adviser to—Robert Willie—is the one who with a man, Joe Vaccaro, raped her and helped kill her. And I’m talking to the parents who are talking about Faith. It’s like a riptide in your soul. I know that the state should not kill Robert Lee Willie, but look at this pain.

Then it gets complicated, because what is the state offering the Harveys? What do they offer victims of murder? That you’re going to have to wait now—hope it won’t be too long—but what we’re going to do for you is we’re going to let you sit on a front row and you watch as we kill the one who killed your loved one. And you get to witness that. And that is going to give you closure.

It’s so contradictory, so morally bankrupt. First of all, the average wait of victims’ families from the time a death sentence is given in the United States to execution is 17 years. All these years, that grief is public. The media are at their door. How can they grieve and how can they heal? But how do you speak to them? You’ve got no words to say to them, because you haven’t been in that fire like they do. And so what you do is you listen.

What happened with the Harveys, because I had visited them and listened to them, when I then walk into the pardon board hearing and they see that I’m by Robert Willie’s side, they go ballistic. They just go, “Well, we thought we’d won you over to our side.” It’s just such a split in your soul. It’s so hard. You don’t feel virtuous, you don’t feel good. You know what you got to do.

Your life’s work consists of sticking up for people who are deeply unpopular. How do you navigate that?

An unpopularity comes with the territory, because what people want to do is focus all their hatred on this person and identify them completely with the worst act of their life and say, “We’re justified in killing them.”

Does the Catholic Church only uphold the dignity of innocent life? What about the guilty? Here’s a man strapped down, totally defenseless and deliberately killed, when we have an alternative. We have a way to keep society safe. That’s what prisons are for.

A lot of conversations around the death penalty focus on people with believable claims of innocence. Should a defendant’s guilt matter when evaluating whether or not the death penalty is just?

That’s the deeper question. What are we doing entrusting [this] to state government? Look at this whole process. They’re going to set the criteria by which you’re going to choose [who dies], and they have an impossible criteria. They said, “You don’t give the death penalty for ordinary murders. You only give it for the worst of the worst.” How do you determine the worst of the worst out of all? Nobody knows how to do that.

If there were a way to ensure that no innocent people were ever executed and that it was meted out without any bias or discrimination, could you support the death penalty?

Of course not. It’s the act itself. The essence of torture is an extreme mental or physical assault on someone—and here’s the key thing—who’s been rendered defenseless. You’ve taken a live human being from that cell, and you force them into a chair or into a gurney, and you deliberately kill them. That is what is against the dignity of humans and against our own best souls.

Data show that a lot of Christians still support the death penalty. There’s a verse in Romans where Paul says the government “does not bear the sword for nothing.” How do you respond to Christians who say the death penalty is not an injustice but is actually a necessity?

Jesus said, “Love your enemy.” Jesus didn’t say, “Execute the hell out of the enemy.” He said, “Love your enemy.”

What are you talking about? How am I going to love an enemy? I learned this from a victim’s family: Lloyd LeBlanc, whose son David was killed by Pat and his brother. He said he was filled with anger. He wanted to just kill with his own bare hands. But the anger was eating him alive. And he kept praying: “God, this is destroying me.”

And then, when he told me about this journey, he said, “They killed my boy, but I’m not going to let him kill me.” He reached the deepest part of his soul, that he would not be destroyed by anger. And so when you look at not just Jesus, but the deepest spiritual traditions that we have, it is always about: Don’t be overcome by your enemy so that it destroys you. Move on with your life, and have a positive, loving life. That’s what it means. Jesus is very radical. Love your enemy.

This is the problem of a selective religious belief where you can go to the Bible and selectively quote whatever quote you want. Because it’s all in there.

My faith is that the deepest love has got to be not just for those of us who are beautiful and lovely and loving people themselves, but those that others consider disposable human waste. And the gift in my life is that I’ve been able to go to those places and meet those people. And I’ve learned a crucial, really important life lesson: that everybody’s worth more than the worst thing they’ve ever done in their life, and that everybody can be more.

One time the warden at Angola Prison, Louisiana State Penitentiary told me, “You know who generally makes the best trusties at this prison?” This is 5,000 men, a lot of whom have life sentences. He said, “People in for murder.” They get here, they have the discipline of prison, they begin to read books. They get a little education. They learn how to talk without hitting people first. They might hit them third, but they grow as human beings. And then we’ve got to kill them anyway with the death penalty? Human beings change.

Being a staunchly anti–death penalty, pro-life person puts you in a pretty politically homeless place in an era of intense political partisanship. You don’t fit neatly in a box. How does that affect the way you get your message out?

One of the things you do is [an interview] like this. We talk to each other and we’re getting into the people. That’s what you do.

Martin Luther King said it best about “the arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice.” When you’ve discovered something really important, like I have—that all human life has value, and we can’t be putting the state in charge of killing people—and you can go to people with a story and talk to them? That’s outside of tribal boxes.

When you first entered the convent, you said that the biggest threat to the world was atheistic communism. You’ve since seen a lot. You were a teacher during school integration in New Orleans. You saw the Ku Klux Klan protesting, and you even met Martin Luther King Jr. in an airport—

Poor man, he was so tired-looking.

You chatted with him a bit, right?

He was behind me in the line, and he looked so tired. And I realized afterward, when I read [about] his life, he was just coming out of Cicero, Illinois, where people were throwing things at him. And I just went up to him and took his hand. And I just said, “Dr. King, I just want you to know, I admire what you’re doing, and I’m praying for you.” He said, “Oh, thank you.” He said, “God, we need prayers, man.” And that was it.

But see, I wasn’t out there then. I didn’t participate in any of the civil rights [protests]. These good nuns you’d see out there in Selma and stuff, uh-uh. I wasn’t awake. And it’s a gift to be awake. Suddenly you come to a realization about stuff, and that’s when you got to act.

So in the 1950s, you thought the biggest threat to the world was atheistic communism. In 2024, what’s the biggest threat?

It’s that we got to educate people to have a real democracy in this country. These tribal wars you’re talking about and all. You got to get to people. You have to talk to them, you have to help them. You write books, you get in there and you talk to them. You do movies, you do operas, you do whatever you got to do. You have a relationship with them. You can’t just be on your little island.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

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