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Nun, author addresses death penalty from different sides

FLC Common Reading Experience writer all over town
Sister Helen Prejean discusses the upcoming reading play “Dead Man Walking” on Tuesday with Fort Lewis College students who will be acting in it at 4 and 7 p.m. today in Roshong Recital Hall.

Nov. 4 is the anniversary, and it weighs heavily on Sister Helen Prejean.

Nov. 4 is the day Elmo Patrick Sonnier and his brother, Eddie, killed Loretta Ann Bourque, 18, and her boyfriend, David LeBlanc.

That murder led to a lifetime mission of advocating against the death penalty for the 75-year-old nun, who has been in town this week to talk about her book, Dead Man Walking, the Common Reading Experience assignment for incoming freshmen this year at Fort Lewis College.

Bridget Irish, coordinator of the program, said the book is selected a year out, so it’s just happenstance that America has been engaged in a death-penalty conversation after several botched executions this year.

On Monday, Prejean shared the spiritual side of her journey in a talk called “Christian Faith & Catholic Social Justice” with an audience of about 120 at St. Columba Catholic Church. On Tuesday, she addressed an audience of about 850 at FLC’s Whalen Gym.

“The death-penalty discussion is a journey,” she said. “Of course, you have to feel outrage when an innocent life is horribly taken. Of course, you think that the person who did something so horrible should die. But integrity can be maintained even when we’re swept away on a river of anger.”

Prejean began her advocacy after seeing her first execution, that of Patrick Sonnier, whom she had served as a spiritual adviser.

“The American people are never going to get close to this; it’s a secret ritual,” she remembers thinking afterward. “My job is to get out there and tell them. April 5, 1984, that’s when my mission was born.”

But first, she had to experience the pain of victims’ families, and she said Lloyd LeBlanc, David LeBlanc’s father, is the hero of Dead Man Walking because he taught her about the grace of forgiveness, that forgiving is strength, not weakness.

The flaws in the American justice system add power to Prejean’s stance.

“We’re up to 144 and counting of people wrongfully convicted, and it’s not just DNA, which applies in one case out of four,” Prejean said. “About 90 percent are related to prosecutorial misconduct. When I started, I thought it would be a fluke to wrongfully convict someone, but I’ve learned that in all these appeals, if the attorney didn’t make a formal objection in the original trial, the appeals court won’t listen.”

Prejean shared other statistics: About 98 percent of people sentenced to death are poor; eight out of 10 are there because they killed a white person, even though more than 50 percent of murder victims are people of color; about 90 percent were violated as children.

“Catholics pride themselves on being for life,” she said. “To render a man defenseless and take his life, where’s the dignity in that?”

Prejean worked with Pope John Paul II to strengthen the church’s position against execution, but not all Catholics agree.

“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia knows he’s part of the death process and said he doesn’t lose any sleep over this,” she said about one of the five Catholic justices sitting on the highest court in the land. “He says we still have the death penalty here even though it’s been abolished in Europe because we have more Christians in this country, and Europe follows Freud instead of Jesus.”

People who saw the movie got the message, too, she said.

“I know authors complain about how a movie ruins their book, but it wasn’t that way for me,” she said. “I worked hand-in-hand with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, and they were determined to stay true to the book. Tim asked an important question: ‘Everybody knows we shouldn’t execute the innocent, but what about the guilty?’”

abutler@durangoherald.com

if you go

A number of events related to Fort Lewis College’s Common Reading Experience selection, Dead Man Walking, remain:

4 p.m. and 7 p.m. today: Reading of the theater production of “Dead Man Walking,” Roshong Recital Hall in Jones Hall at Fort Lewis College, with Talk Back featuring author Sister Helen Prejean.

7 p.m. Tuesday: Durango ecumenical panel, discussion about the death penalty, Unitarian Universalist Foundation of Durango, 419 San Juan Drive.

7 p.m. Tuesday: Documentary “The Thin Blue Line” in the Vallecito Room at the Student Union at FLC.

7 p.m. Oct. 30: Panel “Walking into the Arts” featuring moderator Judith Reynolds, FLC theater professor Dennis Elkins and FLC assistant music professor Charissa Chiaravolloti, Noble Hall 130 at FLC.

Throughout October: Death Penalty Photography Project, featuring photographer Scott Langley’s work, various locations around town including Center of Southwest Studies, Maria’s Bookshop, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Durango Public Library, Reed Library at FLC and Common Reading Experience events.

For more information, contact Bridget Irish at irish_b@fortlewis.edu. Visit subjectguides.fortlewis.edu/DeadManWalking for the book’s research guide.



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