Publisher Description

When Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition asks me one January day in 1982 to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate, I say, Sure. The invitation seems to fit with my work in St. Thomas, a New Orleans housing project of poor black residents. Not death row exactly, but close. Thus begins Sister Helen Prejean's story of her encounter with the death penalty in America. When she first writes to Patrick Sonnier, the condemned killer of two teenagers, this unassuming Roman Catholic nun from a middle class Louisiana family is wholly unprepared for what will follow. As she grows to know Sonnier, she sees the terrified human being beneath the surface of the repentant killer and becomes increasingly disturbed not only by the inhumane conditions of his confinement but also by the terrible anguish he suffers during the long countdown toward execution. She also sees the moral struggles of the public officials - the governor, the head of the Department of Corrections, wardens, guards - who have to carry out killings that the law demands but that they do not personally believe in. And she comes to know the dismaying truth about the death penalty's disproportionate cost in money and resources, and how fragile and sometimes chaotic the justice system can be. Her experience soon leads her to ask: How can society benefit from replicating the violence it condemns? In formulating her answer, however, Helen Prejean also confronts the counterbalancing factors. Chief among them is the devastating rage and grief of the victims' families, whom she comes to know and befriend and whose need for retribution she understands. Prejean's indictment of capital punishment sensitively navigates the complex personal,ethical, and legal issues involved, balancing compassion for both the criminals and the people whose lives they destroy. By turns reflective and deeply personal, spiritual and candidly human, this engrossing and deeply moving meditation on one of the most painfully controversial issue

Author Biography

Sister Helen Prejean is a prison minister and the author of the "New York Times" bestseller "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United State." and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Review

Deeply moving . . . Sister Prejean is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental. . . . She almost palpably extends a hand to her readers. "The New York Times Book Review" An immensely moving affirmation of the power of religious vocation. . . . Stunning moral clarity. "The Washington Post Book World" "" Here is one voice for life. We really should need no other. "The New York Review of Books ""An intimate meditation on crime and punishment, life and death, justice and mercy and above all Christian love in its most all-embracing sense. . . . [Prejean] never shrinks from the horror of what she has seen. She never resorts to something so predictable as pathos or a play for sympathy." "Los Angeles Times" "A remarkable writer . . . Prejean's manner of describing the tortured relations among prisoners, criminal-justice officers and victims' families would be the envy of many novelists. Even if your own views on capital punishment are set in concrete, you are sure to be moved by the force of Prejean's personality and commitment." "Glamour" "Painful and powerful . . . [Prejean's] practical moral courage is heroic." "The New Yorker" "Providing a gritty look at what really happens in the final hours of a death row inmate . . . Prejean takes readers to a place most will thankfully never know . . . adeptly probing the morality of a judicial system and a country that kills its citizens." "San Francisco Chronicle" "An impassioned condemnation of capital punishment." "Cleveland Plain Dealer" "This arresting account should do for the debate over capital punishment what the film footage from Selma and Birmingham accomplished for the civil rights movement: turn abstractions into flesh and blood. Tough, fair, bravely alive you will not come away from this book unshaken." BillMcKibben"

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