The Death of a Teenage Boy

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"They're in such trauma and grief and loss i don't blame," she says of the victims' families. "I was going to lose my own life if i let that hatred overtake me." The girl's parents were furious at her when they ran into each other outside a pardon board meeting, but gradually we got to be friends after he visited his daughter-in-law on death row. 'He said sister people think forgiveness is weak like oh you kill my son like you condone in it,' one father told her.

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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