'Where people are treated with respect'

IC photo by Christopher Gray

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Writer Sister of St. Joseph Helen Prejean speaks to students about writing at Judge Memorial Catholic High School Sept. 19 after addressing the student body. In her two books, "Dead Man Walking" and "The Death of Innocents," Sr. Helen examines the death penalty in America through her own experience.

SALT LAKE CITY — Sister of St. Joseph Helen Prejean, C.S.J., has written books, has her own website, and has a name that precedes her into many American households. But most importantly, the author of "Dead Man Walking" has a message of first-hand intensity: the surreal inhumanity of the death penalty.

Made into a movie in 1996 starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, Sr. Helen’s "Dead Man Walking," detailing her experiences with Louisiana’s death row has become a classic, and has even been adapted as an opera. Though her story has been widely available for more than a decade, Sr. Helen continues to remain relevant through the validity and truthfulness of her personal accounts of lawful death in America.

Speaking to the assembled student body of Judge Memorial Catholic High School Sept. 19 before continuing on to speak at the Utah Valley State Death Penalty Symposium at Utah Valley State College, Sr. Helen engaged the students with her straightforward story, not of the death penalty itself, but rather of her own experience.

"We all have the same response to a terrible crime. We’re horrified, outraged. And we all feel the same anger: anybody that does an evil like this doesn’t deserve to live.

"But Jesus inaugurated for us the kind of community where people are treated with respect."

In "Dead Man Walking" and her 2004 book "The Death of Innocents," the stories of the crimes and punishments of Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Dobie Gillis Williams and other men lead the reader by the hand into the victims’ homes and the death chamber. After the assembly, Sr. Helen spoke to a smaller group of students on the art and process of writing.

"I didn’t think I was going to write a book," said Sr. Helen. "There were other books out there on the death penalty. But then people began encouraging me to talk. I realized my book needed to be written because I had been with the victims and with the people executed. I needed to tell the story from both sides, and from a Christian perspective.

"I knew I wanted to stay with stories about people. Plenty of books have been written about statistics, but I had a personal story. I wanted to tell it in my own voice, and take the reader with me into the prison," she said.

"I was scared, my fingers were cold. Good writing is to take people there, so they can feel what you feel. A writer can’t preach at people. You don’t say, ‘You should, therefore, be against the death penalty. I’ve written this book…’ You must take them there and let them sort it out for themselves.

"My object was not to write a novel that was a mystery. I wanted to be a faithful recorder of what happened. Don’t think that good writing means you withhold the truth of what happens to the very end. What you want is the trust of your reader. They want to trust that they can believe you.

"My editor, speaking about the story of the victims’ families in the first draft, realized that I hadn’t reached out to them, and that I knew it was a terrible mistake. He said, ‘You know what, you downplay it here. You were scared? That was cowardice, wasn’t it?’ When you write a book, tell the truth, don’t just present yourself with the things you did well – take them with you for the things you didn’t do well. Then they’ll trust you as a storyteller, someone who tells the truth."