Her ministry, she explained, is much like Jesus on the cross, amidst criminals and with hands stretched in two separate directions — one toward the victims’ families and the other toward the convicted. Sister Helen Prejean — Roman Catholic nun, death penalty opponent and author — has been ministering to offenders on death row and victims’ families for over 20 years, giving her glimpses of the justice system few have ever seen or even thought about.

The inmates, the victims’ families, the stories and the agony led Prejean to share her experiences in the book and then movie, Dead Man Walking, and with the spoken word, as she crisscrosses the globe telling her story. “I take them on the journey of Dead Man Walking,” she said.

And she did just that when, on November 6, Prejean detailed her ministry to an audience at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, leaving no one at the lecture untouched by her words. Co-sponsors of the event were the Cathedral Forum on Religion and Public Life and the For Whom the Bells Toll Initiative, a national movement to bring awareness to the far-reaching effects of capital punishment in the United States.

Sister Helen Prejean greeted audience members after her presentation at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Prejean began ministering to death row inmates by chance, after someone suggested she write to a man awaiting execution. After a communicating through letters, Prejean finally met the man convicted along with another man of carrying out two brutal murders. “There was a personal connection,” she said, “so you could no longer make generalizations.” What surprised her most, she recalled, was “the humanness of his face.”

After that, Prejean’s life would never be the same. She continued to visit the inmate, Patrick Sonnier, as his spiritual advisor and accompanied him to his death by lethal injection.

Prejean readily admits that at first she made the mistake of avoiding the victims’ families for fear of their disdain for her dealings with the murderer. But she quickly realized the need for arms to be outstretched in both directions — to the convicted and to the victims. And while some families resent her work, many relatives of victims have discovered the power of forgiveness and reconciliation.

“We have to affirm that outrage,” Prejean insisted of the feelings of family members. “We recognize that innocent lives have been taken, and there is fear that accompanies it. But it’s what you do with that outrage that’s important. The death penalty is such a false thing to offer victims’ families. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What really heals a human heart?’”

The answer, she insisted, is not hating or executing the offender. The father of one of Sonnier’s victims told Prejean that if he kept his hatred toward the murderer, it would eat away at his soul. “They killed my boy,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let them kill me.”

It was the deep resonance of her experience with Sonnier that led Prejean to write the book Dead Man Walking, the first personal account about the death penalty that deals with both sides — the victims’ families and the inmates. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and enthralled Susan Sarandon. The actress felt that the story needed greater exposure and offered to help make it into a movie. Through much wrangling, Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Prejean adapted the book for film. The movie, also called Dead Man Walking and starring Sarandon and Sean Penn, was a critical and box office success and received four Oscar nominations, with Sarandon winning an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Having achieved recognition for her work and her cause, Prejean saw there was much more work to do. She reminded the audience at the Cathedral that the United States remains one of the last developed countries to execute convicts, while 110 countries in the world have banned state-sponsored execution. The U.S. is also one of only a handful of countries to execute criminals for offenses committed as minors. The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, and today there are 3700 people awaiting execution.

Over the years, Prejean has visited five death row inmates and accompanied them to their executions. Two of these men she knows to be innocent, a fact that is appallingly common for death row convicts. Prejean pointed out that 102 people have been released from death row after later being found innocent. The chances that other innocent men and women were executed seem great, she said. Then, there are those on death row whose mental retardation, psychosis and other outside factors still don’t warrant them any reconsideration of their lives.

Prejean told the story of Dobie Williams, executed in Louisiana in 1998, who had an IQ of 59 and may well have been innocent. Then there was Joseph O’Dell in Virginia who requested a DNA test to prove his innocence, but this request was denied and his execution was carried out with the evidence left untested and then destroyed.

Race and class are the two biggest determiners in death penalty convictions, Prejean explained. While 12 percent of the United States population is black, blacks make up 43 percent of those on death row. The victims of death row inmates are eight out of 10 times white, although 50 percent of homicide victims in the U.S. are non-white. Poverty is also a factor because the poor often lack adequate legal resources, Prejean said.

Prejean is currently working on another book, Impossible Burden, which focuses on the fatal flaws of the system of execution in the United States. “Once you have the death penalty in the law, there is tremendous pressure placed on prosecutors and judges to use it,” she said. “The death penalty is an impossible burden for the courts, juries and the criminal justice system.”

In spite of the grim realities, Prejean finds the peace to go on. “I have traveled more than any politician, and I have met the American public, and they are the source of my hope,” she said. Encouraging people around the world to reach a deeper response to crime, past the surface responses of retaliation and further violence, is the mission of her relentless journeys to new places and new people. “I think this is changing people’s consciousness,” she said of her work.

“Compassion can only be born if people can see the other person, identify with the person close up,” she said. Indeed, Prejean brings death row inmates startlingly close to her audiences through the power of her words. “It is only possible to support death if you distance and separate yourself, so you don’t see them or their families.

“Don’t forget there’s another mother and another family in this,” Prejean stressed.

And it is for everyone — victims, inmates, families, the innocent and the guilty — that Prejean continues her journey.

Everyone has a role in opposing the death penalty, Prejean explained. She recommends signing the petition calling for a moratorium on the death penalty at the Web site www.moratoriumcampaign.org and sending letters to members of Congress asking for an end to execution. Religion and democracy work together,” she said. Prejean also encourages the For Whom the Bells Toll initiative, which she said is “a concrete way to wake people up.”

“According to the Gospel, the dignity of life demands we be on both sides,” she explained. “Is it only the innocent who deserve dignity?” Or is dignity something inherent to all, she queried, as is asserted in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

As she continues her battle against state-sponsored execution, Prejean holds firmly the belief that life does come out of death. It is her hope that the executed live through her words and that these lost lives might one day act as the catalysts that save other inmates from the sentence of death.

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