The Importance of Being a Nun

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I never questioned because you get to be part of a culture. Well honey, this is the way we do things here. So I awakened and move into the St. Thomas housing projects. It was like another country. All the rules were different. The way the police treated people. What happened if your child got sick? And it's there working in the projects, learning about all this stuff. One day I got the invitation to write a man on death row. Two years later I am in that execution chamber and watch him be electrocuted to death by the state of Louisiana for his crime. Terrible crime.

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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