Sister Helen Prejean had told the story hundreds of times before. Yet as she addressed some 450 students at Kennedy High School in Sacramento late on a Friday afternoon, it seemed as if she was telling it for the first time.

All eyes were fixed on the nun whose passion for years has been changing people’s minds and hearts about use of the death penalty.

“I’m here today because in 1984 I walked with Patrick Sonnier, a death row inmate, to the electric chair,” she said. “He looked into my eyes and mine was the last face he saw before they killed him. I came out of the execution chamber that night and I didn’t know my life was going to be completely changed forever.

“I threw up – I’d never watched anyone be killed before my eyes before. And there in the dark, outside the prison gates, I remember thinking, the American people are never going to see this and I’ve been a witness. So Pat and all the people I’ve accompanied after him have bequeathed to me this mission. I cannot turn away from it.”

With a movie, an opera and a stage play all recounting the story she told in the 1993 best-selling book, “Dead Man Walking,” Sister Prejean, a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, is likely the most recognizable figure working to abolish the death penalty in the United States.

She was in Sacramento March 2 to speak to Kennedy students and to 430 people who attended a fund-raising awards dinner that evening sponsored by the Sacramento chapter of Death Penalty Focus.

At both locations, the 67-year-old nun was a storyteller. She blended personal stories about the six men she has accompanied to their executions, their survivors, and the families of murder victims, with Scripture passages, public opinion data and statistics about who is prosecuted under capital punishment laws.

She told students at Kennedy that she grew up in a comfortable home in Baton Rouge, La., attending Catholic schools. “I didn’t know I was privileged,” she said. “I was sheltered from all the social issues when I was in high school — but not you, you get to explore all of them.”

After becoming a nun, she said her faith life was characterized by a close relationship with God, prayer and her religious community.

She taught junior high students for 24 years, before deciding to volunteer at the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans. A year later, she moved into an apartment in the housing project with five other nuns.

The public housing project was home to more than 1,500 predominantly black working class families, and was rife with gunfire, drugs, teenage pregnancies and poverty.

“I got involved with the death penalty because I got involved with poor people,” she told students. “It took me many, many years to come to understand that Jesus in the Gospels is always about being on the side of people who don’t have a voice, about standing up for the outcast.”

The death penalty “is very tough,” she said. “People have committed inexplicable crimes against innocent people and our hearts are full of outrage because no human being, no life should be ended because of violence.

“But do we deserve to kill these people in return? Think about it — the victims are dead. If we kill the murderers, what does that do to us? Does it really bring closure and peace to the surviving families? Does it really deter crime? So if you find yourself struggling with the death penalty and these questions, know that you are not alone.”

Kennedy High School students in the PACE (Program in America and California Explorations) program were “very moved” by Sister Prejean’s talk, said Alida Imbrecht, government teacher, who invited the nun to visit the school while she was in Sacramento.

“She wasn’t what they expected. They thought she was cool,” said Imbrecht, who has taught at Kennedy for 10 years. “One student said Sister Helen had certainly changed her mind about the death penalty and another said she made him rethink his opinions about the criminal justice system in general.”

In her keynote talk at the Radisson Hotel, Sister Prejean, who founded “Survive,” a murder victim’s advocacy group in New Orleans, contended that the powerful witness against the death penalty by many victims’ families “is part of the reason this country is beginning to back away from the death penalty.”

“One thing I’ve learned traveling on this road is that the American people are not bad and they’re not vengeful,” she said. “They just need waking up. We have to be creative in how we reach people and it takes dialogue — unrelenting, unceasing dialogue — so that we can evolve and change on capital punishment.”

Sister Prejean said in an interview she is encouraged that the climate about the death penalty has changed because of the “Dead Man Walking” phenomenon, combined with reporting by the media about problems with how the death penalty is applied.

“Last year there were only 53 executions in the U.S. — the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976,” she said. “Since 2001, the death penalty is losing force and polls show a decrease in people in favor of it. People are realizing that maybe the way to solve social problems is not by using violence.”

Sister Prejean continues to serve as a friend and advocate for prisoners on death row, gives more than 100 talks each year on the death penalty, writes articles, and appears on television to “keep telling the stories of human suffering and to change people’s minds and end the death penalty,” she told The Herald.

Currently she is a spiritual advisor to Manuel Ortiz, a death row inmate in Louisiana, and Cathy Henderson, a Missouri woman scheduled to be executed on April 18 in Texas for the death of an infant in her care.

Sister Prejean’s second book, “The Death of Innocents,” published in 2005, explored another moral question in the debate on capital punishment: “What if we are killing the wrong person?”

The book focused on the cases of two men she believes were innocent of the crimes for which they were executed, and it detailed their legal cases and efforts to overturn their convictions.

She told The Herald she will start writing another book this summer tentatively titled “River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey to Death Row.” The proposal for the book has been sent to Random House, publisher of her other two books.

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