Dead Man Walking

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains many descriptions of violent crime, including murder and rape, along with the emotional anguish suffered by the victims’ families. It also goes into graphic detail regarding the execution of prisoners.

In January of 1982, Sister Helen Prejean was working at a housing project in New Orleans when she received an offer to exchange letters with a death-row inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. Prejean had some exposure to the racial iniquities of capital punishment but had done little work in that area. The housing project had familiarized her with the violence that often accompanies desperate poverty, but the crime of this inmate she was to correspond with was particularly shocking: Elmo Patrick Sonnier, along with his brother, kidnapped a couple from a lovers’ lane in November 1977, raping the girl and then shooting them both in the back of the head. Prejean wondered “what I can say to this man. What he can say to me” (4). Prejean was committed to the social justice wing of Catholic activism, which sought to alleviate the conditions of the poor and fight the structural conditions that kept them in poverty, and she believed that Jesus had preached good news to the poor, “and an essential part of that good news was that they were to be poor no longer” (6).