'This is the death house, where killing is done by quiet-spoken, polite people who serve you a fine meal and pray with you before they kill you.' Helen Prejean talks to Anna Mundow
When Michael Ross, a serial killer, was put to death in Connecticut last month, he became the first prisoner in 45 years to have been executed in New England and perhaps the first in history to have fought for the right to be killed. Sister Helen Prejean, who visited Ross on death row, believes his death was largely a deliberate redemptive act. "There is a noble part of him that wants to give up his life for the sake of the victims' families," she says when we speak a couple of days before Ross's execution. "He said to me: 'I could be like the thief who was crucified alongside Jesus. I could give my life for those people.' "
This would sound naive, at best, from any other nun, but Prejean is no pushover. She has walked six times to the death chamber with a condemned man and helped him to die. As a spiritual adviser, she talked to and prayed with each one as he was strapped into the electric chair or, more recently, onto the black padded gurney, his feet elevated to prevent him digging in with his heels, the veins of his arm or neck opened to receive the sodium pentothal, potassium chloride and pancuronium bromide that will end his life. "This is the death house," Prejean says, "where killing is done by quiet- spoken, polite people, who first serve you a fine meal and pray with you before they kill you."
Prejean believes that two of the men she accompanied, Dobie Williams and Joseph O'Dell, were innocent. Williams, a poor black man, had an IQ of 65. Two years after his execution, in 1999, the US Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to kill a person so mentally disabled; 35 people deemed retarded under that ruling had already been executed. Arrested for the rape and murder of a white woman, Williams was assigned an inept defence counsel and convicted by an all-white jury. (Williams's attorney once told Prejean that he keeps his car running while delivering clients' appeals to certain judges in Louisiana, knowing that the petitions will be denied within minutes.) Before they strapped him down, Williams's last words were: "I just want to say I got no hard feelings for anybody. God bless everybody. God bless." O'Dell was convicted of rape and murder in 1986, after defending himself at trial - and after being denied DNA retesting of forensic evidence that he insisted would exonerate him. His final words were: "Governor, you're killing an innocent man."
These two stories form the core of Prejean's latest book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, in which the Louisiana nun who brought the death penalty to the world's attention in 1993, with her book Dead Man Walking, now asks: "Can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent? And can anyone doubt, after the revelations of the past five years, that we do it all the time?"
Speaking recently in a packed auditorium at a small college in Maine (she gives more than 120 talks a year), Prejean emphasised that no government "should be put in charge of killing anybody, not even those proven guilty of terrible crimes . . . It is a profound moral contradiction to give the state the power to kill in order to prove that murder is wrong". In her refined, seductive Louisiana drawl, she then reminded her young audience that "only poor people are sentenced to death in America".
In The Death of Innocents Prejean challenges Americans not only to contemplate that fact but also to ask: What if the government kills the wrong person? Then she shows that it has - and still does. Since 1973 117 wrongfully convicted people have been freed from death row in the US, some after spending more than 20 years in solitary confinement. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 23 innocent people were executed in the US in the last century. Yet between 1976 and 1999 the US executed approximately 600 people. Eighty per cent of 2003's executions were in the former slave states that make up the "death belt"; Texas carried out 39 per cent of the killings. (As governor of Texas, George W Bush typically spent less than 30 minutes reading a plea for clemency; he approved 152 executions, more than any other governor in history.)
Prejean presents the facts - 99 per cent of those on death row are poor, 80 per cent are black, 80 per cent of the victims in capital crime cases are white - as she traces the history of the death penalty in the US, including the shifting position of the Catholic Church and the role played by race and poverty, on the one hand, and prosecutorial ambition and electoral politics, on the other, in deciding who ends up on death row.
Reconstructing the crimes for which Williams and O'Dell were executed, Prejean takes us through the trials, allowing us to weigh evidence the juries were never shown. Reading one account after another of corruption and ineptitude, you begin to understand why one eminent defence lawyer, Stephen Bright, concludes that "you're better off in the courts today to be rich and guilty than to be poor and innocent". When young Sister Helen first moved into New Orleans's poorest housing project, in 1981, her black neighbours put it another way: "Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment."
The genteel daughter of a successful New Orleans lawyer and a registered nurse, Prejean was an unlikely ghetto nun. When she joined the Sisters of St Joseph of Medaille, at the age of 18, she was content with teaching, prayer and good works. "I prayed for the poor and left it to God to take care of them," she says. A talk on poverty in 1980 by Sr Marie Augusta Neal changed all that, propelling Prejean and four other nuns to live and work in a neighbourhood where most of the young men were on "greased tracks straight into Angola prison [ in Louisiana]".
Prejean didn't realise it, but she was heading in the same direction. Invited by a prisoner-advocate group to correspond with a death-row inmate called Patrick Sonnier, the young nun encountered the first challenge to her belief that every human being is worth more than the worst act of his or her life. She watched Sonnier die in the electric chair, stopped to vomit on the drive home and swore that she would never go back to the death chamber. But there was another nagging thought. "It was the middle of the night," she later recalled. "I had watched a man die, and I knew that if the people of Louisiana could really be brought to see this - not just the physical execution but how selective it is - they'll reject the death penalty."
Dead Man Walking, particularly Tim Robbins's film version, in 1995, made people see. Its subject, Robert Willie, had been sentenced to death by electrocution for the 1980 torture, rape and murder of 18-year-old Faith Hathaway. The brutality of his crime, coupled with his swagger, made him "a poster boy for the death penalty. He was worse than any single person I've ever encountered", Prejean later admitted.
Dead Man Walking made Prejean a controversial celebrity of sorts. It also gave her personal mission a political edge, one that has become increasingly sharp in recent years. "Just look around and you see that the death penalty is fundamental to this society's outlook," she says. "It says that the way you deal with a social evil is violence. You have a war - on crime, on drugs, on terrorism. You diminish the humanity of the criminal, demonise the enemy, and then you kill them."
For the first time in two decades, however, Prejean sees the Catholic Church in the US finally challenging this attitude, at least on executions. Accepting that an impassioned letter to Pope John Paul II in 1997 may have been a factor, she says that "Catholic bishops just began a nationwide educational campaign to end the death penalty in this country. This is huge. This is the thaw beginning to happen, big chunks of ice breaking off".
What would she say if she bumped into President Bush? She is silent for a moment. "I don't know if I would say anything. A friend of mine told me, 'You don't argue with a drunk man,' and it's sort of like that. What kind of conversation with George Bush is possible?"
In The Death of Innocents, Prejean speculates further. "Callous indifference to human suffering may also set Bush apart," she writes. "He may be the only government official to mock a condemned person's plea for mercy, then lie about it afterward." (In 1999, when the presidential candidate was asked by a journalist what Karla Faye Tucker, a death-row prisoner, had said in a television plea to him as governor, Bush pursed his lips, mimicking Tucker, and whimpered: "Please, please, don't kill me." In his autobiography, Bush later wrote that the pending execution "felt like a huge piece of concrete crushing me".)
Prejean, whose compassion seems boundless, refuses to waste time in despair. When she heard the 2004 presidential election result on the morning news she finished her coffee and drove to visit the seventh man she will accompany to the death chamber. "He's innocent," she says softly. "We're going to do it again."
The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, by Sr Helen Prejean, is published by Random House, £18.95