Dead Man Walking

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to violent crime, along with the emotional anguish suffered by the victims’ families. It also contains references to the execution of prisoners.

Helen Prejean is now one of the best-known death penalty abolitionists in the United States, but as she makes clear in the book, she began her ministry with very little idea as to how capital punishment worked, only believing that God does not invest “human representatives with such power to torture and kill” in the name of the law (21). It is her experiences with Sonnier and Willie that reveal the sheer injustice of capital punishment. Both men that Prejean counsels in the book are white, but they stand out as exceptions in a state (and country) where the state is not only more likely to seek death for a Black man rather than a white one, but also in particular when the victim is: White people comprise 10% of murder victims but 75% of victims in death penalty cases are white (44-45). Along with race, class is an extremely salient factor in determining who the state will kill. As Millard Farmer tells Prejean, “you’re never going to find a rich person on death row” (49), since they can pay for skilled attorneys, expert witnesses, and other prosecutorial stumbling blocks that will compel the state to cut a plea.