HOLLYWOOD'S VERSION
Schroth, Raymond A.
fore their terms are up, hope is in short supply. The prison- himself as a ship captain in a storm who must navigate be- er whom the guards killed had earlier told Warden Cain, tween the...
...In 1952, at the age of twelve, she congregation with about 200 members throughout the Unit- had seen a bus driver literally kick a young black woman ed States, 100 of them in New Orleans...
...the room's walls were plain and bare, and a ceilschool prison chaplain warns Prejean that real pris- ing light glared down at me...
...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...
...We see the original electric chair, used from the or she is to be horrified...
...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...
...Cain gave the writer yearlong access to the table a handmade spinning wheel, proud products of the prison...
...A heroic lawyer, except for the anxiety of anticipation-to be...
...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...
...But the New York Times (May 14, 2000) took a Orleans any more...
...3:13...
...all women, regardless of belief...
...When I asked Hannan storyteller," she says...
...in English from Saint Mary's DoWhen you telephone Prejean's New Orleans head- minican College, she went to Saint Paul University in Otquarters, an efficient, but friendly, woman's tawa for a master's degree in religious education...
...In the film he also tells Prejean she should needle, and sent a serum into my system-and then dress like a "real" nun...
...Meanwhile, as she sees it, the pragmatic beloved home state of Louisiana, by many mea- arguments, like the cost of executions, also have surements one of the most corrupt and backward their ethical dimension: It is immoral to waste states in the Union, which now has eighty-eight inmates on social resources, whether the tax money that death row...
...Walking and of whom she had never heard, by dutifully Second, she explains how, because of court studying Sarandon's Thelma and Louise (1991)-only to dis- costs and prolonged litigation, death sentences cover at their lunch that she had confused Sarandon with ultimately cost much more than life imprisonco-star Geena Davis...
...Catholic Historian and silent on the edge of his bunk or on the floor, or squats Volume 18, Number 3 Theme: naked on his toilet...
...Saint Thomas Housing Project, where Sister Helen moved in Sister Helen's second-floor bedroom and office are not 1981 to work in a literacy program, determined to go along neat...
...Later, she lived in a house with Sister Christopher, plays the clarinet and guitar) to allow the luxury of order...
...if not, we will never know...
...She ing out, blocks the door...
...when you run The Significance of Regions out, tough...
...At a university graduation where Pre- ment...
...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...
...New advocate for women's Orleans Union Baptist Theological Seminary offers prison- equality, Joanna ers an education program leading to degrees in ministry...
...The image stuck, the seed of the realizatwo-story brick apartment complex in mid-city New Or- tion that systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives, leans, a safer environment than the crime- and drug-ridden and "that being kind in an unjust system is not enough...
...Pat Sonnier, not in grim Commonweal 1 4 October 6, 2000 prison garb but smiling and robust in a bright blue shirt...
...It is the voice of Sister Margaret Vatican II, opened her eyes to the concept of justice as the Maggio, of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Medaille, a teaching basis for moral decisions...
...But his- government too...
...hundred thousand, die of felony-type murders And she gets laughs, sometimes unintentionally, always each year, "roughly the same percentage as those at her own expense...
...ject to human foibles and frailties...
...Prejean concentrates on colleges and social juses, and of incompetent defense attorneys...
...but she also men and held their hands at the end...
...At his respect of the inmates...
...lished in 1993, Sister Helen Prejean had After all, she has been a public speaker since her student-gov- developed a set of arguments, both pragernment days...
...legal killing because we give the government The former ordinary, Archbishop Philip Hannan, though the power to do it...
...rural roots and mute her otherwise overwhelming and sophisticated intelligence...
...warm and friendly, she would join the community...
...he maintains that no fatal mistakes have to her and quipped, "You're not just a little nun from New been made...
...executing innocent men, imposed a moratorium on execuPublication date: October 15, 2000 tions until the problem could be remedied...
...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...
...Although daily Eucharist is not always possible, the two The presidential candidacy of Governor George W. Bush nourish their spiritual lives with morning prayer, spiritual has turned attention to Texas, with the nation's highest num- reading, a monthly meeting of a spiritual book club, Sunber of executions...
...University Jesuits...
...her eyes sparkle with the basis of seeing the film, that he thought that she had no good humor, and her voice-when she chooses-carries enough of a disarming Cajun accent to testify to her Louisiana DO YOU WISH TO ARGUE...
...All are experience as a teacher encouraged to live as fully as any prison can permit: through in the Catholic school clubs like Dale Carnegie, Toastmasters, and AA, through system, a former nun, religious retreat groups, and through the arts-there is an and an outspoken arts and crafts festival, and splendid murals abound...
...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...
...utes before midnight...
...R.A.S...
...More than a scientific report, Actual Innocence is a dev- intact...
...Since 1977, thirSingle copy $10.00 (+$3.00 shippingfhandling) teen inmates on Illinois's death row have been exonerated, Order from Fulfillment Center OSV and twelve executed...
...But still her voice informs you that Sister is all booked up education was not complete...
...78 percent are black...
...She then told the crimes-only 1 in 345...
...identify himself with my project...
...And a Chicago her a member of more groups, like Hands Off Cain (an inTribune study (June 11, 2000) of the Texas record found the ternational group based in Rome), the National Coalition to system riddled with weaknesses...
...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...
...with a A few years ago, Prejean, the anti-death-penalty crusadSpecial Supplement on Papal Sin er, was viewed as a lonely idealist, a bleeding-heart liberal, oblivious to the fact that crime springs not from poverty but "Garry Wills: Deconstructing Deceit" from an evil heart...
...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...
...Chris"), her best friend for thirty years...
...I'm book or article against capital punishment, so he cannot going to die in prison...
...When I came to, four hours later, There are several levels of irony in the scene...
...If you wish to schedule her charitable, but the renewal of her order in 1967, following for 2001, please send a fax...
...The average inmate is thirty-six years old, the youngest is Drawing on her seventeen, and the oldest ninety...
...I walk the At your bookstore or call 1-800-395-0690corridor between the dark, 6 ft...
...the prisoners live and work...
...Commonweal 12 October 6, 2000 orgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal (Phil...
...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...
...director of the Louisiana Catholic Conference, has testified Finally, after reasoning carefully with her lisagainst the death penalty to the legislature...
...In the spring, Illinois Gover- ploited by those who proffer, in the very name of history, the nor George Ryan, a Republican who supports the death gnostic vision of a Catholicism cleansed of societal influpenalty, faced with evidence that the state was in danger of ences and historical burdens...
...then the author embarrassed him by detailing prisprisoners' craft shop...
...At Saint Peter's she exhorted her audi- who di from drowning or accidental poisonence several times to protest against New York Governor ing...
...off the bus, leaving the woman sprawled and humiliated Together with a third sister, Maggio and Prejean live in a on the sidewalk...
...But she is...
...Her life is too full of people, mementos, and her own inwith the congregation's decision to "stand on the side of the tellectual and artistic interests (she paints watercolors and poor...
...Toilet paper is rationed...
...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...
...tive social life with friends...
...nally begins to shock...
...F' . thermore, the death penalty is legally George Pataki's recent legislation-until her audience re- applicable to only a small number of violent minded her that she was in Jersey City...
...The (1-146 On the Dignity of Women F big sign stands out among the trees and flowers along the main road leading down through corn and hay and soybean fields to the Mississippi, the new rodeo Joanna Manning stadium in progress, the airstrip and the main prison com- IS THE POPE plex and self-contained camps of army-like barracks where CATHOLIC...
...It was a warm and happy family that welcomed priests ernment has not yet developed clemency procedures, and be- and nuns into their home...
...Considered in iso- tice groups, charging no set fees, but taking advantage of lation, these flaws can look like correctable human errors...
...Today, a series of developments have by Justus George Lawler shifted the death-penalty debate, so much so that publications as different as the Newark Star Ledger and the National A historical/theological critique of errors of fact and interReview have published articles on the conservative case pretation which exposes a fundamental sociological and against the death penalty...
...But she's also a clever writer: her edi- if his position had changed, he assured me that he had altor at Random House, Jason Epstein, taught her to start with ways opposed the death penalty, except for international a crime story to grab her audience and not to let them go...
...When Sister Helen found herself driBush interprets their escaping execution as evidence that his ven to the Academy Awards in a limousine, Margaret turned system really works...
...Hundreds of all her hair fell out after chemo, and I kissed it and pressed overlapping snapshots are tacked to the wall-an old shot of it to my face just to smell her one more time...
...sponges to transmit the current...
...I visit the kennels where attack dogs and bloodhounds 0-8245-1869-1 518.95 paperback are kept, the stables with 250 horses, and then I come to Camp J, the "dungeon," two rows of cells where the incor- i THE CROSSROAD PUBLISHING COMPANY rigibles are housed until they learn to behave-they're vio- 4S 1 Eighth Avcruic, Suite 1550, New York, NY 10001 lent, they throw their excrement at one another...
...he once supported Sister Helen in a clemency case, regularly backed New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick's arCommonweal 1 5 October 6, 2000...
...Kirby Ducote, executive should be contributing to the community...
...x 8 ft., one-man cages, each with nothing but a sleeping slab and a stainless steel combination toilet and sink...
...At the inevitable failure to The relatively new science of DNA testing, combined with attain impossible goals, this ahistoricism breeds among its the dedication of investigative journalists, has exposed a se- adherents resentment and paranoia which are readily exriously flawed justice system...
...terrorists...
...R.A.S...
...and the state bish- teners, she concludes: If it is wrong for individops' conference is preparing a parish-based campaign urg- uals to kill one another, it is wrong for the ing Catholics to ask the governor for a moratorium...
...I'm just a the official position of this diocese...
...In each a black man sits shirtless U.S...
...She "Christian" prison...
...opponents and proponents evidence for their case...
...Our relationship her father, herself, and her sister...
...and we are complicit in this torically, the church's voice has not been strong...
...Cain, fifty-eight, is a short, heavyset oners' homosexual acts and by depicting the rodeo as a "perman with a tan, lined face...
...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...
...I came here as a young man...
...she would roll out in interviews and work into Her stories are crafted-talks have two to five story sec- her public appearances...
...Her brother Louis works with the handicapped and tion of the first federal prisoner to face the death penalty her sister Mary Ann sometimes travels with her on lecture since the Kennedy administration, because the federal gov- tours...
...Cain describes grounds...
...men and women in ons are not like the movies and real prisoners are uniforms huddled around...
...tions, depending on time available-to disarm a possibly First, she tries to defuse the public's exaggerantagonistic audience, to dispel their misunderstandings ated fear of violent crime, which has been exabout how the death penalty works, to answer standard ob- ploited by politicians and the media, by showing jections like, "The Bible says, an eye for...," and to assert the that a very small number, two persons out of a common humanity of killers, of victims, of us all...
...for example, the defense Abolish the Death Penalty, and Amnesty International...
...Catholic bishops does not express College in Jersey City, New Jersey, in fall 1999...
...Her father, a lawyer, died in 1974 and her mother, a nurse, In July, the Clinton administration postponed the execu- in 1993...
...so it made sense that, when Helen cause there is evidence that the penalty's administration finished Saint Joseph's Academy, where the nuns were so may be geographically and racially biased...
...attorneys in forty cases presented no evidence or witnesses for Helen Prejean was born April 21, 1939 in Baton Rouge...
...someone took my arm, not like James Cagney...
...Then, she suggests that audience that she had prepared for her first meeting with life sentences without parole can provide the the actress Susan Sarandon, who ports y,,ed her in Dead Man protection citizens are convinced they need...
...Although seven people sentenced to death in Texas since After the movie of Dead Man Walking came out, phone 1976 have been exonerated after seven to ten years in prison, calls rose to fifty a day...
...Fourth, she illustrates the unfairness of a judicial system where the black and poor who Nof everybody loves Sister Helen Prejean...
...But opportunities where endowed lecture series bring a bigger in the light of unambiguous DNA evidence, the scandal fi- stipend to her religious community...
...He knows I will write a "I've got nothing to lose...
...He has eaten last meals with condemned knows that mostly they will talk small talk...
...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...
...To give death dignity, the articulates how john Paul II's current views nn dying man's friends may make his coffin and place it in a women are not only a disaster far the Catholic hand-carved wagon hearse that a team of horses will draw Church, but are also a threat to the well-being of to the grave...
...guments against anti-death-penalty testimony from Loyola Eddie Sonnier and others she has visited...
...Her rugged jocular warmth, which comes through at din- By the time Dead Man Walking was pubner with wine or in small groups, flows into a large room...
...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...
...She switched into her the murder rate in New Orleans rose 16.39 pertwo-story mode...
...A breast cancer, Prejean told the London Times in 1997 that she NordicTrak, on which she memorizes poetry while workfelt as though she had "undergone an amputation...
...The and Robert Lee Willie, were guilty of stomach-turn- public usually imagines movie stars to be more glaming crimes...
...Her family had raised her to be for the year 2000...
...More recently, a Columbia University 200 Noll Plaza, Huntington, IN 46750 study showed that nationwide 70 percent of reviewed capital cases had reversible judicial error...
...The outstretched arm, was the same as the execution chamscript is open to the scene where, in 1982, the old- ber's...
...To our right a group toils in A Woman Confronts the bean field while a guard on horseback with a shotgun Her Church hovers a safe distance away...
...A rocking chair where she sits for said, "The other day I found the scarf she used to wear when morning prayer looks out into the courtyard...
...everything was gone...
...their clients...
...After earning her B.A...
...From can't afford good lawyers are swept off to death the beginning she has faced opposition in her row...
...Who is the main speaker...
...After Chris died of Books burst out of the shelves and pile up on the floor...
...nocence Project, tells the stories of a dozen out of sixty-seven While the sisters' new address is relatively free of Saint cases in which DNA testing freed innocent men convicted of Thomas's flying bullets and sirens in the night, their street rape and murder, including one five days short of execu- has enough shabby buildings to leave their vow of poverty tion...
...The incorrigibles are allowed only one book-the & the Power of Places Bible...
...The Catholic bishops of Louisiana went on record should go to schools or the lives of persons who in 1994 against the death penalty...
...they are "the scum of the sterilized a spot with a gauze, pierced a vein with a earth...
...Bush himself has presided over 143, with day Mass at the local church, the annual retreat, and an acanother 3 scheduled between September and election day...
...cent...
...When the student newspaper, the Loyola I have seen Prejean in action twice: in 1998 at the PEN Maroon, covered the conflict in 1987, Connick replied that Awards for Prison Writings in New York and at Saint Peter's "the position of the U.S...
...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...
...But he was "burned" by Daniel Bergdoor is a beautiful Western saddle and near the conference ner's book...
...The operating table, narrow, with the inal film script with Sister Helen's comments...
...Third, she lays out the evidence that exejean was receiving an honorary degree, while marching in cutions do not deter crime...
...Sister Margaret answers phone calls, e-mail, snail astating critique of sloppy forensics and hair analysis, mail, and faxes, sets up speaking engagements, negotiates mistaken eyewitness identifications, coerced confessions, with the media, who, at execution time, call twenty-five police and prosecutor misconduct, the use of jailhouse snitch- times a day...
...He praised Helen Prejean's work, but added, on Though over sixty, her face is unlined...
...she has not suddenly been shoved into the matic and moral, against the death penalty which limelight...
...that inundated much of the low-lying prison land won the Meanwhile, I am ushered into the warden's office...
...or the death may seem fitting, 1940s to 1991-wooden, with big leather straps and deserved...
...The trustee, shaken, executed eight people in eight and a half weeks, replied, "But, I thought you knew...
...psychological flaw: a "Catholic superstitionism" that conOver the last several months, the reality and practice of the ceives the Church as outside of history and therefore not subdeath penalty have had unprecedented national attention...
...The only effect celebrity has look and came up with seven cases so flawed that it is pos- had on Helen Prejean is to give her more work and make sible Texas has executed an innocent man...
...A Manning powerfully hospice ward cares for the dying...
...Phone: 1-800.348.2440 x2542 A new book, Actual Innocence (Doubleday) by New York Commonweal 1 3 October 6, 2000 Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer and lawyers Barry Scheck wasn't sexual, but we were so intimate that it's like being and Peter Neufeld, founders of the Cardozo Law School In- widowed...
...In Louisiana, for procession she remarked to one of the trustees, "I'm going to example, i i the fall of 1987, right after the state enjoy this...
Vol. 127 • October 2000 • No. 17
