Helen Prejean

by Joyce Duriga

  In 2005 the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death, a definitive teaching document outlining the church’s evolved thinking relating to the death penalty after St. John Paul II’s changes in the Catechism. That same year, the conference launched its “Campaign to End the Use of the Death Penalty.” In 2015 the bishops called for a recommitment to this campaign: “We renew our common conviction that it is time for our nation to abandon the illusion that we can protect life by taking life,” which the bishops had written in A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death.

  The document left the door open to execute on some occasions. In Catholic teaching the state has the recourse to impose the death penalty upon criminals convicted of heinous crimes if this ultimate sanction is the only available means to protect society from a grave threat to human life. However, this right should not be exercised when other ways are available to punish criminals and to protect society, which are more respectful of human life.

  Eventually, the bishops come to the same conclusion about the death penalty as Sr. Helen—ultimately it’s about us, “the actions taken in our name, the values which guide our lives, and the dignity that we accord to human life. Public policies that treat some lives as unworthy of protection, or that are perceived as vengeful, fracture the moral conviction that human life is sacred.”13

  If there has been any doubt about the Catholic Church’s support for abolishing the death penalty, John Paul II’s successors Benedict XVI and Francis have removed it. Frequently in his brief pontificate, Pope Benedict called on countries around the world to end use of the death penalty.

  In his first pastoral visit to the United States in 2015, Pope Francis addressed a joint session of the US Congress—the first pope ever to do so—and in his remarks he advocated for an end to the death penalty. “The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development,” Pope Francis told Congress on September 24, 2015. “This conviction has led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty. I am convinced that this way is the best, since every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes.”14

  He also cheered the US Catholic bishops’ renewed commitment to this cause and offered his moral support to others working in the abolitionist movement. He has also reached out personally to governors asking for them to grant clemency to death-row inmates.

  Sister Helen met Pope Francis at the Vatican on January 21, 2016, and delivered a thank-you letter from Richard Glossip, whose execution in the United States was halted in September 2015. Pope Francis reached out to Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin asking her not to execute Richard. After the meeting, Sr. Helen said it was “the highlight of my life.”

  Sister Helen’s work with death-row inmate Richard Glossip began when he called her on January 5, 2015, asking her to attend his execution, which was scheduled a few weeks later on January 29.

  Richard, who at the time this book was released, was on death row in Oklahoma and had been convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of an Oklahoma City hotel where Richard was manager. As of June 2017, Glossip had four stays of execution, and Oklahoma had put a hold on all executions.

  Sister Helen, who normally takes only one person on death row at a time and accompanies them to the end, was already accompanying Manuel Ortiz. He was an inmate in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola convicted in 1994 of hiring someone to kill his wife and killing his wife’s friend. But she agreed to Richard’s request despite not knowing she would make time for him with her busy travel schedule.

  After she decided to accompany Richard, she looked into his case and ultimately came to believe he was innocent of the crime. In some instances, district attorneys abuse the discretionary power given to them to pursue the death penalty, using it to further their political career or agendas. Because of that, along with being in a pro-death penalty state like Oklahoma and having an inadequate defense, Sr. Helen believed Richard had been wrongly convicted.

  Upon the statement of Justin Sneed, a nineteen-year-old methamphetamine addict, who worked as a handyman at the hotel, Richard was convicted of allegedly offering Sneed money to kill Van Treese. Richard allegedly wanted Van Treese out of the way so he could persuade Van Treese’s wife to let him manage both of their motels. He allegedly told Sneed they could also rob Van Treese of the motel money he had on him and split the profits.

  The local police kept Sneed in custody for six months without a lawyer and told him he could receive the death penalty if he didn’t implicate Richard. In a routine trial, Richard’s lawyers would look for evidence to impeach Sneed’s credibility. They didn’t do that. Instead, Sneed implicated Richard in the murder and robbery, and the jury convicted him. It was solely on Sneed’s word that Richard was sentenced to the death penalty. No physical evidence against Richard was produced at the trial.

  During a trial the prosecution typically presents forensic evidence found at the scene of the crime. Then the defense presents independent testing of the physical evidence to show why it doesn’t connect to their client. However, Richard’s defense attorney didn’t investigate the evidence. Sister Helen believes the prosecutor and the judge intimidated him. The person on trial, in this case Richard, received a poor defense, either because they were poorly paid, overworked, or they were intimidated by the system; they just stopped raising objections because the judge always opposed the objections of the prosecution but always overruled the defense’s objections.

  The district attorney who prosecuted Richard’s trial pushed for the death penalty in fifty-four other cases. Whenever he would run for office in Oklahoma, he would brag about how many death penalties he got and led voters to think he was fighting for their safety, Sr. Helen says.

  After reading the case history, she began putting a team together, finding lawyers—led by attorney Don Knight—who would take on Richard’s defense. From past experience she knew Richard needed good lawyers, and that they would have to work his case through the courts. The lawyers began gathering the exculpatory evidence—evidence gathered and presented at a trial that favors the defendant to show he or she is not guilty—that Richard’s first lawyers didn’t do.

  The legal team hired investigators who soon discovered that the police detectives assigned to Sneed had a history of forced confessions. They believed that, in exchange for Sneed’s testimony against Richard at trial, these detectives promised Sneed he wouldn’t receive the death penalty. The investigators also found people, including Sneed’s drug dealer, who would testify that Sneed had a bad meth addiction and that his word wasn’t reliable. Sometimes Sneed would buy drugs using change stolen from vending machines or stolen items like a car stereo.

  “He was a bad meth addict. He was injecting intravenously. That’s all he could think was to get drugs,” Sr. Helen says. “But the prosecutor in the closing arguments said Justin [Sneed] might have used drugs every now and then but mostly he was just a loner of a guy who had left home.”15

  Another person the investigators found was a man who was in jail with Sneed after he was first arrested. He told them how scared Sneed was that they would give him the death penalty. Sneed told his cellmate how he went in to rob Van Treese and ended up killing him. According to this witness, Sneed never mentioned Richard. A third person the investigators found was in jail with him and admitted to overhearing Sneed tell his cellmate about how he committed the crime but the police and prosecutors pinned it on Richard.

  Richard appealed his conviction but lost. If during a trial a person doesn’t have a lawyer who will raise an objection to something in the process, no appeals court will look at that case. That is the problem of inadequate defense. It damages the process further down the line. A person on trial needs ve
ry good lawyers at the outset.

  When Sr. Helen decided to help Richard, she didn’t just summon lawyers and investigators to his aide. She also summoned her well-known friends like actress Susan Sarandon, who portrayed Sr. Helen in the movie Dead Man Walking; TV host Bill Maher; director Tim Robbins who wrote and directed Dead Man Walking; and business mogul Richard Branson. Branson even took out two full-page ads in the Oklahoma City newspaper prior to two of Richard’s execution dates and called on the state not to kill a man who was probably innocent. Interest in Richard’s case also reached beyond US borders, including a five-part series on England’s SKYNews.

  Leading up to Richard’s August 2015 execution date, Sarandon arranged for herself and Sr. Helen to be interviewed on Dr. Phil, a popular daily talk show hosted by psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, who was made famous by Oprah Winfrey. The show was devoted to Richard’s case, and was initially scheduled to air on September 8, 2015. However, Sarandon told Dr. Phil that wouldn’t work because the date was too close to Richard’s next execution date of September 30. She convinced Dr. Phil of the urgency to air the show, and he preempted a scheduled summer break of reruns to air it on August 31. He even gave it a big promotional push. The appeal efforts went viral on social media and people all over the world heard about Richard’s case.

  Everyone was trying to sway the actions of Oklahoma’s Governor Mary Fallin, who was in favor of the death penalty. Even Pope Francis sent her a letter asking her not to execute Richard. Fallin responded saying this had been through the court and she had to abide by the law, which was what the citizens wanted. The efforts of Sr. Helen and others drawing attention to the case outside of the state angered the governor, and she told news media that outsiders wouldn’t tell her what she should do.

  While the clock was ticking on Richard’s next execution date, lawyers were working behind the scenes in the court and with anyone who might know him. When Richard was sentenced to death, Oklahoma had three other men on death row. All four men were slated for immediate execution.

  In April 2014 Oklahoma botched the execution of Clayton Lockett, who writhed on the gurney for more than forty-five minutes before dying of a heart attack. When the state resumed executions with Charles Warner in January 2015, they used potassium acetate—not potassium chloride as required under state protocol—and witnesses say he screamed out that his body was on fire.

  In recent years, companies stopped producing the drugs used in executions, so states have begun to experiment on new combinations of drugs for lethal injections. There are no regulations or monitoring of how executions are done or what drugs are used.

  Charles Warner may have been spared if the US Supreme Court decided a week or two earlier to hear the case Glossip v. Gross, where Warner and the other Oklahoma death-row inmates—Richard Glossip, John Grant, and Benjamin Cole—were attempting to bar the use of the drug midazolam in the cocktail for executions, saying that the sedative didn’t work and they would be subjected to extreme pain when the other drugs were administered. The third lethal drug in the cocktail is known to make people feel they are being burned alive. Oklahoma began using midazolam after drug companies in Europe and the United States, pressured by death-penalty abolitionists, refused to sell states the barbiturates used in the past. Charles Warner was executed a week before the court decided to hear the case.

  On June 29, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled against the inmates, five to four. But in an historic dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, raised a larger question about state-sanctioned executions. “Rather than try to patch up the death penalty’s legal wounds one at a time, I would ask for full briefing on a more basic question: whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.” Breyer also wrote, “It is highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment,” barring cruel and unusual punishment. It remains to be seen if this case helped pave the way for the end to the death penalty in the United States.16

  Richard Glossip went to the death house three times anticipating his death. Sister Helen describes the death house as a building made out of cement where the condemned prisoner is taken a few weeks before his execution. The prisoner is confined to a room with no windows and a cement slab for a bed. When she saw Richard there, he had bruises on his hips from trying to sleep on the slab. But sleep doesn’t come easily since guards keep the lights on twenty-four hours a day monitoring the condemned for possible suicide attempts.

  Richard spent several weeks in this cell, which is located just a few feet away from the death chamber, and lost dozens of pounds. It is a form of torture, Sr. Helen says. “People are conscious and have imaginations. They anticipate dying and have nightmares about being taken and dying over and over again before they actually die. One day as a nation when we wake up we’re going to recognize that that’s torture.”17

  The night before Richard’s scheduled execution on September 30, prison officials shut off his access to visitors and the phone. They ignored the fact that Sr. Helen was his official spiritual advisor and therefore supposed to be allowed to accompany him in his last hours. Richard was supposed to be killed at 3:00 p.m., so Sr. Helen and three of Richard’s attorneys were at the prison waiting to be led over to the death chamber.

  It got to be 2:30 and Sr. Helen thought the van would be there to take them over to the execution. “I kept looking at my watch,” Sr. Helen recalls. “I found a little place in this room where I can just pray—pray for Richard, pray for everybody. I pray, ‘God, you know the man is innocent. You really are in charge of every life that comes to you. I just ask you to spare Richard.’ ”18 Soon it was 2:45 p.m. and still no van. Finally, at 3:55 p.m. they learned that Governor Fallin issued a stay of execution saying there was a mix-up with the drugs that were to be use for lethal injection.

  “Then by the next day they had extended it indefinitely because Richard’s case blew the whole thing open,” Sr. Helen says.19 Media digging into the earlier botched executions started detailing what was happening. They reported how the drug used in Charles Warner’s execution is used to embalm people after they are dead. That drug changes the liquid composition of a person’s body so Warner was mummified alive.

  As of June 2017, Richard remained on death row awaiting his fate.

  Chapter Seven

  Her Thoughts on the Death Penalty

  Since 1984 Sr. Helen has witnessed six executions and has had time to develop her thoughts on the death penalty, which she says first and foremost is about us.

  When people ask Sr. Helen how she can minister to and care for the men and women she meets who have committed horrible murders, she says, “They are more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. There’s always the capacity to be more than we have been and for God’s grace to change us.”

  “Human beings do unspeakable acts, and I am outraged over those acts. But when you meet the real person and you meet a human being, you know you’re not meeting a monster,” she says. You’re meeting a person with a story. It’s a story that most often involves them being wounded as a child or abused and they are often poor. “Ninety percent of people on death row were abused as children and had violence pumped into them. One day they pumped out violence on other people,” she says.1 Race also unfairly influences imposition of the death penalty since most of those on death row have murdered a white person. Murders of people of color aren’t treated the same way.

  In her ministry, Sr. Helen holds in her soul the outrage she feels over the death of the victims and the suffering of the families of both the victims and the perpetrators. She holds in her outrage that a human being who is rendered defenseless in prison is stripped of one’s humanity, walked to a death chamber, and killed. “It’s easy to kill a monster,” she has told many crowds. “If you look into the face of a human being who did unspeakable crimes, it is very different to kill them.”2

  People in prison are often victimized by a broken legal system.
A district attorney can only ask for the death penalty if there is an eyewitness who says he or she saw the other person commit the crime. What if that eyewitness is offered a lesser sentence to lie in implicating the other person? How do we know from square one that we have the truth? Only the worst of the worst are supposed to be executed in America. How do we determine that, Sr. Helen asks.

  Often an ambitious district attorney or other elected officials will hide evidence or manipulate the system to get the outcome that benefits their careers the most, which can be getting a death penalty sentence for someone. They should be held accountable for such things, Sr. Helen believes. They are protected from that retribution and given immunity. Immunity is understandable when people are looking for revenge, but not when they have deliberately done wrong. The fact that one person’s personal motivation can influence whether or not death enters into a sentence shows that the death penalty is applied differently depending upon the county or state. How can that be fair, Sr. Helen often asks.

  In The Death of Innocents, she wrote, “I’ve heard criminal defense attorney Millard Farmer (who represented Pat Sonnier at the end) say many times that death penalty cases are 95 percent about politics and 5 percent about criminal justice.”3

  The death penalty is a mostly southern phenomenon practiced by southern states that practiced slavery the longest in the United States. It’s an “impossible situation,” Sr. Helen says. If federal courts ruled it unconstitutional, it would stop.

  “That brings us to a fundamental question about the whole prison system: Is it about punishing people and imposing pain on them, even death, or is it about helping people to change their lives so that they can be citizens again?” Sr. Helen asks. Of course some people should never be put back out into society. “Some of them are sociopaths—there’s something wrong with the wiring in their brain and we have to protect ourselves from them. But most human beings who make mistakes, that is not who they are.” She dreams of a time when prisons are places where people are rehabilitated and could become good citizens. “That’s a fundamental shift to move away from pain and punishment to restoring human life.”4