UBC, Prejean, Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., is a polemicist.

I don't say this as a condemnation, just as something I was never able to forget while reading Dead Man Walking. This is a woman making an argument; her goal is to persuade. As a reader, I was always able to feel her persuading me as I read, and even though I agree with her--the death penalty as practiced in the American criminal justice system is an abomination and a farce--I had to keep reminding myself not to dig in my heels just because I don't like being persuaded of things.

Which is also not to say that she is not extremely persuasive. Sister Helen is an excellent storyteller, and she is always careful to keep the other side of her story in mind: the Bourques and the LeBlancs as well as Pat Sonnier, the Harveys as well as Robert Lee Willie. She's perfectly open about her own rhetorical purpose, and she's willing to show the people who don't agree with her as being good and morally upright people who are able to turn their daughter's horrible death into purpose that is not simply about supporting the death penalty, but about advocating for the rights of the families of murder victims. She's sometimes a little disingenuous, but I never felt she was dishonest.

The movie conflates Pat Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie, which I think does a disservice to the moral complexity of the book. Sonnier, who expresses remorse and accepts responsibility for his terrible crime, who loves his brother fiercely enough to forgive him and (in a sense) to die for him, who is open to and accepting of Sister Helen's message. Who is enough of a man (unlike Willie, the narrative suggests) to drop his machismo and admit his emotions. Sonnier, who thanks Sister Helen for loving him, is just about the perfect poster child for her purpose.

Willie is not. He is not remorseful; he shifts responsibility to the other guy. (Willie & Sonnier are interesting mirrors of each other; both had a partner in crime, and both received the death penalty while their partner got life. Sonnier, in something that was either a clusterfuck or a very shrewd manipulation on Eddie Sonnier's part, confessed; Willie says consistently that it was all Vaccaro's fault, that Vaccaro did it. The closest he gets to admitting culpability is saying that he shouldn't have followed Vaccaro's lead.) He clearly likes Sister Helen, but he's resistant to being molded and he maintains his exaggerated machismo to the end. No confessions, no mention of love (except of course for his mother), no sign that there's anything in him that could be salvaged or rehabilitated or that is even capable of recognizing the idea.

There's a really weird moment where Sister Helen tells him, while they're waiting for his execution, that when she first met him she thought he was a sociopath. And I said (I think even out loud), "You mean you think he's not?" She fails in her project there with me, in the sense that her project is to persuade readers that even the most hardened criminals are still, as her abolitionist lawyer friend says of Willie, "a child sitting inside [a] tough, macho dude" (119). I don't believe that about Willie--Willie makes my skin crawl, first to last--and in any case, that's not why I believe the death penalty is wrong.

I believe the death penalty is wrong for many of the same reasons Sister Helen does. E.g.:

(1) Our government, corrupt, inefficient, and even incompetent as it so often is, should not have the power of life or death over its citizens.

(2) The imposition of the death penalty in America is grossly skewed toward African-Americans, the lower classes, (reprehensibly) the mentally disabled, and towards criminals who murder whites. If we're going to claim it's justice, then it has to be administered justly.

(3) It is absolutely cruel and unusual punishment, despite the fancy footwork the Supreme Court tried to hide behind in Gregg vs. Georgia. Towards the end of the book, the father of one of Willie's victims says, "Know what they should've done with Willie? [...] They should've strapped him in that chair, counted to ten, then at the count of nine taken him out of the chair and let him sit in his cell for a day or two and then strapped him in the chair again. It was too easy for him. He went too quick" (235). What Vernon Harvey doesn't recognize, and what the narrative doesn't point out, is that that's what the torturous system of appeals and retrials and more appeals already does. Stays of execution, temporary reprieves, courts considering appeals only to reject them, the awful, awful cruelty of the power the governor has to commute the prisoner's sentence up until the literal moment the switch is thrown . . . these are torture just as much as the strappado or the rack. It shows more clearly, actually, with Sonnier, because we see more of the process and because Sister Helen (Helen-Prejean-the-author painting Sister-Helen-the-character as the raw naive newbie) doesn't truly believe Sonnier's going to die, that nothing she can do can save him, until 8:40 on the night of his execution (Sonnier officially died at fifteen minutes past midnight). This tug o'war with hope as the prize is dreadful, excruciating for the victim's family and excruciating for the man waiting to die. It's not justice.

There are any number of ethical questions that neither this book nor this review have touched, infinite delicate delineations of gray between Sister Helen and Vernon Harvey (shades of black between Pat Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie), and I do in fact applaud this book for not shutting any of those down.



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