Summary
Sister Helen Prejean’s friend, Chava Colon from the Prison
Coalition, asks her if she would be willing to correspond with a
death row inmate. He assigns Prejean to Elmo Patrick Sonnier, a
man convicted of raping and murdering a young woman and her boyfriend. Sonnier
comes from a pleasant, rural Cajun community in Louisiana.
Prejean describes how she came to work and live in the
St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans in June of 1981. A spiritual enlightenment
forced her to recognize that Jesus challenged the affluent to share
their resources with the poor. As a result, she began working with
the poor.
The residents of St. Thomas, and the working poor of Louisiana in
general, endure daily struggles and police brutality. Prejean works
with teenage single mothers who are unable to making a living from
their minimum wage pay. The Reagan administration slashes funding
for social services, while the incarceration rate more than doubles
in a decade. Although life is bleak in St. Thomas, Prejean derives
hope and inspiration from a young boy working after school to help
buy clothes for his sister, and the college graduate creating self-help
programs. Prejean, who had a comfortable and loving childhood, says
that she doesn’t know how law-abiding she would be if she had been
born into a similar life of poverty.
Prejean sends Patrick a letter and three pictures of herself.
She tries to imagine what type of man he is, and the suffering of
the victims’ family. Patrick writes back saying he would enjoy exchanging letters
with her because it’s “just too hard” to be alone on death row. A
steady correspondence develops. Patrick describes his cell, in which
he spends twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. He is completely
alone. His mother is too old to visit, and his brother Eddie is
serving life in the same prison, Angola, for the same crime.
Prejean asks Chava Colon for Patrick’s files. Chava tells
Prejean that a week after Patrick’s conviction, the trial judge
mailed Patrick the date of his execution, and his court-appointed
lawyer quit. Chava says that it is difficult to find lawyers to
represent the convicts. Patrick has a new volunteer lawyer from
Louisiana.
Prejean reads the newspaper clippings, which describe
the happy lives of the victims and details their brutal murder and
rape. Patrick and his brother confessed during the trial, although
each blamed the other for pulling the trigger. Patrick was sentenced
to death, and Eddie was sentenced to life in prison. Eddie recanted
his testimony and said he pulled the trigger, but a new jury sentenced
Patrick to death once more. The depravity of the crime stuns Prejean.
Prejean describes the history of the electric chair, beginning
with its first brutal use in 1890. She includes a doctor’s report
that says electric chair victims suffer horribly before dying. Patrick’s
victims haunt Prejean, and she feels guilty about befriending their
killer. If someone were to kill her own family, she does not know
how she would feel, but she is sure she would not want her death
avenged by execution. She believes we cannot trust governments to
decide who should live and die; she can’t believe in a God who “invests
human representatives with such power to torture and kill.”
Patrick’s loneliness and gratitude touch Prejean, and
she decides she should visit him.
Analysis
Sister Helen Prejean’s journey from a life of quiet religious
contemplation to one of social activism is motivated by a series
of revelations. Prejean illuminates the progression of life-changing
decisions that brought her to Patrick Sonnier. She opens her story
with a single question and answer, condensed into one sentence:
Chava Colon asks her to become a pen-pal to a death-row inmate,
and her response is an almost off-handed “sure.” By opening her
narrative this way, Prejean highlights how easily the capricious
decisions we make can change our lives forever. The simple question
and the casual answer lead to a radical transformation in Prejean’s
life.
The transformation that begins with Prejean’s decision
to correspond with Patrick is just one part of a larger personal
and religious transformation that has brought Prejean from a comfortable
middle class childhood to a vocation as a nun and a life spent in
a poor, violent public housing project in New Orleans. Prejean’s
decision to work with Patrick is one step in a series of life-altering
moments.
Prejean’s relationship with Patrick and her life in the
St. Thomas housing project are intimately connected to her faith.
Her decision to fight for social justice is a part of both her new
understanding of Catholicism and the changing direction of the Catholic
Church. For Prejean, it is no longer enough to believe in God. Faith
is not passive, but active, and in order for her to live up to her
faith and ideals, she must work and fight for justice. It is a radical
and demanding idea, one that calls upon the individual to shoulder
responsibility for society’s ills. Prejean’s religious beliefs lie
at the center of her narrative, and it is her personal reflections
on the challenges, disappointments, guilt, and confusion she faces
that make her story so uniquely moving and effective.
In addition to describing her relationship with Patrick,
Prejean describes the larger social context of poverty and inequality.
The execution of Patrick Sonnier is just one element of the general
social injustice that includes police brutality, the abject poverty
of the St. Thomas housing projects, the cruel indifference of politicians,
and the unfair distribution of government resources. The facts and
figures interspersed throughout the narrative are not merely disturbing,
but damning. Prejean calls into question the basic fairness of the American
judicial system and the social and political context that support
it. The state, in its decision to execute Patrick, claims to seek justice,
but ours is not a just world.
Two quotes from the French existentialist novelist and
philosopher Albert Camus highlight the world’s injustice. According
to Camus, a state can kill a man only if the man is absolutely evil,
and the state is absolutely good. His other quotation proclaims
that the “premeditated crime” of the death penalty is worse than
the “pure violence” of the inmate’s crime. As Prejean shows, the
state is imperfect and worse. It is itself an instrument of injustice.
To a large extent, race determines, not only who is poor and who
is rich, but also who will live and who will die. The very means
of execution employed by the state—the electric chair—is torturous
and violent. Given the failure of government in even minor matters
of governance, how can society possibly entrust it to determine
fairly and equitably who should live and who should die? For Prejean,
the answer is clear. Governments, and therefore the people behind them,
are far too fallible to shoulder such an enormous responsibility.
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