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Life or death

Life or death Dead Man Walking was an autobiography written by Sister Helen Prejean. The novel tells about Prejean’s life in dealing with her intimate journey through her dealings with capital punishment. Prejean was a Roman Catholic nun that worked in St. Thomas. She worked in a New Orleans housing project for black residents. In January of 1982, Prejean was asked to be a pen pal with a death row inmate named Pat Sonnier. Prejean accepted because she believed that the work seemed to fit with what she was doing at the time. Prejean wrote to Sonnier, believing that she would not be written back. Sonnier, convicted of the brutal murder of two highschool students at a local football game, surprisingly wrote back. Sonnier was sentenced to the electric chair. Prejean, from writing to Sonnier, realized that he was an innocent man. The true guilty man was Sonnier’s brother. Prejean was very bothered by the fact that Sonnier was going to be murdered for something he did not do. Prejean and her associates work every day, up until his execution, to keep him from being electrocuted. Throughout the time Prejean and Sonnier spent together, Prejean discussed how much she despised the death penalty. She doesn’t believe that anyone should have to go through the agony of the death penalty. After the death of Sonnier, Prejean takes on another inmate by the name of Robert Willy. Prejean writes to Willy and he writes back. Prejean visits the parents of the victim, Faith. Willy is on death-row for the rape and murder of Faith. After visiting Faith’s parents, Prejean walked for three days from New Orleans to Boston. Prejean is much more forward with Willy almost as if she is scolding him. Willy is guilty of what he did and admits it. Even with Prejean being Willy’s spiritual advisor, she still believes that the death penalty is wrong. After her ordeals with the two inmates, Prejean begins to get along with her own life. 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 first is a story of a man named John Evans. It was taken from a website sponsored by The American Civil Liberties Union. The second source is from “Rotten.Com.” This is about the botched electrocution of Allen Lee Davis. Both of these sources are graphic. It is suggested that you not look at them if you do not believe you can handle it. Not only is capital punishment, by electric chair, unethical it is also inhumane. Nothing is solved by killing someone because they killed another person. It is just committing a murder like the murder that the suspected convict committed. Sister Helen Prejean states in her novel Dead Man Walking: “I can scarcely imagine how shameful it must be – and so public – for a family member to be killed by the state” (99; ch. 5). This shows how Prejean felt about the electric chair in whole. No matter what, how could you lose a family member to the state. Especially when they are murdered by the state. What if the person is innocent? As Gov. George Ryan said: “I cannot support a system, which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state’s taking of innocent life” (qtd. in Johnson). This brings along another point. If an innocent person is given the electric chair, it is irreversible. There have been several cases where innocent people have been executed. As stated on the site sponsored by The American Civil Liberties Union a man was mistakenly executed: In 1992, Roger Keith Coleman was executed in Virginia despite widely publicized doubts surrounding his guilt and evidence that pointed to another person as the murderer –– evidence that was never submitted at his trial. Not until late in the appeal process did anyone take seriously the possibility that the state was about to kill an innocent man, and then efforts to delay or nullify his execution failed. Coleman's case was marked with many of the circumstances found in other cases where the defendant was eventually cleared. Where Coleman still incarcerated, his friends and attorneys would have a strong incentive to resolve these questions. But because Coleman is dead, further inquiry into the crime for which he was convicted is extremely unlikely. Capital punishment is a very inhumane way to make a convict pay for their crime. Too much is on the line. The persons’ life. Sister Prejean believes that all men are sons of God and none of them deserve to die, especially not for the sake of revenge. Throughout the novel Dead Man Walking Sister Helen Prejean makes her point well heard. She shows how the electric chair is a very faulty way of execution. She shows how execution is inhumane in itself. Many parents around the world always say to their kids; “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” That quote tells a great part of Prejean’s struggle. Why kill a man when one has already died. Keep the suffering in the world down. Do not let the state take the most important thing to you. Your family. What could succumb to the loss of a loved one to the state? Especially if they are innocent. Life is not something you can just put in other peoples hands. Is it right to have a jury make the decision of life or death for another person? If a person is put on trial for murder will that person then live to see the next day? Worst of all, will that person live to see their family and loved ones again? The problems that the death penalty puts on our society is mind-boggling. End the problems of the death penalty. End the death penalty. Bibliography: Works Cited Bedau, Hugo Adam. “Capital Punishment is Irreversible.” Death Penalty. 1997. The American Civil Liberties Union. 8 Oct. 2000 “Botched Execution in Florida.” WWW.Rotten.Com. 8 Oct. 2000 . Johnson, Dirk. “Illinois, Citing Faculty Verdicts, Bars Executions.” The New York Times 1 Feb. 2000: Al. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, Ezra Lehman Library, Shippensburg University, 14 August 2000 . Prejean, Sister Helen. Dead Man Walking. New York: Random House, Inc., 1993.

Word Count: 1273