Dead Man Walking

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1993

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-11

Key Figures

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Index of Terms

Important Quotes

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Themes

The Injustice of the Death Penalty

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. As Prejean will later learn, Louisiana is especially corrupt, with the head of its Pardon Board accepting bribes in exchange for approving death sentences—even in highly questionable cases—so that the governor does not have to take any political flak for being ‘soft’ on a violent criminal.

As the book progresses, Prejean offers an increasingly sophisticated critique of capital punishment and its adverse social impact. Capital punishment costs enormous amounts of money, time, and political bandwidth for what is ultimately a tiny minority of crimes. And where “most people think this 1 or 2 percent who go to death row (among all murderers) must have committed the most heinous, premeditated, cold-blooded murders” (50), it is more likely that death-row inmates are low-hanging fruit, such as people who are poor, mentally ill, or young, allowing for easy convictions along with a tough-on-crime image for politicians to sell to the voters. There is quantitative proof that capital punishment not only fails to deter crime but also may unintentionally make things worse. In fact, cities in states without capital punishment, such as New York, actually saw the murder rate decrease due to more resources for “federal drug-fighting programs and beefed-up police” (233). For Prejean, not everyone will be moved by revelations of race- and class-based discrimination, but if they can see the full costs of capital punishment at the expense of things they value, they may come to realize that it is impractical as well as unjust.

Accepting Personal Responsibility

Supporters of capital punishment argue that death is the ultimate way to make someone reckon with the fact that they have taken a human life. They argue, furthermore, that the prospect of such a reckoning will deter those who might otherwise carry out such acts. Prejean rejects this reasoning from the outset, but in her role as spiritual advisor to Sonnier and later Willie, she finds it very important that they take full responsibility for what they have done, in particular by making sincere amends to the victims’ families at the moment of their death. Sonnier may have been subject to the bad influence of his younger brother, and Willie insists that his accomplice was the main offender, but in any case, it is important that they “die a free and loving man” (84), owning up to the mistakes that led them to ruin peoples’ lives. As Prejean learns more about the administration of capital punishment in the United States, however, she develops a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to accept personal responsibility.

After Sonnier’s execution, Prejean is disturbed at the way that the officers of the state and prison try to create as much distance between themselves and the public, on one hand, and the full reality of what they are doing, on the other. Guards whom Prejean speaks to routinely insist that they are just doing their job, and so “nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man” on the grounds that the offenders are getting what they deserve and those contributing to his death are legitimately constituted agents of the law (101). This same distance extends to the nature of executions themselves, which are increasingly being compared to euthanasia: then-California Governor Reagan compared capital punishment to putting a wounded horse to sleep (216). As Prejean watches the executions take place, it’s difficult to tell what’s happening, and so the handful of eye witnesses may console themselves (or, as the case may be, take umbrage) in the fact that they cannot perceive any distinct suffering. Prejean is therefore convinced that there is a major disconnect between public attitudes, which largely treat capital punishment in the abstract, and their actual support of what occurs in the death house. By the book’s conclusion, Prejean is dedicated to showing the American public what the death penalty really entails, so that they as a nation can take responsibility for what is carried out in their name.

Christian Mercy Versus Christian Legalism

The Bible is a near-constant reference for political leaders seeking to defend certain policies, but Prejean finds such references to be frequently inconsistent and all too convenient. The Book of Exodus (21: 23-27) establishes ‘an eye for an eye’ as a principle of justice, but then in the Gospel of St. Matthew (5:38-4), Christ tells his followers, “you have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you, do not offer resistance to one who is evil. If someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” Prejean herself falls somewhere in the middle of these two positions. While she tries to place the idea of ‘an eye for an eye’ in its cultural context to undermine its use as a rationale for execution, she is certainly not calling for passivity in the face of evil. She reminds everyone who will listen that she supports life without the possibility of parole for Sonnier and Willie, and in the book’s final chapter, she calls for “beefed-up police patrols in high-crime areas” as a better use of public resources than the death penalty (233). Rather than wade too deeply into “biblical quarterbacking” (195), Prejean relies on a set of core principles, namely that human beings, and especially governments, are not “trustworthy enough to mete out so ultimate and irreversible a punishment as death” (123). Christ ministered to the poor and outcast, and so Prejean will do the same, both to provide comfort and to see justice done by trying to commute their sentences.

However, over the course of the book, Prejean encounters many others who are no less Christian than she and who similarly recognize the futility of “get[ting] into all this Bible quotin’ with no nun” but are nonetheless convinced that their faith not only permits the death penalty but also encourages it (77). In addition to the Pauline scripture regarding obedience to legal authorities (Romans 13), these people view the death penalty as an instrument by which the community maintains certain standards of decency against those whom they believe, not without cause, to have flagrantly violated those standards. Where Prejean is focusing on the connection between one person and another, others think of Christianity as advocating for a basically good society where people have the freedom to act virtuously without fearing for their safety. Because of these sincerely held convictions, Prejean cannot simply appeal to Christianity to promote the abolition of capital punishment; she must raise arguments rooted in cold, hard practicality as well.