Sister Helen Prejean was a young Catholic nun devoted to serving the poor in Louisiana in 1982 when she was asked to be the penpal of death row inmate Elmo Patrick Sonnier.

Following several letters, she became Sonnier’s spiritual advisor, and before long, she went to visit him. She admits she had some misgivings going into that first visit.

“I had never met anyone who had murdered anybody before,” Prejean said. “All of the ambience and the atmosphere around death row is so sinister. When the guards brought him in and I looked for the first time at his face through the heavy mesh screen … I was astounded at how human his face looked. It was a deep, deep soul connection, like, ‘This is a human being.’”

Prejean ended up becoming an advocate for Sonnier, who denied killing the two teenagers he was convicted of murdering. Her attempts to stop his execution ultimately failed, and on April 15, 1984, she walked him to the electric chair and witnessed his death at the hands of the state.

The experience shook the young nun to the core, and she emerged with a renewed purpose in life: to fight for the abolition of the death penalty by exposing the public to its systemic faults.

“Here was this big realization that changed everything: That the people are always going to be kept away from this,” Prejean said. “I realized, I’m it. I’m the one who saw it, who witnessed it. So, my job is to bring people into this. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Prejean turned her experience into the 1994 book Dead Man Walking, which is the center of Fort Lewis College’s 2014 Common Reading Experience. And this week, she is bringing her mission to town. Along with visiting student groups and churches, Prejean will give a public presentation today at FLC’s Whalen Gymnasium.

The presentation is the main event of CRE, but it’s not the only event. The book – and the issue of the death penalty – are being explored through film, theater, photography, music and more during CRE events. Prejean said she thinks it’s an effective way to get people to really chew on the topic.

“What you want to do is just get people to reflect, and that’s what art does in every form,” she said.

Prejean would know – Dead Man Walking has been turned into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, a play written by Tim Robbins and even an opera.

It also helped launch Prejean into the life one of the world’s most prominent anti-death penalty activists. Since she watched Sonnier’s death, Prejean has written a second book, The Death of Innocents, and founded Survive, a victim’s advocacy group in New Orleans. She continues to counsel death row inmates as well as the families of murder victims.

“Being in the presence of these people who are making their way under great odds strengthens me tremendously,” Prejean said.

Prejean never would have expected she would be such a public figure. Growing up, she said, she simply embraced the view that states and governments had the right to employ the death penalty. But after experiencing the system from the inside, she said, she had an awakening.

She wants to galvanize others to a similar awakening, she said, which could lead to a wholesale change in America’s justice system.

“My ultimate goal is to help us become a more compassionate society and a more just society,” she said. To do that, she said, she tries to break down the walls that keep the public from truly understanding the death penalty.

“What kills compassion is separation,” she said. “You change the consciousness, you change the culture.”

Prejean admits that the issue is complex and colored with the justified rage of families of murder victims and a deep-seeded belief in many of an eye for an eye. But in her experience, she said, the death penalty doesn’t blot that rage out, doesn’t take away that pain. It only takes away another human life.

Instead of “an eye for an eye,” Prejean said, she prefers another passage from the bible.

“I came to understand better Jesus’ words when he said, ‘love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you,’” she said.

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‘Dead Man Walking’ takes to the stage

For more than a decade, colleges and universities across the country have read or staged the play “Dead Man Walking.” It came into being after Sister Helen Prejean got the idea from an article about world-wide performances of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”
In 2002, Prejean approached actor/director Tim Robbins, who wrote the screenplay for the movie version of her book. Robbins agreed, and together, they developed a plan to offer a dramatic adaptation to American colleges.
But there were a few conditions. For performance rights, two academic departments had to incorporate the issue of the death penalty into the curriculum in some way.
Prejean’s book is the 2014 selection for the Fort Lewis College Common Reading Experience. As such, a number of auxiliary events have been scheduled, so the FLC Department of Theatre jumped at the chance to present a reading of the adaptation.
Visiting assistant professor Felicia Meyer directs, and her large cast will present two free performances at 4 and 7 p.m. Wednesday in Roshong Recital Hall. Whether you have read Prejean’s book or seen the film, the play adaptation should bring forth yet another interpretation of Prejean’s life-changing experience with a death row inmate.
[email protected]. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.

If you go

The Fort Lewis College Common Reading Experience will present a public talk by Sister Helen Prejean at 7 p.m. today at FLC’s Whalen Gymnasium, 1000 Rim Drive. Doors will open at 6:45 p.m. for the public. FLC’s Concert Choir will perform a special piece of music to kick off the evening. The event is free.

The music of forgiveness

Charissa Chiaravalloti, director of choral activities at Fort Lewis College, spent much of this summer composing a new work, “Grace,” for Sister Helen Prejean’s presentation today.
“Musically,” she said in an interview a week before Prejean’s speech, “I wanted the beginning to sound like shimmering light, heavenly. Then it shifts into a chant, which sounds ancient and earthly.”
The text opens with a sequence of built chords repeating one word: love. Then it shifts to a Latin text, Agnus Dei – that is, Lamb of God – and finally merges into a celebratory Allelujah.
The two sections contain other oppositional elements, Chiaravalotti said. “There’s a juxtaposition of sounds, duple against a triple meter and major and minor passages – but in the same key.”
“Grace” moves toward a sonic brightness and ends on an unresolved chord, which Chiaravalloti said was entirely purposeful: “It’s still an open question.”
Judith Reynolds