Sister Helen Prejean was a little-known Roman Catholic nun from
Louisiana when, in 1993, her first book
DEAD MAN WALKING, challenged the way we look at the death penalty in America.
It became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize.
Sister Helen is a member of the Sisters
of St. Joseph of Medaille. She spent her first 24 years with the Sisters
teaching junior high school students and working within her community. At
the age of 40, realizing that being on the side of poor people was an essential
part of the Gospel, she moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans
and began working at Hope House, a center that assists public housing residents.
During this time, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate. She
agreed, and so began a new journey.
In 1982, she started visiting Patrick Sonnier in Louisiana’s Angola
Prison. She became his spiritual adviser, worked to prevent his execution,
and finally walked with him to the electric chair. She did the same thing
with a second prisoner, Robert Willie. Concerned with the plight of murder
victims’ families she founded “Survive,” which provides
counseling and support for grieving families.
And then she sat down and wrote a book about the experience. DEAD MAN WALKING:
AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE UNITED STATES, was published
by Random House in 1993. The best-selling book was nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize. Actor, director, playwright Tim Robbins made the film DEAD MAN WALKING,
nominated for four Academy Awards, with Susan Sarandon winning the Oscar for
"Best Actress" for her portrayal of Sister Helen. DEAD MAN WALKING
is also an internationally-acclaimed opera. Now Tim Robbins has written the
stage play that is being performed by high school and college students across
the country.
Since
1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between campaigning against the death
penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied
four more men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some
of those executed were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book,
THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS: AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF WRONGFUL EXECUTIONS, published
by Random House in December 2004.
In THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS, Sister Helen brings
us to the new moral edge of the debate on capital punishment: What if
we're killing the wrong man?
With her second book, Sister Helen hopes to broaden the discourse around
the issue of the death penalty, reaching out to help people get in touch with
the deep ambivalence within themselves, and to go to a deeper level of reflection.
Listen to Sister Helen's podcast about THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS from Authors
on Tour.
Sister Helen travels extensively, giving, on average, 140 lectures a year,
seeking to ignite public discourse on the death penalty. She has appeared
on ABC’s World News Tonight, 60 Minutes, Oprah, NPR, Larry King Live,
and an NBC special series on capital punishment.
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Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project.
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