Dead Man Walking – The Journey Continues, Sr Helen Prejean

The University of St. Thomas presents Dead Man Walking – The Journey Continues, Sr. Helen Prejean Thursday, March 10 at 7:30pm.

Sister Helen Prejean has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on the death penalty and helping shape the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to state executions.

Sister Helen is a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph. She spent her first years with the Sisters teaching religion to junior high school students. Realizing that being on the side of poor people is an essential part of the Gospel, she moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans and began working at Hope House.

During this time, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate, Patrick Sonnier at Angola, and became his spiritual adviser. After witnessing his execution, she wrote a book about the experience. The result was Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. It became a movie, opera and play for high schools and colleges.

Since 1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling death row prisoners. She has accompanied six men to their deaths. In doing so, she began to suspect that some were not guilty. This realization inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, which was released in 2004.

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