To my mother, Gusta Mae, and my father, Louis, who loved me into life

first vintage books edition, june 1994

Copyright 1993, 2013 by Helen Prejean Preface copyright 2013 by Desmond Mpilo Tutu Afterword copyright 2013 by Susan Sarandon Afterword copyright 2013 by Tim Robbins All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Excerpt from Resistance, Rebellion and Death by Albert Camus, translated by J. OBrien. Copyright 1960 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Five lines from The Warning from The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1967 by Arna Bontemps and George Huston Bass. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Excerpts from Wild Justice The Evolution of Revenge by Susan Jacoby. Copyright 1983 by Susan Jacoby. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prejean, Helen. Dead man walking: an eyewitness account of the death penalty in the United States / Helen Prejean. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Capital punishmentUnited States. 2. Capital punishmentReligious aspects. I. Title. HV8699.U5P74 1994 93-43877 CIP Vintage ISBN: 978-0-679-75131-1 Book design by Tanya M Prez www.vintagebooks.com Printed in the United States of America E9

PREFACE BY ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU

Let me begin by saying that I am honored to be connected to Sister Helen and her great book. At the height of apartheid, South Africa had the third highest judicial execution rate in the world, killing 1,109 people on death row between 1980 and 1989. Then a moratorium was declared, and a year after Nelson Mandela became president, in 1995, we abolished the death penalty. We were making the connections between the various types of violence and injustice, trying to create a new, more nonviolent nation. As we held our national Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and worked to rebuild our country, people around the world were making the same connections about the death penaltyhow racist, unfair, and broken it isand slowly a new global movement for the abolition of the death penalty began. At the heart of that movement was Dead Man Walking, this extraordinary, moving, historic book by Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen tells her story of writing to someone on death row, then visiting him, and then entering the world of capital punishment. She met several condemned men and then the families of their victims. Through it all, she began to speak out and organize against the death penalty and, after recognizing her failure, also reached out to offer healing help to victims families.

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As she undergoes her transformation, so do we. We, too, witness the tragedy of violence, the suffering of the bereaved and the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the capital punishment system. We watch as Sister Helen struggles to offer compassion to everyone. She candidly admits her mistake of not reaching out at rst to the victims families, and this impels her to do something very concrete: she founds Survive, a support group for victims families that offers real healing help. As spiritual advisor to the condemned, Sister Helen managed to do what I myself would have liked to do for the hundreds of persons hanged in Pretoria prison on Friday mornings: say to them as they died, Look at my faceI will be the face of Christ for you. Indeed, the entire book is a journey to this moment. Being the face of Christ to a criminal being put to death by the state presupposes his own dignity as a human person even though he may, indeed, be guilty of a terrible crime. I love the words Sister Helen has been quoted many times as saying: Everyone is worth more than the worst act of his or her life. This classic workand the compelling lm it inspiredstirred the consciousness of the world. Its twofold message is transparently clear: legalized government violence against its citizens serves only to legitimize and perpetuate violence; nor does it truly help the victims families heal, although this is not immediately clear. I sympathize with Sister Helen because during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, we in South Africa tried to listen to those on all sides: rst, our black sisters and brothersand our white sisters and brothers as wellwho lost loved ones and suffered under the evil apartheid system; and then, the victimizers, the white perpetrators of apartheid and their black collaborators, who tortured and killed so many of our black and white sisters and brothers. We too are learning the lessons of compassion, as we strive for a new culture of justice, nonviolence, and reconciliation. We are learning the simple but hard lesson that killing those who kill is not the way to show that murder is wrong. We show this by forgiving. Forgiveness is never going to be easy, Sister Helen writes. Each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won. She says this after recounting the journey of Lloyd LeBlanc, whose son was murdered and who struggled hard not to give in to the hatred and bitterness that had robbed him of happiness. Finally, he came to realize: They killed my son, but Im not going to let them kill me, Im going to do what Jesus said. Thats a lesson we are still

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learning in South Africa: there is no future without forgiveness. We all have to struggle every day to forgive everyone who ever has hurt us if we are going to live in peace. Sister Helen reminds Christians everywhere that Jesus call to love one another, even our enemies, is the heart of his Gospel message. His commandmentLet the one without sin be the rst to throw a stoneforced devout religious authorities, who were about to execute someone, to put down their stones and walk away. But in fact this is a universal call to us all, believers and nonbelievers alike: the call to respect the human rights of all. Not to torture, not to kill. This is the high road the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights compels us to take if we are ever to establish just and compassionate societies, a point Sister Helen makes admirably in her book. Throughout the story, I notice how Sister Helen refuses to be passive. She resists state executions, she organizes, she gets on the road and educates, she founds a group of real people to reach out to victims families. I am delighted that this stellar book is being reissued on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. I hope everyone will read it, pass it on to others, and join the global movement to abolish the death penalty once and for all, so that we can get on with the challenging work of tackling poverty, sexism, racism, and economic unfairness, which are the seedbeds of violence. Maybe one day, well look back at Dead Man Walking as one of the historic turning points that brought an end to the death penalty around the world. May it be so. Thank you, Sister Helen, for taking us with you on your transformative journey. January 2013

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INTRODUCTION

Ive heard that there are two situations that make interesting stories: when an extraordinary person is plunged into the commonplace and when an ordinary person gets involved in extraordinary events. Im denitely an example of the latter. I stepped quite unsuspectingly from a protected middle-class environment into one of the most explosive and complex moral issues of our day, the question of capital punishment. It began ten years ago when I wrote a letter to an inmate on Louisianas death row and the man wrote back. Thus began a tenyear journey that led me into Louisianas execution chamber and then into advocacy groups for homicide victims families. I began naively. It took timeand mistakesfor me to sound out the moral perspective, which is the subject of this book. There is much pain in these pages. There are, to begin with, crimes that defy description. Then there is the ensuing rage, horror, grief, and erce ambivalence. But also courage and incredible human spirit. I have been changed forever by the experiences that I describe here.

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