It was an evening of stories gleaned from 14 years of sharing experiences with inmates living on death row and witnessing the executions that followed.

“Getting your mind around what goes on in the death house is exactly why I’m in front of you tonight,” Sister Helen Prejean told some 1,200 people at UC Davis’ Mondavi Center April 23. “You have to care about people’s lives to care about their deaths.”

Since her Pulitzer Prize nominated book, “Dead Man Walking,” and Oscar-winning film of the same title made the Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille one of the most recognized nuns in the world, she has been a non-stop advocate for both death row inmates and families of murder victims.

She has served on the board and as chairperson of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, is a member of Amnesty International, an honorary member of Murder Victim Families for Reconciliation and founder of Survive, a victim’s advocacy group in New Orleans.

During an interview with The Herald, Sister Prejean talked about her new book, “The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Execution,” due out in January 2005.

The book is about two innocent men she accompanied to execution. One was Dobie Williams, who was executed in Louisiana in January 1999 for the murder of Sonia Knippers, and Joseph O’Dell, executed in July 1997 in Virginia for killing and raping Helen Schartner.

The story of Williams, said Sister Prejean, “will make you weep.” He was a 38-year-old indigent African American said to have an IQ of 63 who was convicted of killing a white woman by an all-white jury.

She describes her journey with O’Dell as “a Catholic story” because “the Catholic Church got involved, the pope got involved, and Mother Teresa got involved in trying to save his life.”

O’Dell’s battle to prove his innocence through DNA testing gained an international audience when a member of the Italian parliament read about the case in the newspaper. From there most everyone in Italy, from the mayor of Palermo to Pope John Paul II, heard about the case. When Laurie Urs, the young woman who married O’Dell hours before his execution, went to Rome in an attempt to save his life, she carried with her a letter to the pope from Sister Prejean.

“It was 14 years of experience I’ve been wanting to talk to the pope about ...being with people when they were executed,” she said. “I talked about there being no dignity in these deaths.”

Sister Prejean praised the “principled stand” regarding the death penalty taken by Pope John Paul II, a position reflected in the most recent “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” which states that there is almost never a morally justifiable reason for execution.

Her new book also addresses constitutional issues related to the more than 100 wrongly-convicted people who are being released from death rows across the nation.

“We have a broken system,” Sister Prejean said. “Once people are found guilty they move them along, not stopping to consider cases on individual merits.”

The honorary chairperson of Equal Justice USA, a national campaign calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, Sister Prejean sees reason for optimism as the moratorium campaign grows and has “an impact on the public consciousness.”

“The paradigm of the death penalty when you apply it to other nations is what we’re doing in Iraq. You don’t bomb your way into democracy,” she said. “Our country tends to want to use violence to solve its problems.”

Sister Prejean also gave her take on a ruling by the International Court of Justice that 51 Mexican nationals on death row in the United States, who were not provided access to representatives of their government when first arrested, were owed a review.

“I’m hoping the world court is going to call us to accountability,” said Sister Prejean, who is critical of what she views as excessive unilateral action on this issue by the United States government. “Maybe we will see from our experience in Iraq we need to live in a much more collegiate way with other nations to have the wisdom to make our way.”

Copyright © 2004 Diocese of Sacramento - All Rights Reserved