september 12 

    Sister Helen Prejean speaks softly, in a sweet Southern accent, but carries a persuasive stick. You know this if you've read her first-person encounter with the death penalty, "Dead Man Walking," or seen the film, starring Sean Penn as the killer who is executed. Sister Prejean has a new book, "The Death of Innocents:  An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Execution,"  and She'll be speaking Tuesday Sept. 12 Milk Streets at the Old South Meeting House at Washington and Milk Street in Boston.  The talk, at 6:30 P.M., is part of the Ford Hall Forum.  We talked to Sister Prejean about what she knows up close and personal.

    JimSullivanInk: I suppose some people could say you're a one-trick only because of your focus on the death penalty.  How would you reply to that?

    Sister Prejean: The death penalty is really a gateway issue.  What it is is a kind of paradigm or emblamatic of a government that uses violence to keep some kind of social order.  We can see the same pattern in the war in Iraq.  You select an enemy, you dehumanize them and they have to be terminated-killing them is the only way to deal with the problem.

     JSI: Is it a door opener?

     SHP: It opens the door to a broader use and reveals the pattern at work and the thinking at work.  That when you have an "enemy" there's a process involved and it's that violence is going to be the answer, its the way to control it; its always going to be violence. 

    We are a very young country.  I've been to Europe, I've been to Asia.  We are a like a teenage kid that got a lot of power and so we have this instinctual need to use violence or our power, which we catered to early and has always worked for us, to work our will in the world.  I do believe that just like we do it with criminals in the United States - the domestic version of it-I do believe we do it indirectly through poverty.  Gandhi used to say 'Poverty kills more people than bullets'  and you just look in the six years of the Bush administration.

    Poverty has risen 17 percent in this country. Poverty kills you quietly.  You die ecause you can't get health care,of a heart attack.  If you look at the history of our country, what we did to the Native American people, that we bring over slavery, we use coerecion to work our will in the world and the death penalty is emblamatic of that.

    JSI: Was watching the execution a catalyst to activism?

    SHP: The way I even got involved with the death people was poor people.  The minute you start getting involved with poor people,  there's a greased track right to the prisons and onto death row. It's only poor that go there.  So I am working in the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans- the very people you saw you left in the Superdome-and I get this invitation to write to someone on death row, Patrick Sonnier.  He is the first story in "Dead Man Walking."  And that was in 1982.  I never dreamed they were really going to kill him.  We haven't killed anyone in Louisiana in almost 20 years - there'd been this unofficial moratorium.  Well,lo and behold, in 1984, he is brought into the death house to be killed in the electric chair and I was there with him.  I watched as the state of Louisiana electrocuted him to death in the chair. It was the middle of the night.  I never watched anybody killed in front of my eyes.  The legality of it didn't mean anything. Nothing meant anything. This man had been alive and they killed him. So I threw up right outside the prison, and I just remember thinking, "I've been a witness, I've got to tell the story." People think this is such a great idea. They are so removed from it. The first thing I did was just start giving talks to whoever whould hear me and then I started writing and that's how I wrote the book, "Dead Man Walking.''

     JSI: Here's the infamous question asked of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis: If someone close to you had been raped and killed ...

     SHP: I know I would be in a state of trauma and horrified and outraged. And I cannot say all the way through that I'd say ''Oh no, I'm not for the death penalty." I think, like many people do, that I would want to kill the person with my bare hands. And I know I would feel all those emotions. Hopefully, I wouldn't stay there. And I've learned over the years from the (victims' families) that have taught me. They have been thrown in the fire. Like Lloyd LaBlanc, he is really the hero of "Dead Man Walking." His son, David, was killed at 17 and the way he put it to me was: "Sister, I'm a loving man. They killed my boy, but I'm not going to let them kill me. If I let hatred and bitterness take over then I'm not going to be me anymore." And ... There's a life force and a love force that's so strong. Some of them, it's a matter of their religious faith and some of them, it's just parts of the very integrity of their soul. And some, especially women, if they were to (endorse) this, the ultimate punishment, it's going to involve another mother having to go through the ordeal of her child being killed.

    JSI: Sister, you joined the sisterhood when?

    SHP: I joined in 1957, the Sisters of St. Joseph. We lost our mother house. The flood got it first and then lightning hit it and burned it. You think God's trying to tell me something? I'm back in New Orleans, but we all rent apartments for our Death Penalty Discourse Center.

    JSI: The talk in Boston concerns primarily what?

    SHP: The importance of civic discourse. For the last 20 years I've been going to speak to the Americna public, and it's not so much that people need to hear the facts and information as much as they need you to be honest and share experiences and invite them to reflection. That's why I was so glad about the film of "Dead Man Walking": It's an invitation to reflection. In order to do that, you really have to bring  people over to both sides. So I'm going to spend as much time on the murder victim's families as I am about the one being executed. And then we're going to make connections between what this has to say about our society. We're one of the few modern societies that still practices the death penalty. Even in Rwanda, they're considering doing away with the death penalty. ... People (here) are never going to see an execution. The ordinary person struggles with it. And I stand with them in the outrage when an innocent person is killed, especially in a savage or cruel way. But what are we going to do with the outrage? And then I'll make connections to other things in the country and the importance of discourse.  Thurgood Marshall said a whole number of years ago: "The American people say they support the death penalty, but if you give them information and help them reflect on it, they'll reject it."

    JSI: In this country - although not this state - you are swimming against the tide, but I guess you pretty well know that.

     SHP: Yeah, but you know what? I've been so heartened, I get to see the faces of peoople when I'm speaking. They get the book and say "I didn't know it was like that." I'm going to bring them close to what it means to kill a human being. ... My second book, "The Death of Innocents," takes people through two cases. And they go through the execution in the story, but by the time they get to the execution they know in all probability this person is innocent. And that does something to you to know that. And it helps people develop a passion. You've got to start a fire in your belly. You want to wake people up. That's what it's really about.