Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  Living with the poor of St. Thomas opened Sr. Helen’s eyes to many injustices. It was like living in a war zone where the language and the rules were different than what she previously knew. She learned about government systems and what happens to those in them. During those days half of the adults in Louisiana did not graduate from high school, one in every three babies was born to an unwed mother, and the state had the nation’s ninth highest crime rate.

  The sisters were the only people who were not blacks in those projects of fifteen hundred people. She met the working poor teaching those without high school diplomas at Hope House. “I began to see from the underside what life was like and how privileged I had been,” she says. “I sat at their feet and they became my teachers about everything. The rules were different.”13

  Sister Helen worked with teen moms who had no chances for college and who were the prey of any man who looked at them. Rocking her baby in her arms, one young girl told her she wanted to have a baby so she had something of her own in the world. At St. Thomas, Sr. Helen saw how a boy could make money running drugs down the block, but if he took on a summer job his mother would lose the government support that kept them fed because his earnings would count against it. She noticed how murders of poor, black people didn’t get reported in the news. At St. Thomas she learned how often poor, black people were incarcerated over people with money.

  In Dead Man Walking she recalled helping single mother Shirley figure out how to make ends meet for her family on the food stamps and aid she received from the government. Shirley wanted to work, but if she took the job at the grocery store she would lose her health benefits and aid. Mothers like her who wanted to work faced additional expenses for childcare, medical treatment, and transportation. Her rent would also go up since in subsidized housing it is determined in proportion to a person’s income.

  The sisters at Hope House tutored preschoolers who didn’t know words like “lettuce,” “sofa,” or “over.” Without additional help as they entered the overcrowded city schools, they were bound to fail. Sister Helen saw for the first time how police treated the neighborhood residents. During the time she worked at Hope House, New Orleans received more complaints against the police than any other city in the country. Almost every family living in St. Thomas knew someone in prison.

  Living with people doing the best they could in the circumstances of their lives made Sr. Helen appreciate the gifts of her own upbringing—a safe roof over her head, food on the table, an education, and the ability to read and write, to name a few. She also was forced into a simpler lifestyle. For example, no air-conditioning in the hot and humid Southern climate made her move slower and choose to do only essential tasks. She learned to appreciate gentle breezes and shade under trees. “And for the first time in my life I have the opportunity to enjoy the friendship of black people,” she wrote in Dead Man Walking. “I realize how deprived my life was in the all-white-just-like-me social circles I used to frequent.”14

  It was also where God began her life’s vocation with a single letter to a man on death row.

  Chapter Three

  Patrick Sonnier

  A simple, handwritten letter changed forever the lives of Sr. Helen Prejean and countless men and women on death row in the United States.

  It was January of 1982. Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition in New Orleans asked Sr. Helen if she would consider becoming a pen pal to death-row inmate Elmo Patrick Sonnier, who was in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. She said yes.

  Pat was a white, Cajun man from St. Martinville, Louisiana. He and his brother Eddie had been convicted of murdering two Catholic high school students on November 4, 1977. That night they abducted David LeBlanc, age seventeen, and Loretta Bourque, age eighteen, who were taking a night out on lovers’ lane. They raped Loretta and forced her and David to lie down on the ground before shooting them both in the head.

  Pat might not write back, Chava told her, but she figured that didn’t matter because if he was on death row he was poor, and she was there to serve the poor. At the time, Sr. Helen was living and ministering in the St. Thomas Housing Projects in New Orleans where she learned that “capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment.”1 As a trained English teacher she also figured it was her duty to send some letters, maybe some poems.

  That evening Sr. Helen sat down to pen her first letter, telling Pat about herself, the work she did, and that she would keep writing to him even if he didn’t want to write back. She also included three photos—one of herself, one of Christ crucified, and one of a view of the water at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. It was a step on a journey. “I never dreamed they were going to kill him or that I would be there. But, you see, we take a step,” Sr. Helen says. “That’s what it’s like to follow grace, to follow a vocation. You take a step.”2 Along with his cell number, Pat’s address at the prison included his location, death row—abbreviated D.R.

  About a week later Pat replied to her letter. He wrote that he thought he could go it alone but couldn’t and would be happy for a pen pal. At first he mistook the name “Helen” on the envelope for his former girlfriend and was going to tear up the letter. But he looked again and saw “Sister.” A nun was writing him? Sisters had taught him in grade school, and he remembered some bad experiences with them, but Pat told Sr. Helen he still wanted her to write him.

  He asked if they could just “talk regular” because he had a spiritual director in prison who talked a lot about Scripture, and Pat couldn’t keep up. Sister Helen agreed and soon they were corresponding regularly. He wrote from his six-foot by eight-foot cell where he spent twenty-three of twenty-four hours of every day.

  They shared stories. She often included news clippings or parts of the comics with her letters. He told her about life in prison and his cell. He even drew her a picture of his cell.

  Sister Helen shared Pat’s description of his cell in Dead Man Walking:

  On one wall is a bunk, on the back wall a stainless steel toilet and washbasin, a stainless steel plate above the washbowl instead of a mirror. He keeps all of his stuff in a footlocker under his bunk. He uses the footlocker for weight lifting. It’s hard not to gain weight in this place, he says. Plenty of potatoes, rice, pancakes, and beans. He is allowed out of his cell for one hour a day (the time varies; the earliest is 5 a.m.) and then he can visit with the other eleven men on the tier if he chooses, but relations are often tense. If another inmate has it in for you, he explains, he can throw hot water on you through the bars of your cell, or he can take batteries out of his radio and sling them at you, or he can sling feces.3

  In the beginning Pat frequently apologized for his penmanship and asked Sr. Helen to tell him if she couldn’t read his writing. It seemed such a trivial thing since the man was on death row. The letters were written in pen on yellow lined paper and were pristine with no corrections or imperfections. Later he revealed that he wrote several drafts of each letter to get them right. With time on his hands, if he made a mistake he just started over.

  Soon Sr. Helen learned that inmates were given only two stamped envelopes a week to write letters, so she asked if she could send him stamps. That made him happy because then he could write her more often. The reality of prison life was always evident, because he told her to write inside the letter how many stamps she sent so he could make sure he got them. There was no telling who might take them when inspecting his mail since stamps were a commodity in prison.

  They became steady pen pals, and Sr. Helen began to think of him as a fellow human being, not a criminal, but the reality of his crime was always there in her mind. It was a struggle for her to reconcile the easygoing Cajun who wrote to her with the brutal murderer of two helpless teenagers.

  Pat regularly began his letters the same way: “I am hoping that when this letter reaches you that it will find you doing fine, and in the best of health. As for me I’m doing fine and i
n good health and I thank the good Lord above for that.”

  Contact from the outside world was important to those on death row. Many of their families were too poor to make regular visits to the prison, which was located in the center of Louisiana.

  On many occasions, Pat included drawings on his letters and envelopes. He drew a few detailed schematics of the layout of his tier. Some of his drawings included the cartoon characters Tweety Bird and the Tasmanian Devil.

  Sister Helen was getting an education about life on death row in Louisiana. Those on death row weren’t allowed to work like other inmates, so they couldn’t buy stamps or other items. One day Pat included a photo of himself taken in prison. “It is the first time I see his face: he’s not scowling exactly but there is something about the bushy eyebrows and the way they slant downward. I feel a sliver of fear. I feel safer knowing he is behind bars,” she wrote in Dead Man Walking.4

  During their first few weeks of corresponding, Sr. Helen didn’t look into the details of his case. Pat sounded like a regular person, but she couldn’t help thinking of his crime, the victims, and the families left behind. She finally looked at the documents on file in Colon’s office at the Prison Coalition that detailed the crime and the trials. After one look, Sr. Helen realized there was some knowledge that would change you forever.

  There was gruesome testimony detailing the manner of Loretta Ann Bourque and David LeBlanc’s deaths and how two men fitting Pat and Eddie Sonnier’s descriptions had been terrorizing couples at lovers’ lane during the weeks leading up to the murders. Sister Helen felt rage over the crimes and at the same time guilt for befriending the brothers. But she felt in her heart that everyone has a right to life no matter the worst thing he or she did. All the while she also knew she was in over her head.

  Then Sr. Helen read about contradictions in the brothers’ confessions. At first, Pat confessed to shooting the teens, but at his trial he said his brother did it. At Pat’s trial, Eddie told the jury that his brother pulled the trigger. Both men admitted to the kidnappings. Pat denied raping Loretta, but Eddie said they both did.

  In separate trials both brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. The Louisiana Supreme Court later overturned both convictions—for Eddie it was because they felt Pat was the shooter and more culpable; for Pat it was because of a judge’s error. However, at Pat’s second sentencing trial he was once again given death despite Eddie testifying that he himself shot the teens, saying that he snapped at that moment and was afraid to admit the murders earlier. The court said Eddie was just trying to spare his brother from the electric chair.

  Reading these documents left Sr. Helen shaken. She wrestled with the guilt of befriending the teens’ murderer but at the same time had a growing unease about the morality of the death penalty. What would she feel if one of her family members was murdered—rage, loss, helplessness? At the same time Sr. Helen was convinced that Jesus wouldn’t want us to kill another human being, no matter the circumstances. She was also convinced that if she herself were murdered, she wouldn’t want her murderer executed, “especially by government—which can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably, or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.”5 This argument of imperfect governments and legal processes would become a common refrain in Sr. Helen’s work against capital punishment.

  In the meantime, the letters from Pat continued. She noticed how he always thanked her at the end for writing to him and caring about him. He was lonely. Did anyone ever visit him? No, he wrote. So Sr. Helen arranged to visit, but before that could happen Pat had to put her name on his official visitor list. There were two categories on that list: visitor or spiritual director. He chose spiritual director. It was a pivotal choice on both Pat’s and Sr. Helen’s journeys because spiritual directors could be with the inmate right up to one’s execution and could witness the execution. It was the time leading up to and including his death that Sr. Helen later felt God was calling her to witness. Executions occurred in the early hours of the morning with little transparency to the conditions. It was a secret ritual that later on she felt she must share with the world.

  Several months after Pat put her on his visitor list, Sr. Helen had an interview at the prison and was then cleared to be Pat’s spiritual director. Their first meeting would be on September 15, 1982. That day she drove the three hours from New Orleans to Angola and went through the prison’s processing. Guards yelled, “Woman on the tier,” and led her to a green metal door with a barred window and the words “death row” written across the top in red block letters. She was ushered behind four locked doors into a room with six visiting booths. Heavy mesh screens divided the visitors from the inmates.

  Then Pat walked in wearing a blue denim shirt and jeans. His hands were cuffed to a brown leather belt around his waist. “Boy, am I glad to see you, Sister,” he told her. They had two hours to talk. Pat was open and friendly, telling her about all of the letters he had received from pen pals Sr. Helen had set him up with. “I was always a loner growing up. I’ve never had so many friends,”6 he said. Pat told her he kept a checklist in his cell of “letters received” and “letters answered” with dates next to each.

  During their first meeting, he chain smoked, leaning down to light his cigarette in his cuffed hands. The whole experience was surreal to Sr. Helen: traveling to meet a man condemned to death, meeting a man who had killed two people, looking at his hands as he talked, and thinking about those hands pulling a trigger. On that day Pat had a gift for her. He made her a picture frame out of folded cigarette wrappers. This was Pat’s second time in Angola prison. Previously he had served time there for stealing a truck.

  Going into the visit, Sr. Helen worried how they would fill the two hours, but Pat kept talking the whole time, telling stories about growing up and about his daughter who lived with foster parents in Texas. Two hours passed quickly, and Sr. Helen said good-bye to Pat. Her first visit to death row was over. On her way home she realized how tense she was the entire time, and she craved a shower to wash away the feel of the prison. She also knew she would return because Pat had never felt a steady love from anyone in his life. She could give him that.

  Just how much her visits meant to him comes out in his letters. “You know after our visit I felt so good that I came back to my cell and I wrote seven letters and I didn’t mess up one of them. For I usually have to start them over at least three times before I get them right,” Pat wrote on December 2, 1982.7

  All the while, lawyers were petitioning on Pat’s behalf for a stay of execution. They hoped to have his sentence overturned to life in prison, like his brother Eddie. The stress of it all came out in his letters.

  In some of his letters, Pat wrote that his “nerves” bothered him. In one instance it was because a fellow inmate on death row was taken for execution but received a stay at the last minute. When someone is taken away to Camp F—the area of the prison that houses the electric chair—it affects many of the inmates, especially if they are friends.

  “For I’m doing much better now that Tim got his stay, for I must say that it did have me feeling down and out. . . . Tim and I still talk through the bars for he’s still not quite himself yet, for he tries to say that it doesn’t bother him. But I happen to know better than that. Because it still bothers me and I know that it has to bother him,” Pat wrote.8

  Pat’s first execution date was August 19, 1983. When Sr. Helen visited him the day before, Pat finally talked about the murders. He had lost thirty pounds in two weeks because the anxiety and stress made it impossible for him to eat. He lived on coffee and cigarettes. Later Sr. Helen learned it was common for the condemned to lose extreme amounts of weight leading up to their execution.

  The warden gave her four hours to visit with Pat the day before that first execution date. During that time both she and Pat anxiously waited to hear from the attorne
ys about a possible stay of execution. “I want to be with you when you die,” she told Pat. He said no because he thought the experience would scar her. “I can’t bear the thought that you would die without seeing one loving face. I will be the face of Christ for you. Just look at me,” Sr. Helen told him.9 She had come to love him as a brother and wanted to be there for him. He agreed. He wondered about the execution. Would he feel pain? Would he feel the burning? He worried about his mother.

  Sister Helen asked Pat if he believed God had forgiven him for the murders. Yes, he said, adding that he had gone to confession earlier to the elderly priest-chaplain. He said that every night before bed he knelt down and prayed for the teens and their families, and said he would go to his grave feeling bad about their murders. Despite his words, Sr. Helen tried to determine if he was sincere. Did Pat really feel remorse for the part he played in the deaths of David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque?

  Nobody was supposed to die that night, Pat told Sr. Helen that afternoon in August 1983. His brother Eddie snapped. Eddie had recently been released from jail for harassing a girl who was pregnant with his child but who wouldn’t marry him. He had gone over to her house with a sawed-off shotgun and threatened to kill her and her entire family. Eddie also cut the phone wires. He was arrested and thrown in jail.

  When he came out of jail he wasn’t the same. “Something I think the boy David said to him teed him off and he shot the kids,” Pat told Sr. Helen. “I should’ve known he could blow. I should not have let us get mixed up in the bad things we was doing.”10 While fleeing from the police in the days after the murders, the brothers planned to both confess to the killings because they thought the police wouldn’t know who actually pulled the trigger. Eddie didn’t follow the plan.