Sister Helen Prejean
Anti-Death Penalty Activist
"Dead Man Walking — The Journey"
January 27, 2000

I don't want to take anything for granted. I know a lot of people sitting in this audience tonight are dealing with the struggle because on the one hand when we hear about the terrible crimes that people do to innocent people we are filled with outrage and that is part of moral sensitivity to be filled with outrage. When we hear of young people being killed or old people being killed or just people without any sensitivity to human life, blowing people away, sometimes that they're angry that they don't have money on them and they're angry and they just shoot them out of anger, and we're outraged over that as we should be outraged over that and how do we hold, on the one hand of our souls the outrage over what people have done and the evil that they have done, and on the other hand as a society to say, now, how shall we respond? What will our response to be those people among us who have truly done evil deeds?

And that is our soul poised in a moral stance about the death penalty and the fact that you've come here tonight means that you're willing to reflect on it and I want to take you through crucial pieces of my own journey and just lay it out to you and just say to you work it through, work it through. The book is a help because a book is a private place where you can go and you don't have to defend a position. It's place where you can go and you can be in touch with different people and witness things you otherwise are not going to be able to see because the death penalty is a very private, behind-prison-walls, middle-of-the-night, for a few choice witnesses. It's going to take you into all the places and I've come to respect human beings who struggle with this issue because we are a good and decent people in this country and most people are not wedded to legalized vengeance or to turning over to government these choices when we can barely trust them to collect our taxes right or get the potholes filled and we're going to turn over to government deciding who among us lives and dies.

First, just a little bit about the film, "Dead Man Walking." It's a miracle film. It shouldn't have happened. All the odds against its happening were great but Susan Sarandon has become a good friend and I was with her just a couple of weeks ago in New York. The Center for Constitutional Rights gave her an award, not for a few fly-by-night little trendy celebrity things, but for 19 years of standing on the side of people who hadn't had a choice, people from Nicaragua, the Haitian HIV positive people, the immigrants in New York being shot by the police, Susan's great, and I wasn't looking for the book to be made into a film. Now, y'all from Virginia, y'all don't have a whole lot of Catholics here but nuns generally don't do well in films. I want to just to tell you about that [audience laughter].

We had a sister, Sister Fabian, left the community and they're going to do a made-for-movie thing, a TV movie on her. We all gathered in the den and we should've known from the title it was going to be a fiasco because it was called "I Was a Weekend Nun" [audience laughter] and people don't know about nuns and so the sisters in my community are saying to me, "Don't you let Hollywood touch this book," and they didn't have to tell me because can you picture what they’re going to do with this story of a nun with a death row inmate? Huh? Can you picture that? Bringing a cyanide pill in my bra or the two of us trying to elope and both taking cyanide pills [audience laughter]. You know they're going to put some romantic element in there between the nun and the death row inmate, so I'm going, hey-- [audience laughter]

And then one afternoon, I'm in the kitchen and the phone rings and the voice on the other end says "Hi, I'm Susan Sarandon. I'm in Memphis. I'm filming "The Client." I'm reading your book. I've got to come to New Orleans for two days of filming." Half of John Grisham's book ends up with people leaving out of airports if you noticed the pattern in the story, so sure enough, she's coming to New Orleans, and she said, "I'd love to meet you." I said, "Great." I'd heard about her from Amnesty International that she was great on human rights, so we set the restaurant. I rush out, rent "Thelma and Louise," see what she looks like [audience laughter]. Well, she comes in. In the first scene, get her mixed up with Geena Davis [audience laughter], so the whole movie I'm following Geena Davis who's the ditzy one in "Thelma and Louise," getting them in more and more trouble, and saying to myself, "I like Louise. I like Louise." So when she comes in the restaurant, it was a prayer of thanksgiving to God out of relief [audience laughter] that she was Louise [audience laughter] and we have supper.

And the one piece of advice I'd been given about this film was don't let anybody touch your book unless you can trust them because once you sign that contract, they can do a musical comedy with your stuff [audience laughter] and I'm talking with Susan Sarandon and she's telling me about herself and Tim presenting the Academy Awards (this story was just recounted at the Center for Constitutional Rights the other night) in 1994 and they know a billion people are watching and they had been to Guantanamo. They had talked to the HIV-positive Haitian people that some of them were fasting to the death because they were being confined for no reason and Susan said, "We worked out the words -- 26 seconds," and people, of course, at the Academy Awards, they're departing from the script for all kinds of things. Their baseball teams. Their girlfriends. Their whatever and she and Tim made that decision that they used the occasion--they held up before the world the HIV-positive Haitian immigrants and the next day a judge signed those papers for the release and the Academy Award community was furious at them.

And, you know, Susan had an insight. We were talking about it after we went to their house afterwards and she said, "You know, when you interrupt a ritual, when everyone's expecting one thing and then you change the ritual and they held up those people. People were averting their eyes. People were saying things to them angrily when they left. They were banned from the Academy Awards. When she told me this story, I thought, hmmm, if we do a film, we ain't never going to get an Academy Award for sure. They're mad at these people and it made me so appreciate her because think of her professional life as an actress and you're willing to alienate and make all these people mad at you on the Academy and then lo and behold, the next year she stands up before the Academy and receives the Academy Award for her performance in "Dead Man Walking." Is that a miracle story or is that not?

Then, she had to persuade Tim Robbins. He's busy. He's doing all these projects. His movie that's coming out now, "The Cradle Will Rock," he was working on then and he was stuck and he couldn't get a producer and she’s saying to him, "You're stuck, you're stuck. Look read this book, Dead Man Walking, read this book." He wouldn't read it. Six months and she truly is the midwife of this film because she said, "Tim, you've got to read this book," and so he did. Next thing I know I'm sitting in New York in their living room. We're talking about making a movie. Well, you know, a lot of people sit in living rooms and talk about making movies, but I'm naive. I think Tim Robbins. He's the director. Susan Sarandon. Then they said they were going to get this guy Sean Penn. Had to go rent a film on him. Who's Sean Penn? [audience laughter], who, by the way, had made a very public statement a couple of weeks before that he wasn't acting any more. He was just going to direct and Tim sends him this script and so Sean and I had a day before the film of "Dead Man Walking." We drove to the prison together and he gets in the car. I'm driving. He says, "My mama said to tell you she's glad I'm going to be in a movie with a nun" [audience laughter] and I had to say, "Sean, I heard you made this big old public statement you weren't going to act any more. Why are you doing this film?" And he said, "When you read a script and you find your tears falling on the page, you know it's something you got to do," and so Sean picked up the role of the dead man walking Matthew Poncelet and Susan was me and I thought every Hollywood studio in this country was going to jump on this film. I mean, you've got this great director, great actors in it. Wrong. Wrong. Tim and I are on the phone. I said, "How's it going, Tim?" He says, "I'm turning grey." He says, "It gets up to the second highest level and they turn it down."

You know, their little formula for films is a little three-bullet magic thing of a lot of sex, a lot of violence and a lot of action. They said, "Tim, first you got a nun in there. We got no romantic element, and you won't let us fiddle with the script and then the guy's done a terrible crime. He's going to be executed at the end. Tim, it's a downer. Nobody's going to come see this film." They all turned down the script of "Dead Man Walking," all of them. Yet, Polygram Film International had just had one successful film, "Four Weddings and a Funeral." They mostly did albums. They picked up "Dead Man Walking." Today, they're real glad they picked up "Dead Man Walking" and they brought the film all over the world. It was in Beirut. It went to Japan and the taxi cab driver's going "Dead Man Walking." It was like-- And when Susan received the Academy Award it was for Catholics it's the feast of the enunciation. It means when Mary consented to be the mother of Jesus and 1.3 billion people watch and to me, that's-- You do your little part but it's like I said in the beginning. The Marie Deans sitting in here and the people that have worked on this issue for so, so long, you're in there and it's like a big old mosaic and maybe you put a little bit of red into the mosaic but there're plenty blues and greens and all that are part of this and the same thing with the film.

The world was ready for this film and Tim was really clear. He said, "You know, if we do a polemic against the death penalty and put in the 1,482 reasons of what's wrong with the death penalty, the only people going to come to see it are the Amnesty International people, a few nuns and the criminal defense lawyers" [audience laughter], and he said, "We've got to construct this film that we can allow the American people to go into it and to begin to reflect and we've got to take them over to both sides," and there are some people that come out of the film of "Dead Man Walking" that are really for the death penalty and they come out, they’re more for the death penalty when they come out, but it began the process of helping the American public to think and to reflect on the death penalty and so that's the film.

I didn't know I was going to write a book, didn't know there was going to be a film. The San Francisco Opera is doing an opera of "Dead Man Walking" and they're already on. They're already onto it that the theme of redemption is at the heart of this story and that there's going to be a scene in the opera where there's going to be a medley where the victim's family and the mother of the death row inmate, which is Frederica Von Stade if you know opera people, are all going to be standing in a semi-circle and they're all going to be singing, "You Don't Know What It's Like," each of them talking about their suffering and their loss and bringing everybody together in their common suffering to reach a point of reconciliation and people who are sitting in here tonight who are murder victim's families, who have had loved ones murdered, and know that death is not the answer to heal the human heart, understand that already.

The key parts of the journey and I want to take you through it tonight and I can only give you the highlights because I only have like a limited amount of time with you. I want to encourage you to get the book, not just for yourself, but the book is going to be a private cloistered place where you can go and where you can get information you didn't have before. You don't have to defend your position but you also are going to meet and experience and witness things that you're not going to have a way of seeing. The first part of my journey was just to understand the connection between the gospel of Jesus and justice because for a long time I simply lived out, well, if we're kind to people and we're charitable with people and pray for people, you know, but I didn't get this thing of justice. Didn't know really what it meant and was not in contact with any poor and suffering people in my life. I was like that little girl that was asked to write an essay on the poor and she wrote, "The poor. Once there was a very poor family. The father was poor and the mother was poor. The children were poor. The gardener was poor, the chauffeur was poor [audience laughter], the butler was poor. It was a very poor family."

Well, that was kind of like me in a way, because I wasn't in touch with the inner city in New Orleans, the people that struggled against racism and against poverty. I was out of touch with that and that changed in my life. It changed when I became awakened that the gospel of Jesus was about being on the side of people who were poor and struggling and it made me get in touch with my own life of privilege. My father a lawyer, my mother a nurse. We traveled to Europe by the time I was 15. I had the choice of any college I wanted to go to. I had an excellent education. When we're privileged we don't know we're privileged because it's like little fish in an aquarium. We're all swimming and everybody's just like us. I wasn't in touch with what was going on in the inner city of New Orleans. I'm out at the lake front and knew there was a thing called racism and knew there was a thing called injustice but I didn't know any real people that were suffering under it, so my heart wasn't impassioned to do anything and that changed, and that's the first part of the journey and I share that with you in "Dead Man Walking" because that's like the linchpin that set me on the trajectory down a certain path which was to go into the St. Thomas Housing Projects and to start living among people who were on the underside of the tapestry of the great American dream and it's only by going there and being with people that I began to understand all the stereotypical things-- Well, those people on welfare. They could really get a job if they wanted to. It's just a question of all they have to do is just go to where the jobs are. Look at those ads in the paper, all those people that could get those jobs and growing up I had believed in the death penalty.

The Catholic church had stood behind the death penalty for over 1700 years, had embraced in its teaching about the death penalty as had most Christian churches that those who did terrible crimes, particularly heinous and terrible crimes, the state had a right to take their life to protect society and self-defense and all this kind of stuff. I had even thought about the death penalty. How am I going to think about the death penalty? I'm not in touch at all with people who are going to be executed or on death row. Now, that is going to change and see, God works with us, gives us like a little penlight, little penlight, not a great big old search light, because believe me, if I'd had a search light, and I knew what was waiting for me at the end of the road, I never would've gone down that road [audience laughter].

And so I moved to St. Thomas and lived with five other sisters in an apartment, 5C, and right across from us in the other building was also 5C but in the next building was a big drug pusher and the whole neighborhood, everybody knew where he was. Everybody saw everybody going to do the deals. One night, 2:00 o'clock in the morning, there's this [knocking sound]. Sister Barbara gets up, stumbles to the door. On the other side of the door she hears, "Man, I'm here for the bags." She goes, "Right across, over there in building B" [audience laughter]. We said, "Barbara, Barbara, that was a drug deal." She goes, "I was sleepy. Everybody knows where the guy is" [audience laughter]. And I began to understand racism because in the St. Thomas Housing Project African American people when Sister Laurie who started Hope House goes down to the mayor's office (this was in the '70s) and said "The drugs are open like loaves of bread. We can see it from our window" and to be told, "Look, Sister, hold it. Sister, every city's going to have its problem with drugs. At least we know where they are" [audience laughter], and when people in St. Thomas were killed, we knew we were lucky if we could find it on page 15, three little lines, "Resident of St. Thomas killed." Every single time a white person was killed, it was on the front pages of the newspaper. It's not like people get up in the morning and plan to be mean and racist. How can we make our newspaper racist? How can we make this, all our policies racist? It's just that there's a penchant for standing on the side of people that we most value in our society and I'm going to soon learn, because I'm at Hope House now and I'm working in an adult learning center for high school dropouts and people coming in who've been through the 11th grade in the public school grades in the New Orleans and they can't read at a 3rd grade level, and I'm getting in touch with my education, even my high school education, where I learned public speaking by the time I was a senior and elected student body president and had developed my leadership and could read any book I put my hands on and a daddy who stood behind me and said, "Honey, you can be anything you want to me, any college you want to go to in this country," and I'm up against people who can't read at a 3rd grade level and they've been through the 11th grade and can't do fractions and can't write a sentence and I'm thinking why them? And why was I given so much? Why me?

And I got in touch with privilege and seeing the young women come in and you know it's a blooming miracle if by the time they reach 21 they haven't had a least one baby and I'm saying to myself, put me here. And take away my hopes and my dreams and what I can do with my life and the first young man that shows me attention, am I going to say I'm not going to show up pregnant at 16, 17? Could I say that? It's like all my virtue dropped away and I realized I was cushioned and I was protected and I had resources and take all those away from me and push me up against the wall and I don't know what I would do, and I joined the human race and it was liberating to join the human race and to realize that is what all of us are. All of us are basically human beings and some of us have received a lot more support than others and now over these 15 years I've accompanied five people to execution. I can tell you stories of people. Why did I get the love? I don't know. I don't know. All I know is that the love that has been poured into me has to flow through me, has to flow to other people and I begin to learn about this thing called justice, that you can't stand there and watch people suffering injustice and just say I'm neutral.

And Archbishop Tutu, good old Archbishop Tutu from South Africa. He has a wonderful little parable that if an elephant is standing on a mouse's tail and you're standing there and you go "I'm neutral," the mouse does not appreciate that we say we're neutral [audience laughter] and that when we're in the face of injustice and something that's wrong, we’ve got to act and so my soul begins to get on fire because I see people suffering and I see the injustice and I know I can't remain static. I've got to do something, and I'm in this soil of St. Thomas receiving another whole kind of education and spiritual formation when one day, and when I think of how casual it was, this friend of mine coming from the Prison Coalition Office and I'm coming down St. Andrew's. We're like two little ants and we bump and he has a little clipboard. He always had projects going and he says, "Hey, Sister Helen, you want to write to a guy on death row here in Louisiana?" I said, "Sure, sure, I could do that," because I'm thinking I can write letters to somebody, you know. I thought that's all I was going to be doing.

It was 1982. We hadn't executed anybody in Louisiana since the '60s and he writes a name down on this envelope. I remember Patrick Sonnier. I don't have a clue about how that name is going to be a passport to this strange and bizarre country and it's going to change my whole life, and his number, and his address which gave me pause. I had never in my life seen anybody that lived on Death Street, death row, Louisiana State Prison, Angola, Louisiana, and we still call our prison Angola because it's 18,000 acres of a plantation where the slaves from Angola used to work and so help me, when you go to the prison and you see mostly African-American prisoners of the 5,000 men going out to the fields with hoes over their shoulders and guards on horseback with guns at the beginning and end of the column, you wonder how much has changed. I understand why Jesse Jackson calls his book on the death penalty Legal Lynching.

And I'm beginning, beginning, to understand, and I write to this fellow on death row and people had warned me. They said, "You nuns, you nuns are so naive and you think that man is interested in a spiritual relationship with you? Do you think that? They going to try to con you. They going to get money for cigarettes," and my guard was up in the first letter. I got to tell you. I got to say that. I must have said three times, "I'm a nun. I got no money" [audience laughter], about how I'd like to be his friend. I believed in his dignity. Didn't believe he should be executed. "I'm a nun. P.S. I'm a nun. I got no money" [audience laughter], and the irony of it all, that he never asked me for anything, and when you see the film "Dead Man Walking," Matthew Poncelet is a composite character and Patrick Sonnier is one of those, Robert Willie's the other, but it came from Patrick Sonnier's mouth a couple of hours before he died, "Thank you, ma'am, for loving me. I never had anybody to love me."

And I write the man a letter and lo and behold, he writes back, and I'll always remember his letter because he said, "Dear Sister Helen, couldn't believe it when the guard stopped by my cell. Knew I wasn't writing to anybody." He had seen Helen on the letter which was his ex-wife's name who had turned him into the police and he looks at the letter and he's about to pitch it. Then he sees Sister Helen, got a nun writing me here. His experience with nuns hadn't been super good, but he responded and here I get a letter saying, "I'd love to have someone to write to. I'm all alone. I thought all day why be friends with anyone because they're going to execute me anyway," and you know that whole thing of why be close to anyone. I just got an invitation yesterday to come and see the women on death row in Texas because now the state of Texas is about to execute Betty Lou Beets and they've already been through Carla Faye Tucker's execution and now they're going to go through Betty Lou Beets in her late '60s as a grandmother and they now want to kill her and all the women are going to this because they are bonded with each other and because they know each other as human beings, and one of the tortures of the death penalty is not simply that you are called to be executed but that you have to watch walk across the tier someone who maybe was a cell mate next to you for 7 years, 6 years, 10 years, and watch them walk out the green door to go and be executed. If someone wrote a play, a theater piece on this, of people together and them see their friends, one by one, being led out to be killed, you know it would be a great piece of drama. Where else does that go on in the world? Where you’re in a war and where you’re in a place, and one by one, they pull us out to kill us. And who's next? This is incredible when you think of it, like how have we gotten to this? And Betty Lou. Now, she's not there for being an outstanding little angel. She did kill some people who were her former husbands. I mean, she buried them all in the backyard in a garden. I mean, she did terrible stuff. I'm not trying to condone that, but Betty Lou--who's she going to kill now? She's a meek little women. In the discipline of the prison she'll never hurt anybody again. We've got to kill her. The only thing we know to do is to kill her? She did it. We identify her by her crimes, so we have to kill her. Carla Faye Tucker, we had to kill her? Why? Why do we have to imitate people in the worst action of their live? To try to make ourselves as a moral society? Why do we have to do that? We don't have to do that.

Well, I'm going to learn. I write to the man. He writes back. I realize he's alone. He didn't have anyone to come and see him. It's not like his mama didn't try. She did go to the prison once but she had had a hard life. She'd been abused in a lot of ways and she went into the prison and she saw him and she came out and she almost had a nervous breakdown and she couldn't make herself go into the gates, into the place of these people who were planning and plotting and serious about killing her son. She couldn't go into the negative atmosphere of these people who were going to kill her boy. She couldn't do it and he understood and he said, "Don't come, Mamma. It's okay. Don't come, Mama." And he like relieved her of that and even when he went to the death house, he said, "Mama, don't come. Don't come into this. It's okay, Mama. I know you love me."

The unseen story, of course, in the death penalty if we want to talk about victim's families. We've got two sets of victim's families we've got to talk about and one, of course, is the victim's families who have sustained a murder and the terrible violence against their loved one and that's real and we're going to go into that. But the unseen victim's family is this little family standing behind there who has a son, who has a brother, who has a uncle on death row and the state is going to kill him. Who tells their stories? Is that all we know to do--is to multiply victim's families by doing this violence against people?

And, of course, in this process, I am going to learn about the death penalty. I'd get on these radio talk shows with these dee-jays who think ho ho ho, I'm going to have the nun on my show who has a little following. For the death penalty, I'm going to have the nun on my show. Poor little nun saying oh, poor little murderers and they think I'm all emotion and it's great fun [audience laughter] to blow them out of the water. They don't know about the death penalty. They don't know there're 17,000 homicides in this country, 1.5% get chosen for death. Can you guess who they are? How selective this thing is? And aren't all of them poor that are selected, not to say poor people don't do terrible crime. Isn't it odd you don't ever see any rich people in there? Don't rich people do terrible crimes? And I was at a workshop with Johnny Cochran. He put it clear. He just said you got the OJ's and the no J's. It's the no J's who get the death penalty [audience laughter], and it's very selective--1.5%. Look at New York five years ago. Five years ago Dukakis, supposedly a good Catholic governor, puts in the death penalty in New York. We need the death penalty in New York, he says, and five years later they spend at least $50 million. There've been close to 200 capital cases. They selected three people for death. That's what they've done. Is he going to tell that to people when he's running for governor of New York--how selective the whole thing is going to be and finally we're talking about 1.5%.

Who's going to talk about race in the death penalty? Who's going to talk about not simply that it's a disproportionate number of people of color on death row and in prison? And as of the year 2000 we're incarcerating two million human beings in this country--two million. One in every four African-American young men from the ages 18 to 29 are in the prison system. Go to any country and you find out one in four of the young men is in prison. You say this is a police state. It is disproportionate, but where you really see race in the death penalty is who was the victim and who cares? Overwhelmingly when the death penalty is chosen, it's because white people got killed. Eight out of every 10 people of the 3,500-plus people in this country sit on death row tonight are there because they killed white people. Don't get me wrong. No one should be killed, white, black. No human being should be subjected to violence but isn't it odd that when we practice the death penalty overwhelmingly we're outraged over the death of white people and pursue the ultimate punishment for their deaths, but when people of color are killed, there's a shrug of the shoulders. It's like hey, that's what those people do to each other.

We all know about Columbine. Everybody knows about Columbine. What about all the inner city shootings of young black kids that have been going for the last 10 years? Who's outraged over that? We seem to accept the death of some people, like hey, and it's not just the race thing. It's also class. When homeless people get knocked off, a wino is found dead stabbed on the street. You think the media is out there, "Hey, a wino got stabbed!" It's a shrug of the shoulders when poor people are killed. Who cares? And I'm going to tell you, I'm not talking out of the top of my head here. I back up everything I'm saying to you with studying and research and when they did the Chattahoochee study in Georgia, they found out when the white people were killed one in every five times DAs went for the death penalty, visited the victim's family as their wishes went for it. When black people were killed, one in every 19 times.

You think it's any different in Virginia? Do you think there's as much outrage of the death of an inner city black kid as there is over white suburban housewife? We know that about ourself and when you have people, let's just make it fair across the board. Let's go get everybody. Right. How’re going to go get everybody? When race makes a difference and you know, when we had the death penalty in this country for rape, can you guess how many times the people were strung up from gallows or put in the electric chair because they raped a woman of color? Raped a Native American woman? And it's not our fault. It's like we've grown up with this. It not like people sit on the edge of their beds in the morning and go let's go do something racist. We don't try to do it. It's just part of us, but we have to have our heads up and we have to be alert to how race is a part of this and it has to do with who's the victim and who's outraged over their death, who cares enough to go to the expense and the time and all the people involved to pursue the ultimate punishment because we're outraged over the death of a person, and you know what I really learned was when we started Survive for Murder Victims' Families in New Orleans and there were 40 women in the group–African-American women, all of them indigent and that's when I really learned about race and the death penalty because not only had the DA of New Orleans not gone for the death penalty in any of the cases, but none of them had even come to trial and some of the women, the mamas were saying the justice system, they don't care about us and one of the mamas talked about having to get up in the morning and see the kid who killed her kid just going scot-free. There hadn't even been investigators sent out because there wasn't enough care over the death of her son to come in and do a full investigation.

In order for us to say we can do the death penalty we have to know that we have a pure and caring society that we know if any one of our citizens is killed we care equally about them and we know that's not true and we know that hadn't been true for a long long time and I'm going to learn all of this as I begin to visit the man Patrick Sonnier and through the prism of this one man I enter into the whole thing and I go to visit him, and you know what blew me away? The first visit I'm nervous not just about the guards and the prison but I'm nervous about him I'm thinking, hey, it's easy enough to write letters. Anybody can come off good in a letter, but like what's he really like. We have two hours to visit. Well, like can we have a normal conversation? I guess lurking in the back of my mind was he's a death row murderer and you know what makes the death penalty possible? Is we have images in our minds--they're not human the way the rest of us are human and if we're disconnected from people and we don't know them and we never look into their eyes, we can do anything to them. We can torture them. We can kill them. They're not human the way the rest of us are human and I look into his eyes. He appears before this screen, looking through this heavy metal screen and I'm blown away by how human he was. I couldn't believe his face. I couldn't believe this smiling face who says to me, "Sister Helen, you came." He knew I'd driven 2 hours to come and visit him in a place where from the time he opened his eyes in the morning until the time he shut his eyes at night he knows he's nothing but disposable human waste and it's that dehumanization of human beings that happens in this process--

It's not simply taking them at the end and killing them. It's putting human beings in cells without health care. So you need a wisdom tooth pulled. Too bad, buddy. You think this is a Boy Scout camp. You need glasses? Forget it. People die because they can't get health care because once you posit you can kill people, well, what do you expect? You think we're going to be sending you to the dentist regularly? And so once you posit that you can kill people so into those death row cells begin to go juveniles, once you just identify human beings by the worst action of their life we can do anything to them and does it matter that they're juveniles. They did an adult crime, so they get treated like an adult. That's what they are. Look at the crime they did. Only identifying them by their crime, so juveniles can go to death row and in Virginia here you just killed someone who was 17 years old when he did the crime. We know about juveniles. Juveniles don't think of consequences. We know. That's why we don't let really young people vote because it's not like they're thinking of consequences and they act spontaneously and they act irrationality and they act off their top of their heads and so we can kill juveniles and so the U.S. Supreme Court shortly after positing death penalty is not against the 8th Amendment and cruel and unusual punishment and shortly after that the mentally retarded.

Johnny Penry is sitting on death row in Texas now 17 years later sitting there waiting to be executed--a mentally retarded man and I know people in Italy who are coming across to visit Johnny Penry and trying to save his life. Italy! Because they know when you visit Johnny it's like visiting a little child. Are they going to execute him in Texas? They sure are unless something stops that because in the Penry case the U.S. Supreme Court said that mental retardation doesn't mean you can't be executed and look what's happening to us. Is this us? Is this the American people who stand for dignity of life and all the best things that are in our Constitution. This isn't us. Just like slavery wasn't us. Just like segregation and Jim Crow laws weren't us and lynching wasn't us.

We're on the cusp now of a new millennium and I want to hold up as a beacon of light that your City Council in this city just voted for that moratorium. That's not a fluke. That's people who see through this thing and know we've got to choose another road and we're going to choose it in Virginia. We're going to choose it in Oklahoma. We're going to choose it in Louisiana. We're just beginning to see the thaw on the death penalty. We're just beginning to see it. Not that executions aren't continuing apace. I mean, they are. There's Betty Lou. They're going to kill Betty Lou unless something dramatic happens to stop that, but on another level, there's a growth in consciousness in this country and you know about the people of Virginia that when they were asked in a poll to choose between the death penalty and life without parole, that 60% of the people of this state chose life without parole. That shows the heart of the people of Virginia.

True, people want to be safe. They want to be safe, and I've found-- This is 15 years of talking to audiences across this country. Wanting to be safe is different from wanting vengeance and safety means sometimes you hear people say if we don't execute them, they could kill again. They're going to get out in a few years. They'll kill again. We've got to protect our children and you have to know if there's one piece of information I give you tonight, you have to know that those who are sentenced in this state and all the other states in this country for first degree of felony murder are not getting out of prison in a few short years. They are not. Just the will of the people, the politicians aren't allowing that to happen. They are not. They can be safe without imitating their violence and their horror.

So, I go see this man Patrick Sonnier and then I found out he's got his brother in prison. He's serving two life sentences and that was my first question mark on the legal system. How is it one brother got death and one brother got two life sentences? Didn't they do the same murder? And that is the beginning of an education. See, my father was an attorney and I really, honest-to-God, thought that the people on the death row, well, maybe they hadn't a perfect defense. Maybe they didn't have the Johnny Cochran dream team of defense, but at least that their defense was adequate and I'm going to find out. I'm going to find out that Patrick Sonnier's lawyer who had never had a capital case in Louisiana, took him and visited with him for two half-hour periods to plan his defense and one of those half hours was on the morning of the trial. That the jury was selected on Monday, that by Thursday night they'd found him guilty and by Friday they'd sentenced him to death and just check the records. Because he was poor and he had a court-appointed attorney he washed through the courts and you learn how the legal system works.

You begin to learn. If I'm the district attorney and I want to go for the death penalty and I see over here somebody did a terrible crime, somebody over here did a terrible crime, but the person who did the terrible crime over here has Johnny Cochran sitting by his side and I know there're going to be a 100 pre-trial motions. I know they're going to fight me every step of the way. I know there're going to be endless appeals. I'm going to be much more prone to plea bargain with him over here than here's somebody sitting over here. He did a terrible crime too, but there's a court-appointed attorney sitting there and that's going to be a wash and I'm going for it. Everybody can understand that and that's what happens. We now have 88 human beings who have been sentenced through the whole court system and have been found to be innocent on death penalty--88. The latest in Illinois. They've executed 12 and they've had to release 13 off of death row in Illinois and here in Virginia how many possible innocent people and they're not releasing them in Virginia. You have that terrible 21-day rule where you can't even present it in a court in Virginia about evidence or innocence--21 days after trial. I mean, you're still in a fog 21 days after your trial. How do you even get--

But the thing about Illinois is it's open, so any time people present evidence. So, 13 people have come off of death row in Illinois and 12 have been executed and it's partly what's contributing to the thaw. American people are going wait a minute, maybe this thing isn't as air tight as we thought it was going to be. We got the best court system in the world, right? Right. Eighty-seven innocent people coming off of death row, not because the courts-- Often it's because of DNA and people like the Barry Scheck Innocent Project or the Centurion or people who go in there and do DNA or do whatever.

I was in New York. Amnesty gave awards to people who had stood up for human rights, Susan among them, and I was there that night at the banquet and while we're sitting at the table, these two students came up to the table and I said, all right, how do you do. They were two students who were at Northwestern and Anthony Porter's about to be executed in Illinois and it wasn't a question of innocence. The courts all had found him guilty, but it was a question about his mental competence. He had like an IQ of 59. Was he mentally competent to be executed? Well, let's study this a little bit more. Do a stay of execution and a professor at Northwestern University gave them an assignment. Four students went to look into the case of Anthony Porter and I'm there talking to them. I said, "Well, what happened?" They said, "We just went to the town. We just started talking to people." They're journalism students. They're not lawyers. They said we just sort of talked to people and the next thing you know people all of them knew who the real murderer was and so they all went and in two weeks these journalism students unraveled the whole case of Anthony Porter and saved his life and it had been through all the courts and see, I used to think the courts were the place where everybody could come. Naive me. That everybody could come and everybody could just tell the truth. This is a chance where y'all get to tell the truth and I didn't know. I didn't know that it was about hoops and jumping through the hoops and who knew the legal thing and who didn't know the legal thing and what you got to say and what you didn't get to say, and I've accompanied five human beings to execution.

The last was Doby Williams in Louisiana, an African American man, again, with an IQ of 59 and found out a white woman had been killed in a little town in Louisiana, brutal terrible killing and they did a sweep of young black men in the town, Doby among them. No evidence of a confession but three police officers who were there said oh yeah, we all heard Doby confess. Incredible things. All white jury. Can you picture for one-half or one nanosecond that a white person in the United States of America could be on trial for their life and face an all black jury when they're accused of killing a black person. Can we picture it? Of course, we can't picture it. It's never going to happen. That's what Doby faced and I'm beginning to learn all this stuff. I'm beginning to learn it through Patrick Sonnier.

And after I visited him I figured out I'd go visit his brother. Making the drive to the prison I'd just as soon see both the brothers and this went on for several months and then one day I was thinking I didn't want to be naive about what they had done. I didn't feel it was my place to say to them tell me what you did. If they ever trusted me enough they would, and I had known them enough to know that they were worth more than the worst thing they'd done in their life, that there's good to people.

There's good to Betty Lou. Betty Lou Beets. When I go and meet those women, if you had the chance to go in that room and sit around that table with those women on death row, you can know what they did before you go in and you're going to look at those women and you're going to be with them and you're going to know deep down that there is more to human beings than the worst thing that they've ever done and that is part of our transcendence and that's part of our dignity and that's true of everybody sitting in here tonight because we had a screen here where we could project, including myself, the worst thing we ever did in our life up on that screen for everybody to see and the media would cover it and then be told that is all you are and we know that's not true and so it is with them. I knew that, but I didn't want to be naive. Go over to the Prison Coalition Office and said could I have some background information on the Sonnier case and they said sure and they were leaving that day.

I remember. I remember it really well because it was an October afternoon and the sun was coming through the window and this red slanted sun and they brought out a bunch of these manila folders and put them on the table and they were leaving and they said, "Look, Sister, when you leave, just close the door behind you" and I was alone and I opened up the folder and looked down into the faces of a paper called The Daily Iberian on the front page were the faces-- prom pictures -- of the two young teenage kids, David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque and they're smiling in their prom pictures and you hope when you see the picture that it's because they got some kind of award. What are kids doing on the front page of the paper? No. And you see the heavy, bold outlines, the headlines, saying teenagers found murdered and my heart exploded because it's like as I read the details of what happened to them, of how these two brothers that I was visiting and whose dignity I was trying to show, these two brothers had posed as security guards in a sugar cane field near a little lover's lane, near St. Martinville, Louisiana. Here were the teenagers. They'd done this with other teenage couples. Come up to the car. They got guns. They tell the kids they're trespassing. They tell the kids if the girl has sex with them they won't report them to the owners. The kids are scared. The kids are embarrassed. The kids go along. Five other teenage couples came out when Dave and Loretta were killed and said that's what those two men did to us--despicable stuff, and these two kids are found lying face down in the grass near the sugar cane field with bullet holes in the backs of their heads and I read it and now I know what happened to the victims.

Who doesn't feel the outrage that we feel when we hear this of innocent people, these young beautiful kids ripped out of life by an act like this? A wanton act, evil act, and the letters to the editors are pouring into that little newspaper in that little town. What kind of animal? What kind of scum would do this? We have to rid our society of people like this. Bring back the death penalty. All the rage of the community being vented in those letters. Of course. How could we not feel the outrage over that? These kids, and I feel it too, and the second thing I felt right on the heels of it was overwhelming guilt. I'm with them. I'm visiting the two kids who did this. I'm like consorting with the enemy. I've put myself on the seesaw like I'm going to see them and they think, whoa, these parents. This is every parent's worst nightmare and people sitting in here tonight and I know there must be people sitting in here tonight who have been through this. Marie Dean but other people whose faces I cannot see here in the darkness, but you are sitting here among us and you have been through this where you have had a loved one snatched way from you by this wanton act of violence like this and then when I think of the parents, I think maybe I ought to go see them and here's where I made the worst mistakes of my life.

It was a really bad mistake and it was done out of cowardice and it was done out of fear and it was done out of I don't want to go see those people. Those people could really be angry. I was picturing the headlines, nun shot on front porch going to visit. I was scared. I had never done anything like this before and it was cowardice. I began to pray for them but of course that wasn't enough simply to pray for people if you don't reach out to them and I met them. I met them at the worst possible time you want to meet a victim's family--at the pardon board hearing in Louisiana. It's the last public act before a person is executed and when people come into the room they sign the book as to which side they're on. It couldn't be more polarized. Are you for the state carrying out the execution, which is usually the side the victim's on. Not always. There are the Marie Dean’s of the world and the Bud Welch’s of the world whose daughter Julie was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing and the Marietta Yager’s of the world whose daughter was killed by a mad man on a camping trip in the Montana.

There are those people of murder victim's families for reconciliation but who cannot understand that the victim's family gets swept into this thing. The DA calls them, says we're going to get the death penalty for the death of your child. This is justice for your child and for them not to succumb to that. Of course, they carried along and so that's when I met the victims' families was at that pardon board hearing and it was while the pardon board was in there voting. We were outside. The Bourque family whose daughter had been killed was so angry at me. They saw me coming and they put their eyes down and they just walked past and right behind them was Lloyd LeBlanc and his wife Eula and their son David had been killed and I'm bracing myself because here they come and Lloyd LeBlanc comes right up to me and he says, "Sister, I'm Lloyd LeBlanc and this is my wife Eula. It was our son David who was killed, our only son. When they killed our son they snipped the branch off our family tree. We'll never have other children. We have a daughter Vicky," and I'm saying, "Oh, Mr. LeBlanc, I'm so sorry about your son." He says, "Sister, where you been? Why didn't you come see us." He says you can't believe the pressure I've been under with this death penalty. And I was so lame. I was so guilty. Cowardly. I just said "Oh, Mr. LeBlanc, I'm sorry, I didn't think you wanted to see me." And he says to me, and so help me I got his words chiseled on my forehead for the rest of my life from this man Lloyd LeBlanc because he said to me, in his little Cajun accent, real Frenchy, "My sister, but sister, may you don't know what I think unless you come to talk me and you find out" and I wanted to say, "but you don't know what a coward I am," and he took me by the hand.

He was the first murder victim's family that took me the hand and began to take me down the road and I tell his story in "Dead Man Walking" and he is the hero of "Dead Man Walking." An incredible story. I went to pray with them in this little chapel. In the end of film "Dead Man Walking," all the characters are composite and fictionalized. This character Earl Delacroix. His name means cross, trying to get out from the under the rock of the hatred and the revenge and the bitterness and it shows us praying together. Well, that came from Lloyd LeBlanc and going to this chapel to pray with them and I had never in my life knelt by the side of someone praying and having him pray for everybody. He prayed for his son that he would be at peace with God, prayed for his wife who had cried for three years day and night, prayed for Vicky, prayed for the grandchildren, prayed for the Bourque family who were having a lot of trouble with some of their sons and had undergone their murder of their child, and Mrs. Sonnier, Patrick and Eddie's mother, and Patrick and Eddie. He prayed for everybody and I'm going to find out from this man that when the sheriff's deputy brought him to the morgue to identify David's body and they pulled down his beautiful young son that everybody loved. They interviewed the kids at the high school after David got killed. Nobody could imagine who would want to kill David LeBlanc. Even the kindergarten kids loved him. He'd play with them and he looks down at his slain son and the prayer that comes to his lips was what he had learned as a child. Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name and when he came to the words in "Our Father," forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, he said those words and as he told me, "I knew the road Jesus wanted me to go down. I didn't feel it at first. I felt that bitterness and if I could get those guys with my bare hands, but I knew, didn't Jesus say, didn't he call us to forgive?"

And I got from him the best working definition of forgiveness I ever got. He said, people think forgiveness is weak, like you condone what they did. That you killed my kid. Oh, it's really okay. There's no way I condone what they did to our David, but he said, "If I don't deal with the hatred and bitterness inside of me, it's going to kill me. I've got to be there for Eula. I've got to be there for Vicky. I've got to be there for my family," and he started walking down the road that Jesus told him to walk down which was forgiveness and reconciliation and the grace of God met him on that road, so that when he was in the chapel with me to pray, he could pray for everybody and he went to visit Pat and Eddie Sonnier's mama before she died and he brought a basket of fruit and he said to Mrs. Sonnier, "None of us as parents ever really know what our kids might do. I don't hold you responsible for what your boys did to my boy." She died shortly after that and I meet him. I end the book with them because it's not just forgiving once. It's every time David has a birthday and imagining David as an adult man, standing at his back door with his children around his knees saying how you doing Daddy and having to give him up again and again and again. The last line of "Dead Man Walking" is that forgiveness was never going to be easy but each day it must be prayed for and struggled for and won, and people sitting in here today who have had loved ones killed and have chosen that road of reconciliation and forgiveness know far better than I because I've never been in this fire but they have of what I'm talking about and we have incredible witnesses in this country that you can call into your community to come and talk to you.

Bud Welch's daughter Julie, the last one they dug out of the rubble in Oklahoma City bombing. He wants to take Timothy McVeigh with his bare hands and then one day he's in the car and he turns on the car radio and he remembers Julie in the car, Julie sitting there when it came over the radio about an execution in Texas. Julie saying to him, "Dad, that's about nothing but vengeance," and knowing that the loving daughter that he raised and that he loved would not want the death of Timothy McVeigh and then he knew the road he had to go on and he was the only one that stood under the Survivor's Tree. If you ever go to Oklahoma City they have a tree called the Survivor's Tree because the blast killed every thing except this tree and they stand there for the media interviews and he stood before the nation and said "I don't want the death of Timothy McVeigh," and he said everybody treated him like he was a nut case and sometimes murder victim's families have people say to them, well, didn't you care about your daughter? Didn't you love your daughter? Because when society offers this and you don't go for it, is something lacking in you?

And through Lloyd LeBlanc. He was the first. I began to go to these meetings, these support group meetings for victim's families and then I really got the shock of my life. I knew death row inmates were pariahs that everybody wanted to kill. I didn't know victim's families were pariahs of another kind, but person after person was saying after the funeral nobody came to see us or when I try to bring up about my daughter who got killed, people changed the subject. They get very uncomfortable. They don't know how to deal with our pain and they stay away from us and every talk I give I hold up a model that those of who belong to faith communities need to reach out, not only to death row inmates but also to murder victim's families and when David and Loretta were killed, the bishop, Fry, of Lafayette began that year on the second Sunday of Advent before Christmas of having a mass, having a Eucharist, a prayer service, for all victims of violent crime and the bishop said the mass and it was a way of saying to victims to put the arms of the community around suffering victim's families and not leaving them alone and saying we care about you and we will accompany you and people flooded into this church and afterwards there was reception and out of that came support groups.

What if every place in Virginia where there's a church on a corner at least once a year, maybe more than once a year, that community reaches out his arms to victims of violence and people don't have to say when they come in the church what the violence is, that I was a victim of rape, I was a victim of incest, I was mugged, my daughter was murdered. People come in the arms of the community around them and you can pray together, because when you are isolated and alone it is so hard to heal and so why can we not do that?

And those of us who are people are faith--I think of the image of the cross. It's a symbol of execution and Jesus, the young man would've known very well going to Jerusalem seeing a thousand crosses at a time. That was the Romans anti-crime program that they had going real strong and Pontius Pilate the governor really carried it out and people were hung on these poles, sometimes tied, sometimes nailed, but whatever they had done against the state, that was the example they set. Don't think of messing with Rome. Kind of close to don't mess with Texas, almost. Or Virginia. When you used to have a bumper sticker that said "Virginia is For Lovers" which kind of had a ring to it [audience laughter] and now you can't say that because of the death penalty here and this cross, the early church, you look at the catacombs. They didn't dare use this as a symbol of Christianity following Jesus. They were so ashamed. There was such a stigma. They'd use the young shepherd or a fish symbol, but the cross, the symbol of execution. It took them 400 years before they could raise up that the cross was a symbol of redemption and we wear crosses. I see them in magazines decorated with jewels. People wear them as earrings like it's some kind of fashion statement and it's a symbol of execution and this cross has two arms and it's a challenge to us. It's a challenge to us morally because we live in a culture that sanctifies revenge. We sanctify it and on one arm of the cross is the murder victim who must not be left alone but must be accompanied and on the other arm if the cross is the death row inmate who has done an unspeakably horrible thing, but who is more than that and whom we want to respect their dignity and the change in the Catholic church recently and it's very connected to Joseph O'Dell in your state who was executed has to do with the coming to realize that being pro life means not just being pro innocent life but being pro guilty life, too.

Joseph O'Dell who was executed in July 1997 I got involved because Lori Urs is a young women who got involved with this case called me to do a press conference in Richmond and try to save Joseph's life. He was saying he was innocent. Virginia, of course, would not let him have the DNA test to prove his innocence. Still will not let a DNA test be done even though Joseph's been executed, and then you had an incredible thing happen and I don't know what it is with the people of Italy. Is it the pasta? I don't know what it is with the people of Italy, but somebody in the human rights commission in the Italian Parliament heard about Joseph O'Dell. The next thing you know coming into your state visiting the governor, visiting the prison, are floods of Italian Parliament people coming about Joseph O'Dell. All of Italy gets involved. They're having protests in St. Peter's Square. The Pope, everybody's going who's Joseph O'Dell? Who's Joseph O'Dell? If you go to Italy today, everybody knows who Joseph O'Dell is. The mayor of Palermo comes over to visit with Joseph O'Dell. Says, Joseph, he took on the Mafia like 10 years ago and he will be with bodyguards and his teenage kids who hate it, they can't even go out on a date without a bodyguard. I mean, it's got great costliness in his life because he took on the Mafia and stopped them in Palermo.

He comes over. He visits with Joseph O'Dell. He says, Joseph, if they kill you, Joseph, we will bury you in Palermo and what happened? Virginia killed Joseph O'Dell without a blink of the eye. Maybe you don't even remember it because there've been what, 79 executions in this state. You're right behind Texas, but the people of Italy shipped Joseph's body over to Palermo for burial and the Pope came out to see Lori Urs, the young woman, who had tried hard to save his life and contributing to that was a change in the Catholic catechism and it was largely through this case that the Pope got involved in, began to see it in a new way, because as faith communities we evolve morally. We grow in our awareness of things and I've never been to a funeral where someone was buried, and there was a huge crowd that assembled and all the media was there and when they lowered Joseph's body into that grave in Palermo there was huge applause from everybody there and they have a slab there today, if you ever go to Palermo, you get to read about the state of Virginia--to Joseph O'Dell, cruelly executed by the unjust system of the state of Virginia and it's in Italian and it's in English and people-- I get notes from people who said I put a flower on Joseph O'Dell's grave today.

Maybe he wasn't innocent. Maybe he really was guilty, but here's the moral question for us. What do we do about the guilty? Because everybody knows we shouldn't execute innocent people but what about when they're guilty? Can't we execute them? And when I told the story in "Dead Man Walking" and I take you through the execution of Patrick Sonnier and I take you through the execution of Robert Willie, I also take you through the story of the guards and the people on execution team that have to do the killing for us because when we're outraged by crime, and we say, well, man, they deserved to die. They deserve it. We've got to ask ourselves a question--who deserves the killing and we have to push ourselves on this. If I believe they should be executed, I've got to be willing to do it. Can I do it myself or do I have to hire somebody to do it for me and if there's a part of me that holds back, there's a part of my soul that hasn't said yes to this thing and I want you to know I have been doing this for 15 years and talking to audiences across this country, in season and out of season, and I know that a lot of good and decent people struggle with this issue, and we struggle with it because we're so outraged over the terrible crimes people do. That's part of it.

We don't know how the things really work and how selective it is and how political it is on the other hand, because political candidates have an easy symbol and they use it. When you have your campaign going and you've got 30 seconds, guess how you're going to show you're really tough on crime? And do you know, I have had politicians pull me aside and say to me, people like to break things down to nuns. They like to say, "Sister, come here. Let me explain" [audience laughter]. They do. They got a thing about that and I have had politicians pull me aside and say to me, "Look, Sister, it's not like personally I'm really for the death penalty but my opponent had a lot of money and he would've blown me out of the water with negative campaigning if I had said I was against the death penalty. Soft on crime. Soft on crime, so what I did was I said I'm for the death penalty. I went in there right with him. I got elected. Now, I'm going to do some good things" and that is across the board. That is the across the board in this country with very few exceptions is because they're scared. They're scared to not be for it.

How do we change that? The only way change is ever coming in this country is when the people awaken. How did slavery change? It was a time when it was 70% of this country supported slavery. You could go into the city square and see a slave being flogged and the blood coming from their back and have somebody say to you, they don't feel things the way we do. It was part of our life. How did it change?

I gave a talk at Newport Beach in California and when we had questions from the audience, a young man stood up. He said my name is Richard Stowe and my great-great-grandmother was Harriet Beecher Stowe and she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and everybody in the audience applauded. Uncle Tom's Cabin--it was the first time a book was written that talked about the humanness and the suffering of slaves and the churches were involved. The Christian churches are preaching from the pulpit quoting St. Paul, slaves obey your masters and the scriptures are always quoted in this moral issue because you can go through the Bible and you can be very, very selective.

An eye for an eye is mentioned three times in the Bible, one time by Jesus saying you've heard it said an eye for an eye, but I'll say to you, mercy is mentioned over 2,000 times. Guess what's quoted? [audience laughter] and when I'm on these radio talk shows and they say we will now open the phones to our callers, I'll fasten my seat belt and get ready [audience laughter] because when the caller comes in and says, the Lord God says-- I know they're only going to quote the Lord God one way. They're going to go page 5, skip over to 500 and there're 37 different crimes in the Hebrew testament for which you can get the death penalty. They didn't have alternative prisons. The nomadic code of Moses of the book of Exodus and Leviticus. You think they got a little, while they're going through the desert, a little cart on wheel would say prison, little bars, and they take turns pulling it [audience laughter]. You stole, you had your hand cut off, and of course, much harder on women than on men. Adultery, the women got the death penalty. Where are the men? Not too, too different than some of our laws, and it's like there were 37 different crimes and so to hear these people come, these callers on the radio saying as the Lord God said, and I go, well, wait, why are you just quoting the thing on if you shed blood, you shall have blood shed. Well, what about for blasphemy? What about sassing a priest? What about touching sacred objects? What about homosexuality? What about adultery? Oh, well, we're more civilized than that now [audience laughter] Right! Right!

Because, and here's what I've discovered, and I've been at this awhile. I've been in a lot of debates. When you're having a debate when somebody, who does not want, excuse me, but to quote God [audience laughter]. As a minister one time said, as the Lord has said in scripture, and rightly so [audience laughter] and like Will Campbell, the Baptist guy, they threw him out of the church. He was against the death penalty, said, it's biblical quarterbacking. You toss me your quote, I'm going to toss you mine. They bring Jesus in there too. Oh, excuse me, a quote from Jesus about why I want the death penalty. Yes, as Jesus said, those who live by the sword die by the sword. People don't look at context. They don't look at the Biblical story. These are proof texts. Grab your proof text and throw it in and let's have God weigh in on my side in this debate and it's the easiest thing in the world to do.

And when we had slavery they did it. When we had the whole debate going on in this country about whether or not we're going to be able to trust women to vote. Women? Whom we all know are emotional and go into hysterics and like have their periods and do crazy things [audience laughter]. Trust them in the voting booth? Guess where the quotes are flying hot and heavy. Hot and heavy, out of the Garden of Eden and Eve tempting and how we're going to trust them with the quote-I mean with the vote? [audience laughter]

And the death penalty isn’t any different. And what we have to weigh is what side are we on. Can we be for life and can we be for death? Well that kind of divides life into absolutes, doesn’t it? With the book of Deuteronomy, the Lord said, "Look, I’ve set before you death and life. Choose life." And tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, led by the city council here in Charlottesville, Virginia, who have had the courage to light that little beacon on the hill, first moratorium. How about this moratorium? Let’s stop killing while we look at the death penalty and see if it is the road we want to come down. And you’ve got to know, internationally the whole movement is away from the death penalty. I was in Geneva at the U.N. commission on human rights, and I witnessed with my own eyes countries from the former Soviet Union coming up to the microphone, lining up for a moratorium on the death penalty. And the U.S., as they say in prison, stuck out, holding up the death penalty, refusing a moratorium with China, and Iran, and Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and uncomfortable-really uncomfortable. And we need to be uncomfortable. We know we have a vulnerable flight where we stand up before the world and talk about democracy and human rights. We know on this one we don’t have it. And we get exposed all over the place. At first there is moral disequilibrium before there is change. And we have that on our side. Every time the U.S. is in these international circles, there are 185 member nations of the U.N., and close to 100 of them now are moving toward abolition or a moratorium on the death penalty. It’s going to keep increasing, because the movement of the world and the consciousness is about human rights. Articles 3 and 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights state that human beings have the right to life and shouldn’t be killed. And article five: no human being should be subjected to cruel and degrading punishment and torture. And who’s going to tell me that executing a human being, even by the most "humane" method, is a humane thing to do in that torture sound wall? Because the five people I’ve accompanied to execution-including Joseph O'Dell–they all have the same nightmare that you and I would too if we were held in a place and told, "On a certain date, we’re going to kill you."

Human beings have an imagination and a consciousness. And a nightmare, which we can’t control, and our unconscious comes–"They’re coming to get me. They’re coming to drag me from my cell. Tonight’s the night. They’re taking me to the execution chamber." Do you think it matters a whole lot if I’m going to be strapped down so drugs can stop my heart and lungs, or I’m going to be shot, or I’m going to be gassed, or whatever the physical method is? Electrocution? I’m being strapped down against my will and I am being killed. That’s torture. And I’m going to say to you, "We are not worthy of this. This is not who we are as good and decent people." Let’s choose a road of life, with the beacon led by this city council, and these the people who live in courage. And it’s beginning to happen now; you can see little beacons of light beginning to happen around the country.

Outside waiting for you when we leave here tonight is the book Dead Man Walking, that I want to encourage you to get. When you buy it, it helps the moratorium campaign, which we are working on not only in the United States, but in other countries. There are two million signatures already coming from Europe, and we are building them up here in the United States. And to sign that moratorium petition when you know where you are on this issue, and it means a personal commitment on your part that you know where you stand. Then if you put an asterisk by your name, the moratorium committee is going to send you a blank petition and you can begin to get other people to sign it. And all those petitions sent into the central office of the moratorium campaign are going to be sent back here into Virginia, to Amnesty International, to Virginians for an Alternative to the Death Penalty, to all the people who have been working long and hard in this state, before they had the city council lighting the beacon, to educate the people here, because they know that they want this alternative for Virginia. And I want to invite you to do that. And when you come to the books of Dead Man Walking, the reason I want to invite you to get it, is not because I’m trying to push my book-I don’t need to push my book–It’s because that book is going to be able to take you on a journey (and other people you know) in a quiet, private place, and it is going to give you information, and it’s going to be able to help you to sort out the ambivalence that you may still feel on this issue. Some of the books are already signed. When you go out into the lobby–the table facing you–all of the books are signed. I’ll be sitting across if you want to get your book personalized. And I’ll stay here as long as you want to stay here and sign those books for you because I know that each one of those books is a little seed that can help people get through this journey, because you are not going to have any other way of seeing it, you are not going to have any other way of being there, unless somebody will take you there. I know that’s my job. I know that’s my witness. That’s my mandate. I’ve been there. I carry the faces inside me of five human beings, and their families who have suffered and who have died. I carry inside me the faces of the murder victim’s families. And to be faithful and truthful to what I have seen, if this is what I must do, until finally we change this thing–and we are. You got to know this: we are going to change it. One time Archbishop Desmond Tutu was talking, he said," We didn’t know how in the world we were ever going to change apartheid. And you never know when waves keep hitting, and waves keep hitting, and waves keep hitting, and one day the wall falls. We are going to end the death penalty, and it’s because of good people like you who don’t need this thing, who don’t want this thing, and are going to help it change tonight.

And I invite you tonight, if you know where you are on this already, to sign that petition. And if you don’t know where you are and you are still sorting it out, I’ll respect that. Cause it’s a deep thing, a hard thing. But you can sort it out. Get the information you need to sort it out so that you can take a strong stand for life. [looking at watch] I don’t know what I did with time here. I think I blew it a little bit, huh? How are we doing? [let’s open it up for questions] Ok, look, let’s do at least five minutes of questions and don’t waste time. Just get up there and talk, ok? And then we’ll go out there into the lobby, and I hope you’ll get a book and I hope you will sign the petition.