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Campaigning Nun Brings Death Sentence Discussion to Campus
by Nathan Heath and Hilltop staff*
Photos by Josh Doby
Sister Helen Prejean
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As 17-year old David LeBlanc prepared to leave for his high school's homecoming football game, his mother gave him a velour sweater. After putting it on, he stood smiling in the kitchen alongside his 18-year old girl friend Loretta Bourque, and rubbing his arms appreciatively, said, "Mama, this is going to keep me warm at the football game tonight." But his father would later comment sadly that it couldn't keep him alive.
Later that night, after the homecoming game, Elmo Patrick Sonnier, and his brother Eddie came across the couple parked in a local "lover's lane." Posing as security guards, they handcuffed them and drove them to a remote field, where they took turns raping Loretta. They then murdered both of them. David and Loretta were found lying on their faces in the wet grass in the field, shot in the back of the head, execution style.
Sister Helen Prejean had been visiting the brothers in prison, and as she read the police reports, her initial reaction was; "I'm visiting the two people who did this? I'm their spiritual advisor! Oh, my God, what am I doing with these people, and how did I get involved?"
Sister Helen Prejean is author of the best selling book Dead Man Walking: An Eye Witness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, which was the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie Dead Man Walking. She is an iconic critic of the death penalty and has spoken out against it in communities nationwide. On April 3 in Moore Auditorium she spoke about her book, movie, and her position on capital punishment.
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Signing books
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Born in 1939, Sister Helen describes herself as a "privileged child" who grew up as the daughter of a lawyer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and who went to a private high school. She was only 18 when she became a Roman Catholic nun, joining the sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille. She received a bachelor's degree in English and education from St. Mary's Dominican College, New Orleans, in 1962 , and a master's degree in religious education from St. Paul's University in Ottawa, Canada in 1973.
After receiving her master's degree, she moved into the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans, where she was introduced to, and indeed was shocked by, the suffering and injustice that thrives in America. This experience would prove to be the beginning of her spiritual revolution.
It was during the four years she spent at that housing project that she was asked to correspond with a man on death row, Patrick Sonnier. She did, and he eventually asked her to come and visit him. In retrospect she claims that she felt more "caught than drawn…like a boat that gets on a current in the stream." She was a nun, and he needed her, so she came.
"I didn't start out as a Catholic nun thinking one day that if you Googled me up and put 'Death Penalty Nun' I was going to pop up on screen," she said. But she humorously conceded that; "God is as sneaky as all get out."
She described her initial visit to Patrick Sonnier, and her deepening ambiguity while being escorted through the prison, "where the guards keep slamming these gates behind you, and then they lock you in a room, and you see a green metal door with little windows with bars, and in red block letters, DEATH ROW…"
She recalls wondering before the visit whether she would be able to have "a normal conversation" with a murderer. Later she learned that in a letter to his brother, Patrick said "I'm meeting with this nun. I hope we'll be able to have like a normal conversation. I hope we don't have all this God talk where she threatens me with hell and damnation."
Sister Helen recalls that when they finally met, "I couldn't believe how human his face was. And he was smiling. And he said, "Sister, you came."
He was relieved and even surprised. She explained that "You cannot believe the abandonment of people on death row…Imagine waking up in the morning, and you get a thousand signals that you're nothing but human waste. You're so evil and bad, that we've got to kill you….good riddance!"
Despite their initial ambivalence, they got along well, and she became his spiritual advisor for the last two and a half years of his life.
It was during this time on death row that she really began to question capital punishment and the criminal justice system, particularly when she discovered that Eddie Sonnier, Patrick's brother and the man she came to believe was responsible for both homicides, had received a reduced sentence of life in prison for testifying that it was Patrick who was the murderer.
"We can barely trust the government to get the potholes fixed." How, she asked, can we trust government agencies with the process "of deciding that some human beings will live and others will die?"
She noted that 128 people in the United States have been sentenced to death, but were later exonerated. In some of these cases - including one in North Carolina -police officers hid reports and withheld evidence that would have proven the defendants' innocence.
She has learned that 98 percent of those on death row are poor and that 60 percent are minorities. Without money, defendants cannot afford quality legal counsel that can access their constitutional rights, she said. Instead they are provided an "underpaid, overworked" public defender who hasn't the time, nor in many cases the incentive, to give them appropriate legal representation.
Although Patrick Sonnier was white, Sister Helen began to notice that the majority of death row inmates were black. She recalled an observation she made while at the St. Thomas housing project, that the residents regarded the police very differently. "I would not be afraid if my car broke down in the middle of the night on a state highway and a state trooper pulled up to me. I would expect that he would help me, and he would." But many young black youths in her neighborhood had felt "intimidated and threatened by the police."
After two and a half years, Patrick Elmo Sonnier was finally executed, and Sister Helen was there for him.
At a quarter of six in the evening, everyone left, including his family. "And I realized how scared I was…I was it. I was mother. I was sister. I was friend. I was spiritual counselor. I had never been involved in anything like this in my life… but I'm all he's got… And I cannot afford to fall apart."
She continued. "And then its midnight… and I hear the lines, 'Ok Sonnier, it's time to go.' …And I said to him, 'Pat, you are not going to die without a loving face… You look at me. I'll be the face of Christ for you.'"
And as they were strapping him into the gurney, "he looked at my face." She reached her hand out to him, ... "and he looked at my face. And they killed him."
In closing, Sister Helen pointed out that because America is a democracy, "the 43 people you've killed in North Carolina have been killed by people who, in your name, are doing the killing for you." She encouraged people to take a stand, because "If we're not raising our voices against injustice, we're a part of it."
Nathan Heath put together this story with contributions from Hilltop Reporters Paul Annas, Yonatan Arnold, Katie Bolton, Kacie Cardwell, Sally Carswell, Tyler Coates, Josh Coburn, Caitlin Daly, Shawn Esworthy, Leslie Frazier, Douglas Green, Ashley Poulter, Alex Turner, Joey Wilson, and Jessie Young.
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