SISTER HELEN PREJEAN
Schroth, Raymond A.
SISTER HELEN PREJEAN On death row Raymond A. Schroth he drive from New Orleans west to Louisiana ty activists, also wonders about the mystery of Helen...
...R.A.S...
...men and women in ons are not like the movies and real prisoners are uniforms huddled around...
...Producer Tim Robbins and Susan Saran- orous and interesting than the real-life characters they don were determined to purge the script of the usual portray...
...I'm book or article against capital punishment, so he cannot going to die in prison...
...the room's walls were plain and bare, and a ceilschool prison chaplain warns Prejean that real pris- ing light glared down at me...
...thousand-acre farm...
...There's even an ex- A few weeks after I watched that scene on video, I hibit on the film Dead Man Walking, with pictures of was wheeled into a hospital operating room for spinal the three inmates who inspired the film, and the orig- cord surgery...
...When I came to, four hours later, There are several levels of irony in the scene...
...The final irony is that the naive nun would one day The first irony is that, though the prisoners are become the heroine of a prison movie and one of the human beings and not scum, the men on whom the world's leading spokespersons for the idea that there composite film inmate was based, Patrick Sonnier are no "scum" among our fellow human beings...
...She "Christian" prison...
...tration building, perched on the highest point of the eighteenOn five of these trips she has watched a man die...
...It was Sonnier and Manuel Ortiz...
...He knows I will write a "I've got nothing to lose...
...He sits at the end of his office verse," thirty-two-year-old tradition that seriously injures conference table, with two witnesses, his assistant Cathy inmates desperate for a few seconds of fame...
...his spiritual adviser until his execution in 1984, which she Last December six convicted murderers took three guards witnessed...
...in fact, the real Helen Prejean may be less prison-film sentimentality, to produce an "anti" glamorous but she is much more exciting, complex, death-penalty work of art which would give both and above all funnier than Sarandon's portrayal...
...Prejean makes her way to the visiting room to try to de- He has gotten good coverage for running a humane, liver a little hope to Eddie Sonnier and Manuel Ortiz...
...Cain describes grounds...
...gola (because historically the slaves around here came from Death row is situated in a wing of the long, low adminisAngola in Africa) every month for more than twenty years...
...they are "the scum of the sterilized a spot with a gauze, pierced a vein with a earth...
...She began as a poor little nun T through long flat stretches of nothing but cy- willing to correspond with a prisoner and ended up writing press swamps and sudden, torrential rains that a best-selling book, Dead Man Walking, that was made into a blind the driver to all but the tail lights of a car a few yards popular movie with Susan Sarandon in the role of Sister in front...
...but she also men and held their hands at the end...
...Perhaps this is what cent victims behind bars and oppressive thugs wear- the general public imagines death by lethal injectioning the uniform of law and order...
...the Lilly Endowment...
...utes before midnight...
...The outstretched arm, was the same as the execution chamscript is open to the scene where, in 1982, the old- ber's...
...then the author embarrassed him by detailing prisprisoners' craft shop...
...In known in the 1960s as the "bloodiest prison in the South," 1977, when Eddie was twenty, he and his older brother Pat but a series of reform-minded wardens, particularly the cur(twenty-seven), squirrel hunting, came upon a young couple rent one, Burl Cain, have attracted national and internaon a lovers' lane, kidnapped them, raped the girl, and shot tional attention...
...Ortiz was out of the country when the murder took place, and the -- _ -N /1' prosecution suppressed evidence pointing to other suspects...
...Sister Helen believes she is counseling an innocent condemned man...
...Manuel crushed the rebellion and killed an inmate...
...But he was "burned" by Daniel Bergdoor is a beautiful Western saddle and near the conference ner's book...
...At his respect of the inmates...
...Trenticosta, one of the nation's leading anti-death-penalRaymond A. Schroth, S.J., is Jesuit Community Professor of the Humanities at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City...
...With more than 60 percent serving life Equal Justice calls the case against Ortiz weak...
...Cain gave the writer yearlong access to the table a handmade spinning wheel, proud products of the prison...
...Prejean is the recipient of twenty-four honNorth of Baton Rouge, Highway 61 slowly turns "scenic...
...The operating table, narrow, with the inal film script with Sister Helen's comments...
...hostage and beat and stabbed one to death before guards The second prisoner she will see is on death row...
...A "general" in the worldwide movement to bellum Homes," vast slave plantations that before the Civil abolish the death penalty, she has three times been nomiWar lined the banks of the Mississippi River...
...Sister Helen nated for the Nobel Peace Prize...
...In the film he also tells Prejean she should needle, and sent a serum into my system-and then dress like a "real" nun...
...The court, in spite of a last- sympathetic TV documentaries, as well as a critical book, minute confession by Eddie, held that Pat had pulled the Daniel Bergner's God of the Rodeo (1998), on the annual poptrigger and sentenced him to death and Eddie to life in ular rodeo where convicts ride wild bulls and break many prison...
...He has eaten last meals with condemned knows that mostly they will talk small talk...
...I hope to see Ortiz as well...
...Yet she continues her Prejean, of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Medaille, has been monthly seven-hour round-trip drives to Angola to look making the trip to the state prison popularly known as An- these God-forsaken men in the eyes...
...Helen Prejean...
...The prison- himself as a ship captain in a storm who must navigate beer whom the guards killed had earlier told Warden Cain, tween the rocks and the waves...
...Commonweal I I October 6, 2000 fore their terms are up, hope is in short supply...
...Commonweal 12 October 6, 2000...
...If there is played by Henry Fonda, will snatch the temporary another world on the other side of darkness, we will victim of injustice from the electric chair five min- have what we deserve...
...it occurred to me that I had gone through, but not exPrison movies, as a genre, are peopled with inno- perienced, the oblivion of death...
...So no, I may not Jett and a university professor friend, as he tells me why I see death row, but his assistant will give me a tour of the may not talk to Manuel Ortiz on death row...
...His lawyer, Nick Trenticosta, of the Center for are desperate men...
...Cain, fifty-eight, is a short, heavyset oners' homosexual acts and by depicting the rodeo as a "perman with a tan, lined face...
...Prejean was Pat's first death-row pen pal, as well as bones...
...Turned out to be me...
...identify himself with my project...
...Angola has been the focus of several both in the back of the head...
...A heroic lawyer, except for the anxiety of anticipation-to be...
...The prison extends into the Mississippi This is the last Friday in June, and she will visit Eddie River, which surrounds the farm on three sides...
...The documentary film, prays that the new national and international discussion of The Farm, records how his leadership during the 1997 flood the death penalty will offer Ortiz a glimmer of light...
...sponges to transmit the current...
...someone took my arm, not like James Cagney...
...I came here as a young man...
...orary degrees and is a national celebrity so overwhelmed The landscape gently rolls, and forests and lines of ancient by her speaking schedule that she can barely keep track of live oaks shelter what the tourist signs announce as "Ante- where she is...
...We see the original electric chair, used from the or she is to be horrified...
...everything was gone...
...opponents and proponents evidence for their case...
...he also did prison ministry while teaching journalism at Loyola University, New Orleans...
...SISTER HELEN PREJEAN On death row Raymond A. Schroth he drive from New Orleans west to Louisiana ty activists, also wonders about the mystery of Helen Prejean: State Prison drags on toward Baton Rouge How does she keep going...
...if not, we will never know...
...that inundated much of the low-lying prison land won the Meanwhile, I am ushered into the warden's office...
...The incident is Ortiz is a Salvadoran and a former New Orleans business- seen as both an exception to the usual order and a brutal man, convicted of murdering, in 1992, both his wife and her reminder that some of the fifty-one hundred Angola inmates woman friend...
...HOLLYWOOD"S VERSION The museum at the gate to the Louisiana State So, though both Sonnier and Willie were electrocutPrison displays a replica of one of the prison's ed, the Sean Penn character dies by lethal injection...
...or the death may seem fitting, 1940s to 1991-wooden, with big leather straps and deserved...
...The and Robert Lee Willie, were guilty of stomach-turn- public usually imagines movie stars to be more glaming crimes...
...In degrading little cells, where the visitor can this way the very fact of his death-apparently clean, pose and have his or her picture taken for three dol- peaceful, and painless-must horrify the viewer, if he lars...
...It was based without parole and many others knowing they will die belargely on the testimony of an informer who said that Ortiz had once asked if he would kill someone for him...
...The research and writing of this profile were funded by a grant from "I just finished this whodunnit...
Vol. 127 • October 2000 • No. 17
