e. In 1988 Prejean, and her pilgrimage, successfully established the New Orleans Victim Assistance Group. Prejean never stopped fighting against the death penalty.Throughout the novel, Prejean displays exactly how inhumane, unethical and faulty the death penalty is. Prejean proves that the electric chair is not an ethical act at all, to say the least. The electric chair has had many faults. The electric chair consists of two main parts. Being placed into the designated electric chair. This entails being hooked up to electrodes, having a hood placed over your head and being tied down so you can’t move. The second part involves having up to 2,400 volts of electricity passed through ones body for up to five minutes. Surely this kind of process will kill a man instantly. This is not so. As Prejean explains in her novel Dead Man Walking not all people die right away. Only the lucky ones do.The only man to walk away from an electric chair alive was seventeen-year-old Willie Francis. On May 2, 1946, he was strapped into Louisiana’s portable electric chair in the jail in St. Martin Parish. As the current hit his body, witnesses reported that the youth’s “lips puffed out and he groaned and jumped so that the chair came of the floor, and he said, ‘Take it off. Let me breathe.’” The officials applied several more jolts but Francis was still alive. They then helped him back to his cell to recuperate from the ordeal.The U.S. Supreme Court, considering wether it could be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” or “double jeopardy” o subject Francis to electrocution a second time, rendered a split verdict. On May 8, 1947, Louisiana officials once again strapped Willie Francis into the Chair, but this time they succeeded in killing him. (19; ch. 1)That was one example of a botched electrocution. The attached pages give reference to more botched electrocutions. The fir...
