Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  Finally Robbins read the book and agreed with Sarandon. He wrote the screenplay and directed and produced the movie. Like Sarandon, Robbins was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools. Robbins contacted actor Sean Penn to play the lead character of Matthew Poncelet. The congregation received $150,000 for the rights for the film, and Sr. Helen had approval of the script. Robbins secured $12 million in funding, which was a low-budget film at the time.

  At one point the financiers reduced funding and assumed everyone would work for less pay. Robbins and Sarandon agreed to work at a lower rate, but they weren’t sure what Penn would say. When approached, Penn agreed, quickly saying it didn’t matter. He really wanted to play the part of Poncelet. Penn told Sr. Helen that he cried after reading the script of Dead Man Walking. When that happens, you have to do the part, he told her.

  They went through five drafts of the script. Robbins quipped in a 2014 appearance at DePaul University in Chicago that it was the first time since grade school that a nun had corrected his grammar.

  In Dead Man Walking, Sr. Helen wrote about accompanying two men to their deaths, but one of the first big changes Robbins made to the story was to amalgamate them into the character of Matthew Poncelet. He also changed the characters’ names because the murders were still fresh in the minds of the people involved. In her book, it’s questionable if one of the men, Pat Sonnier, actually shot the victims, which was the crime he was executed for. The other man, Robert Lee Willie, was clearly guilty. Since people can easily agree that an innocent person should not be killed, Robbins wanted the character to be guilty and unlikeable. That would force viewers to wrestle with the question of whether or not it is right to kill even the most despicable person.

  While Robbins changed the names of the other characters, he kept Sr. Helen as herself. He shared that news with her on an escalator in LaGuardia Airport in New York City. That’s when she realized her name would be out there for the world. Sister Helen’s notoriety increased once the movie was released, as did sales of her book.

  Sister Helen didn’t always agree with Robbins’s proposed changes along the way. In the book, Sr. Helen recounted a scene where she met with a priest-chaplain affiliated with the Louisiana State Penitentiary in order to be cleared to visit Pat Sonnier as his spiritual director. The priest suggested she wear her habit when she visited death row. That was a suggestion she ignored. When writing the script, Robbins had Sr. Helen going back to her car and pulling out a habit. “I told Tim, ‘No way!’ We don’t wear habits, and I had to explain to him the reasons for that,” said Sr. Helen in an interview with St. Anthony Messenger magazine. “I teased him. I said, ‘Boy, you better get the nuns right in this! We haven’t had a good film about nuns since The Bells of St. Mary’s.’ ”9

  In reality, both men whom Sr. Helen wrote about in Dead Man Walking were killed by electrocution. In addition to combining those two men into the one character of Matthew Poncelet, Robbins also changed the method of execution to lethal injection. While the scene of death by electric chair would be great filmmaking, Robbins told Sr. Helen he didn’t want to give viewers any “moral outs” when watching the film. At that time states were abandoning the electric chair for the more “humane” way of killing by lethal injection. He felt it would be easy for viewers to oppose electrocution but accept lethal injection, and he wanted to challenge them. Sr. Helen agreed.

  After receiving the final funding and the go-ahead to make the film, Robbins called Sr. Helen to tell her the good news. He said he was scared, Sr. Helen says, and that reassured her they picked the right director. They filmed in New York and on location in Louisiana over nine weeks.

  As a script consultant, Sr. Helen was on the set for the filming and on more than one occasion she would be transported back to the real moment that the actors were portraying. The first scene they filmed was Sr. Helen meeting with a victim’s family. They chose a setting in Slidell, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Robbins gave her a set of headphones so she could listen to the dialogue. While watching Sarandon, she was taken back to the real moment. She felt it all—the family’s loss, her own grief and despair, everyone’s pain. It was like a cauldron of emotions. Sarandon was a window that took Sr. Helen right back to what had happened.

  One scene that people often tell her stays with them happens leading up to Poncelet’s execution. The character’s mother and brothers visit him in prison. No one knows what to say to each other so the room is silent except for the squeaking coming from the youngest brother’s shoes as he moves back and forth across the room. The awkwardness of visiting a loved one whom you know will be killed in a few hours leaves many of the families without words and the room silent, says Sr. Helen, who also made a cameo in the film. She was part of the vigil outside of the prison on the eve of Poncelet’s execution—the woman holding the candle.

  The sets accurately recreated the death row cells and other areas in the Angola prison. The killing devices—including the crucifix-like table from which an elevated Sean Penn says his final words—were exact replicas of execution gear from Louisiana and Missouri.

  The most poignant moment of filming for Sr. Helen came during the scene where Penn’s character was blaming everyone for his plight, and Sarandon challenged him to face the truth of what he had done. The intensely emotional scene took seven takes, and each time Sr. Helen cried. “I guess in a way it was also this great release for me to see it, to be back from it. Because it was the moment of redemption and transformation. Afterwards I just went and I hugged Tim,” she said in an interview.10

  Along the way, Sr. Helen, Robbins, and Sarandon became friends. She often stayed with them when in New York and even took a trip with them and their children to Washington, DC.

  Dead Man Walking was released to limited US audiences in December 1995 and received rave reviews. Its wide release to cinemas across the country was two months later, in February 1996. Popular theater critic Roger Ebert gave it four stars, the highest rating he gave to movies.

  “Sr. Helen, as played here by Sarandon and written and directed by Tim Robbins (from the memoir by the real Helen Prejean), is one of the few truly spiritual characters I have seen in the movies,” Ebert wrote. “Movies about ‘religion’ are often only that—movies about secular organizations that deal in spirituality. It is so rare to find a movie character who truly does try to live according to the teachings of Jesus (or anyone else, for that matter) that it’s a little disorienting: This character will behave according to what she thinks is right, not according to the needs of a plot, the requirements of a formula, or the pieties of those for whom religion, good grooming, polite manners and prosperity are all more or less the same thing.”

  Ebert was moved by how the movie was spiritual without being conventional or pandering. Sister Helen didn’t try to convert Poncelet, didn’t fall in love with him, and didn’t try to claim he was innocent and work for his release.

  “This is the kind of movie that spoils us for other films, because it reveals so starkly how most movies fall into conventional routine, and lull us with the reassurance that they will not look too hard, or probe too deeply, or make us think beyond the boundaries of what is comfortable,” Ebert wrote. “For years, critics have asked for more films that deal with the spiritual side of life. I doubt if ‘Dead Man Walking’ was what they were thinking of, but this is exactly how such a movie looks, and feels.”11

  Moviegoers were equally moved. Theater managers told Tim Robbins that they had never known a film when at the end of it everybody stayed glued to their seats until the screen went black. They reported that audiences then filed out in silence.

  It was nominated for Oscars in four categories: best leading actor (Penn), best leading actress (Sarandon), best directing (Robbins), and best original song (“Dead Man Walking,” written and performed by Bruce Springsteen). Sarandon took home the Oscar for best actress.

  Sister Helen was in the audience when
Sarandon won her Oscar. During her acceptance speech, Sarandon thanked members of the Academy for choosing her and thanked them for giving her the opportunity to thank “the people who are so dear to my heart.”

  “First of all, Sr. Helen Prejean who is here tonight,” she said, gesturing to the area of the auditorium where Sr. Helen was sitting, “for trusting us with your life and bringing your light and your love into all of our lives.” Wrapping up her four-minute speech, the actress said, “May all of us find in our hearts and in our homes, and in our world, a way to nonviolently end violence and heal.”12

  Sister Helen was convinced that the film would ultimately take the story of the injustice of the death penalty to ever more people. More than 1.3 billion people watched the Academy Awards that night, which was the feast of the Annunciation. “It’s a brave, good film that brings people fairly over to both sides and lets the audience figure it out for themselves,” Sr. Helen says.

  In 1998 Sr. Helen asked Robbins to write a play adaptation. She had read a New Yorker article that said Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman had been performed more than one million times. If there were a play version of her book, even more people would be informed about the injustices of the death penalty.

  Robbins didn’t want to do something on Broadway so they looked at writing something that could be performed at colleges, universities, and high schools. As a requirement to obtain the rights to the play, the schools would have to convince two other departments to offer classes on the death penalty at the same time. Both Robbins and Sr. Helen wanted to encourage conversation about the issue among younger Americans. Since the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project launched in 2004, more than two hundred schools around the country performed the play. The project held its final season in 2015.

  In 2000 Dead Man Walking came to the stage again, this time as an opera. Lotfi Mansouri, then-general director of the San Francisco Opera, wanted a new opera for his company and commissioned Jake Heggie to write the music. It was a risky move on Mansouri’s part because while Heggie was a successful songwriter, he had never written an opera. Mansouri asked playwright Terrence McNally to work with Heggie, and it was McNally who came up with the idea to make an opera out of Dead Man Walking. Opera companies around the United States and the world have performed the opera since its debut.

  It’s just one more way of spreading the story that God had Sr. Helen witness on April 5, 1984.

  The spirit of Dead Man Walking transforms people and stayed with Sarandon and Robbins. Sarandon continues to be an anti-death penalty activist, often partnering with Sr. Helen to fight for the wrongly convicted on death row. She’s also appeared on panels about reforming the criminal justice system and narrated documentaries about prisoners on death row who were wrongly convicted.

  For his part, in addition to continuing his work with Sr. Helen on the Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project, Robbins developed, with fellow actor Sabra Williams, an arts program for inmates in California’s prisons through the Actors’ Gang theater group, of which he is the founding artistic director. The Actors’ Gang Prison Project, which started in 2010, is an eight-week course for inmates that gives them a chance to transform their emotional lives through acting out their emotions in a safe environment. It also helps them to recognize emotions other people may be feeling in response to their actions.

  The mixed-race sessions focus on acting out the heightened emotions of happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. In prisons, inmates tend to segregate themselves by race so the course forces them to interact. Using masks or white face-like mimes, the men and women in prison act and improvise scenes in high emotions. This experience transforms them.

  In a 2016 interview with the BBC, Robbins said, “A study came back last December that shows that for those men who took the acting class, there is an 89 percent reduction in infractions, fights within prison, which is huge for the safety of the prison itself and the safety of the corrections officers. They have to deal with a lot less from the people who have been through our program.”

  He cited another preliminary study, which found that California’s 60 percent recidivism rate was cut in half for alumni of the Actors’ Gang Prison Project.13

  “That is the key to rehabilitation, that they stay out of prison. And we now have the evidence that our program does that,” Robbins told the BBC.14

  Every time Sr. Helen gives a talk about the death penalty, she holds up a copy of the book Dead Man Walking and says, “Lloyd LeBlanc is the hero of this book.” It is not about her. She says she is a storyteller who made a bad mistake. That mistake was not reaching out to the victims’ families while she was the spiritual director for Patrick Sonnier. Figuring her presence would only add to their pain, she stayed away. It was the wrong thing to do, she later learned.

  In the end, Lloyd LeBlanc approached her and a friendship formed; he taught her that forgiveness is first and foremost not letting one’s own life be overcome by hatred.

  The two first spoke during a break at Pat’s pardon board hearing in Baton Rouge on March 31, 1984. The Bourques, whose daughter Loretta was murdered and raped by the Sonnier brothers, were furious when they saw Sr. Helen. They averted their gaze and walked past her in silence. Lloyd and Eula LeBlanc were right behind them. The first words out of her mouth to them were, “I’m so sorry about your son.”

  “Sister, I’m a Catholic,” Lloyd replied, asking her how she could stand up for Pat without ever visiting him and his wife, Eula, or the Bourques. “How can you spend all your time worrying about Sonnier and not think that maybe we needed you too?” Sr. Helen recalled in Dead Man Walking.15

  At that moment she realized that by not visiting the victims’ families, she had hurt them anyway. Lloyd didn’t let Sr. Helen off the hook. Instead, he shared with her his wife’s struggles grieving for her son David for days, months, and years on end. Lloyd also shared a side of Pat she never met—a bad man who stole, drank too much, and raped women. The two talked for more than an hour.

  It never occurred to Sr. Helen that victims’ families might not want the death penalty for their family member’s murderer. Neither did she consider that others might pressure the victim’s families to push for the death penalty. This was something Lloyd shared with her.

  People told Lloyd that if he and his wife said publicly that they didn’t want Pat to be executed, it would look like they didn’t love their son. Lloyd turned to the church for guidance, but never heard opposition to the death penalty preached from the pulpit. “Sister, you weren’t there for us,” he told her.

  Deep down he felt Jesus would not want them to push for the death of his son’s murderer. “Jesus talked to us about forgiving our enemies,” Lloyd told Sr. Helen. “People think forgiveness is weak, like you’re condoning what the person did. And you didn’t really love your son. You don’t seem to care because you forgive them. But I don’t see it as weakness. I see it as my own life.”16

  He also shared that early on he would imagine himself killing both Pat and Eddie. He pictured himself pulling the switch for the electric chair and seeing them in pain. But the grief and the bitterness began turning Lloyd into an angry person, and he didn’t like it. “I’m snapping at Eula. I see pain all around me. I almost lost my wife who almost died of grief and the loss of David. And here I am. I was getting angry, and I was losing who I was because I’ve always been a kind person who loves to help people,” Sr. Helen recalls him saying.17

  While Lloyd was talking to Sr. Helen during the pardon board hearing that day, he put his hand out, palm faced outward like “stop,” and told her, “I said to myself, ‘Uh-uh. They killed our son but I’m not going to let them kill me.’ ” Lloyd decided to embrace grace and Jesus and found himself able to forgive Pat and Eddie. That is why Sr. Helen calls him the hero of Dead Man Walking.

  “I feel I am still right to oppose capital punishment, but I had not thought seriously enough about what murder m
eans to victims’ families and to society,” she wrote in Dead Man Walking. “I had not considered how difficult the issue of capital punishment is. My response had been far too simplistic.”18

  Lloyd and Sr. Helen stayed in touch after the pardon board hearing, talking on the phone and writing notes to each other. Eventually Sr. Helen visited their home in St. Martinville, Louisiana. At one point in their burgeoning friendship, Lloyd invited Sr. Helen to join him for a holy hour he kept before the Blessed Sacrament from 4:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. on Fridays. She agreed and while there, the two prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary. It was during this time that Sr. Helen says she had her first real glimpse of what was in Lloyd LeBlanc’s heart. He prayed not only for the safety of teenage kids and their families but also for Mrs. Sonnier, Pat and Eddie Sonnier’s mother, who lived in a little town and endured the hatred of the community. Townspeople would often make snide comments to her at the grocery store, loud enough so she could hear, and some even threw dead animals on her front porch. When you legalize hatred through something like the death penalty, how do you say to the townspeople, “Don’t hate the mother.”

  Through her friendship with Lloyd, Sr. Helen also realized she needed to do something for victims’ families and established an assistance program.

  Lloyd wasn’t the only family member of a victim opposed to putting the murderer to death. Two such family members share their views in The Culture of Life and the Death Penalty, a booklet produced by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Mary Bosco Van Valkenburg’s brother and sister-in-law were murdered, but no one in her family wanted their killer executed.

  “We felt instinctively that vengeance wouldn’t alleviate our grief. We wanted this murderer in prison so he could never hurt another person. But wishing he would suffer and die would only have diminished us and shriveled our own souls. Hatred doesn’t heal,” Van Valkenburg said. “Every time the state kills a person, human society moves in the direction of its lowest, most base urges. We don’t have to make that choice.”19