STEPHANIE SALTER: Death penalty foe’s ‘awakening’ still a compelling story

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Sister Helen Prejean was only slightly exaggerating Tuesday when she told her Human Rights Day audience at Indiana State University, “I have crisscrossed this nation 44 hundred thousand times.”

Since 1982, when someone asked if she would consider writing to a prisoner on death row, Prejean has been on the move to raise awareness — her own and America’s — about the inequities and false promises of capital punishment. Her best-selling book, “Dead Man Walking,” has become a critically acclaimed film and an opera that is performed to sold-out houses all around the globe.

Prejean, who will turn 70 next week, shows no sign of slowing down. Other than a limp, left over from an ankle fusion last year, she seems ageless and even more energized for a cause that keeps expanding to include all human connections — to one another and to our surroundings.

No matter how many times she stands before a crowd to deliver her message — and Prejean is on the road more than she is in New Orleans with her Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille community — it is as if for the first time. Whether the audience is packed with grade school children or skeptical law enforcement representatives, Prejean is in a state she recommends for all of us — “ablaze with the fire of human rights.”

A natural storyteller, Prejean would give any Southern Baptist preacher, Broadway actress or stand-up comedian a run for his or her money. Tuesday, as the keynote speaker for the eighth-annual Human Rights Day at ISU, she used her down-home Louisiana drawl, impeccable timing and irrepressible sense of humor to full advantage.

“All I need is just fiiiive minutes with President Barack Obama,” she said, stretching the word to evoke images of the commander in chief listening intently to this little ol’ nun — or else.

Her bone to pick with Obama is his equivocation on capital punishment. While he advocates curbing the current system, Obama still believes some crimes are deserving of state execution.

“As if we can have a designer death penalty,” Prejean scoffed, then dropped into imitations of people making various exceptions for specific crimes: “I don’t want it for everybody, I just want it for my criminal.”

Once a government decides it is all right to kill anybody, she said, “You are going to have the whole spectrum.”

Whether an execution is by Kenyan officials who bury a woman up to her neck and stone her to death for having a child out of wedlock, or by an anonymous official who administers a lethal IV, governments always insist sanctioned killing is for the good of society.

But it is not, Prejean said. Killing is killing, and it is immoral.

“What do you think they write in as the cause of death” after an execution, she asked her audience in Dede I in Hulman Memorial Student Union. “Homicide.”

Referring to Indiana’s 20-some executions, the nun reminded her largely student audience, “Every single person who’s been strapped down and killed in this state has been killed in your name.”

By now, Prejean has told the story of her “awakening” through prison ministry thousands of times. But if anything, the account is more dramatic today because it encompasses Prejean’s expanded view of human rights abuses, along with more than two decades of travel and listening, and six trips to the execution chamber with death row inmates she came to know.

Never in denial about the crimes committed by her incarcerated spiritual charges, Prejean has long based her anti-death penalty argument on these premises:

n None of us, including murderers, amounts only to his or her worst deeds.

n No society’s legal system is so perfect, omniscient and equally applied that it can guarantee innocent people will not be executed or even that all defendants will receive proper legal representation. Thanks to efforts such as “The Innocence Project,” Prejean noted, more than 130 people have gotten off death row in the United States via DNA or other exonerating evidence.

n Killing someone for having killed someone else not only contradicts Christ, it doesn’t heal the wounds of loss in loved ones left behind.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Prejean said, capital punishment has been dangled in front of grieving, broken-hearted families of homicide victims as the only way to “win” or, worse, to “prove” how much they loved their relative.

Victims’ families she has spoken with who did not want prosecutors to press for execution, she said, have been told they must have “condoned” their loved one’s slaying or, incredibly, “It’s a shame you didn’t love your child.”

Working with those families has broadened and deepened Prejean’s work. Together they have addressed state legislatures to advocate for repeal of the death penalty. Sixty-two family members of murder victims helped convince New Jersey lawmakers to throw out that state’s capital punishment statutes, she said, and others just persuaded New Mexico’s Legislature to do the same.

“They told them, ‘Don’t kill for us,’” she said.

Prejean urged the students in the audience to begin lobbying their state Legislature so Indiana will someday repeal the death penalty. If not capital punishment, she encouraged them to find their own niche of the human rights/civil rights struggle and get involved.

“But you’ve got to get real knowledge,” she said about educating themselves for a cause. “You can’t just walk around and glow with human rights.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.