Author Profile

Sister Helen Prejean

Sister Helen Prejean

Sister Helen Prejean is known around the world for her tireless work against the death penalty. She has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to all executions.

 

In 1982, Sister Helen started corresponding with Patrick Sonnier, sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison for the murder of two teenagers. Sonnier asked her to become his spiritual advisor and she accepted.

 

In 1984, Elmo Patrick Sonnier was put to death in the electric chair. Sister Helen was there to witness his execution. In the following months, she became spiritual advisor to another death row inmate, Robert Lee Willie, who soon met the same fate as Sonnier. After witnessing this second execution, Sister Helen realized that this lethal act would remain hidden unless she spoke up about it. She came together with others to hold execution vigils and to march to draw attention to the issue. She founded a support group for victims’ family members called Survive. And she sat down and wrote a book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. Dead Man Walking ignited a national debate on capital punishment and it inspired an Academy Award winning movie, a play, and an opera.

 

Over twenty years later and with capital punishment still practiced in 32 states, Sister Helen divides her time between campaigning against the death penalty, counseling individual death row prisoners, and working with murder victims’ family members. She has accompanied four more men to their deaths and is currently spiritual advisor to Manuel Ortiz, a man she believes is innocent of the crime that has put him on death row at Angola for over 20 years. Her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, was published in 2006.

 

Sister Helen is currently at work on her third book, River of Fire.



For more about Sister Helen and her works, go to http://www.sisterhelen.org/

Reviews of Dead Man Walking

Deeply moving . . . Sister Prejean is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental. . . . She almost palpably extends a hand to her readers.
-- The New York Times Book Review

An intimate meditation on crime and punishment, life and death, justice and mercy and--above all--Christian love in its most all-embracing sense. . . . [Prejean] never shrinks from the horror of what she has seen. She never resorts to something so predictable as pathos or a play for sympathy.
-- The Los Angeles Times



Videos featuring Sister Helen Prejean

A Life Against Death: The Work of Sister Helen Prejean






Sister Helen Prejean Preview | Connections | KET