Sometimes it requires a compelling story to focus thinking. Such a nudge came from the presence in Durango last week of Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking, describing to school and community audiences her 1980s interaction with a death row inmate in Louisiana and how that began to shape her crusade to abolish the death penalty.
Prejean is from the South and emphasizes that the most active death rows are in states where slavery existed, and those sentenced are mostly black. Federal statutes provide layers of appeals, but quality legal representation can be lacking. Legal opportunities are missed, mistakes are made and occasionally the innocent are executed.
Prejean, who is 75, is a story teller, which is how she gets her message across.
Not everyone agrees with her moral arguments. She admits to her mistake in originally not reaching out to family members of the victims and not hearing their pain and anger. And she describes other family members, in other cases, who may be devastated by their loss but who do not want to see another life taken. They do not believe that will return their lives to what they were.
The death penalty fails as a deterrent to violent crime. Study after study confirms that those who take a life in a premeditated and especially violent way do not consider the consequences. The death penalty is also expensive. The easy belief is that incarceration for 30 or 40 years must be more expensive than an execution. No. The appeals process for death sentences means that there will also be many years of incarceration and under conditions that add to the expense. At each step, lawyers, judges and law enforcement officers continue to be involved.
Where Prejean is most successful in is her descriptions of what the death penalty does to the living: the mistake many make who agree to witness an execution and the scene that never leaves their mind, the effects on prison staff. How can you have a conversation with a man who is shackled hand and foot, helpless and dead an hour later? Boxing up his few possessions afterward to send to his family. The system understandably provides prison staff with time off, and counseling, but is that adequate?
Some consider the time leading up to the execution to be torture. Knowing that your death is impending and, on some occasions, receiving stays of execution that can arrive within hours of one’s end is destabilizing and dehumanizing.
Dead Man Walking was this year’s Common Reading Experience, anchored at Fort Lewis College and in its eighth year. Among other events was a panel that included members of two families who were able to set aside their anger at those who ended the lives of their loved ones. They never forgot, but they accepted that the guilty were human beings, too.
What deserves more attention is the mental health of those who have been sentenced to death. In some cases, the crimes are so violent – so extraordinarily cruel – that the perpetrators cannot be of sound mind. Mental health is just that, a health issue, and the effort should be to cure, not to kill.
Life without parole should take the place of the death penalty. While life behind bars is a limited life, taking that life is deeply unsettling to too many people, and is wrong.
Prejean is taking her stories to the 32 states that have the death penalty, believing that is the way to end the practice in this country. Polling suggests the trend is in her favor. Prejean’s is an extraordinary crusade, and we wish her success.
