The Inviolable Dignity of the Human Person Innocent

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Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they've ever done every human being so when I'm with the guilty I'm very conscious of that and recently the Catholic Church coming to that awareness after a long dialogue. The outrage is about our system and about the ignorance because people aren't awake to it, he says.

In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean was invited to write a letter to a man on death row in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison named Elmo Patrick Sonnier. She told us, “I thought that all I was going to be doing was writing letters. And lo and behold, two years later, I am in that execution chamber.” She’s now 81, and has been present at the executions of six men.

Sister Helen’s book, Dead Man Walking, is about her time as a spiritual advisor to Elmo Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie. It was adapted into a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

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