Sister Helen Prejean’s walk into the dark world of death row began with letters. It was part of her order’s community outreach program. Her recipient was Elmo Patrick “Pat” Sonnier, convicted for rape and murder. It was a particularly sick case, as death penalty cases usually are.
A teen couple from a Catholic high school in Louisiana had been parked in a quiet area after the homecoming football game. Sonnier confessed later that he and his brother pretended to be police, abducted the couple, raped the girl, made them both to lay face down on the ground, and fatally shot them.
Prejean was in her early 40s in 1982 when she first wrote to Sonnier. As a graduate of St. Mary’s Dominican College, she was trained in English. As a Catholic nun, she was trained in mercy.
“I was an English major. I was going to write some good letters,” Prejean told an audience largely composed of lawyers last week in Austin. “I never dreamed that two and a half years after I begin this, he’s going to be electrocuted to death, and I’m going to be in the chamber, and I’m going to be saying to him, ‘Pat, when they do this, look at me. Look at my face. I’ll be the face of Christ for you.’ And he had tried to protect me. He had tried to say, ‘Sister Helen, you can’t be there at the end because, you know, it could scar you.’ And I said, ‘Pat, all I know is, don’t worry about me. I’m gonna be all right. All I know is, you are not gonna die without one face to see as they kill you. You have a dignity that no one can take from you.’ And I was strong. I was strong during the execution for him, and came out afterwards, middle of the night – first thing I did was I threw up.”
That execution took place April 5, 1984. Since then, Prejean’s life’s work has centered on the death penalty. She has served as a spiritual advisor for both guilty and innocent death row inmates, and she has witnessed their executions. She has written books about the injustice of this country’s executions, and directly petitioned Pope John Paul II to harden his near-absolute anti-death-penalty stance.
Visiting UT-Austin’s School of Law last week, Prejean pointed out that the death penalty’s popularity has dramatically waned since her descent into the world of state-run deaths in the 1980s.
“We’re sending you into eternity. How do we know God’s finished with them?” – Sister Helen Prejean
Few states still carry out executions, with Texas having the second-highest execution rate in the U.S. since the 1970s. During each of the last five years, Texas has ranked either first or second for total number of executions.
“The Bible Belt and the death belt are the same belt in the United States, where you have the most religion and churches. But what form of religion?” Prejean said. She underscored Southern states’ obsession with the angry Jesus of Revelations, judging the living and dead, throwing sinners into fire. “And that’s who the Jesus is that people invoke for the death penalty.” But that fact, she said, is only one puzzle piece.
“Which states are the ones carrying out where all these pockets are of execution? They’re all slave states. And I’m learning more and more and more about the direct connection from slavery and mass incarceration and the penal system and punishing people. Slavery did two things to white people. First, it made us very afraid of Black people, and it inured us to harsh punishments of Black people. And racism is so threaded into this whole criminal justice system.”
She spoke of solutions on the individual and societal level. Person to person, she finds most people who are in support of or neutral about the death penalty have never considered what it actually looks like for a government to make an alive person dead through premeditated steps. To make that clear, she recommends having articles about the death penalty – short ones – “at your fingertips” to share with people who are on the fence. With Christians, the nun advises a conversation on the possibility of redemption. “Think what it means now for us as human beings to be an absolute judge. Your time on Earth is finished. We’re sending you into eternity. How do we know God’s finished with them?”
On the societal level, she calls for a reframing of the criminal justice system in its entirety. “The government actually having the power to kill people is the apex of the whole penal system, but the penal system is out to punish people,” she said. “It exiles people from their family. We need to speak – and the conversation has started – of restorative justice, rather than simply retributive justice.”
This article appears in April 11 • 2025.
