Capital punishment demands nothing less of people than that they look with compassion into both the eyes of victims’ families and those condemned to die, according to anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean.

“We have a culture that says to us: You can be on the side of a death row inmate you don’t want executed or on the side of the victim’s family, but you can’t be on the side of both,” Sister Prejean told about 350 people May 6 during a symposium on the death penalty held at St. James Parish in Davis.

“Like the image of the cross so central to our salvation…this issue stretches us out and challenges us,” she contended.

Sister Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille, is the author of the best-selling book, “Dead Man Walking,” about her experiences with death row inmates in Louisiana, for which she earned a Pulitzer Prize.

Sister Helen Prejean (left) signed copies of her book “Dead Man Walking” at an anti-death penalty symposium in Davis. Nancy Westlund/Herald photo

A self-described Southern storyteller, Sister Prejean spoke at a Jubilee 2000 event sponsored by the Sacramento Diocese’s social justice ministry. She spun the horrifying true-life story of Patrick Sonnier, who was convicted of killing two teenagers and executed in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison in 1984.

“You can be standing in the presence of somebody who has done an unspeakable, terrible act and then you look into his eyes and know it’s a human being,” Sister Prejean said. “It’s a dangerous thing to look into another person’s eyes because you understand he is more than the worst thing he has ever done in his life.”

Sonnier is among five men Sister Prejean has accompanied to their executions. She told not only of their terror, but of condemned killers later found innocent who have come off death row since the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-1970s.

“We have 87 innocent people who have come off death row because scrappy citizens got involved in their cases,” Sister Prejean said. Among them were a group of journalism students at Northwestern University in Chicago whose efforts resulted in the release of 13 death row inmates in Illinois and a statewide moratorium on executions by Illinois’ governor.

Sister Prejean also spoke of Lloyd LeBlanc, whose 17-year-old son David had taken 18-year-old Loretta Bouque to a Catholic high school homecoming before being murdered. It was in coming to know LeBlanc, Sister Prejean said, that she began to understand the journey of victims’ families and how they deal with the loss of loved ones.

“Society tells them they’ll get justice for their loss by the imposing of maximum punishment,” she said, recalling the torment suffered by the LeBlanc family.

But when LeBlanc went to identify his son’s body in a sugar cane field, he prayed the “Our Father.”

“When he came to the words, ‘Forgive us our trespasses,’ he forgave them,” Sister Prejean said. “Here’s a man who lost his son following the road Jesus took.”

In contrast, she spoke of the parents of a teen-age girl murdered by Robert Lee Willie, the second Louisiana inmate she accompanied to his execution. After Willie was executed on Dec. 28, 1984, Sister Prejean said the girl’s father told the media he couldn’t wait for Willie to die.

“Anybody got a Jack Daniels (whiskey)? Anybody want to dance? They got Robert Willie tonight, but he died too quick. I hope he burns in hell,” he raved.

The parents who couldn’t seem to kill Willie enough had taken the position that some crimes are so horrible the only punishment is to do to the murderer what he did to his victim, Sister Prejean noted.

“Can that restore us as a society? Can it restore the victim’s family?” she asked. “What can it do to the human heart?”

As the founder of a New Orleans-based victims’ advocacy group called “Survive,” Sister Prejean has challenged Catholic dioceses nationwide to have Masses for victims of violence so “the arms of the community can be gathered around people who have been hurt.”

“There’s a spirituality where we can go deep enough to where we can stand with Christ despite the emotion of the victim and outrage over the crime,” she said.

The Louisiana nun noted that activists on both sides of the death penalty can take heart in the fact that over the last 10 years state legislatures have tightened the sentences for first degree felony murder and that convicted murderers are not walking out of prison.

In the final analysis, she contended the death penalty is a moral issue that “goes to the heart of who we are as a people.”

“It definitely goes to the heart of our Christian Catholic faith,” she said, and about how people perceive God.

“Is God pain for pain, life for life, or compassionate, loving, merciful, and can we have the kind of heart God has?” she asked.

Sister Prejean has recently written a catechetical program focusing on the death penalty for Renew 2000, available to participating dioceses nationwide.

She is also near completion of a book that will be a continuation of stories of her involvement with inmates on death row and murder victims’ families, as well as issues of concern to Catholic women in the church.

The premiere of an opera based on “Dead Man Walking” by the San Francisco Opera Company is scheduled for Oct. 7 in San Francisco.

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