Dead Man Walking

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Dead Man Walking

Photograph

By: Anonymous

Date: 1995

Source: "Dead Man Walking." MGM, 1995.

About the Photographer: This image is part of the photo library at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a prominent American media company. Founded in 1924, MGM is a Hollywood-based producer and distributor of films and television programs.

INTRODUCTION

Sister Helen Prejean was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in April 1939. She joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille at the age of eighteen and later settled in New Orleans, where she devoted her life to working among its poor. In 1981 she began her prison ministry, also serving on the board of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty between 1985 and 1995. It was for this work that Prejean would become most widely recognized.

Prejean published Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in 1993, an account of her relationship with Patrick Sonnier, who was executed in April 1984. Hitherto a petty criminal, Sonnier had been convicted of the 1977 rape and double murder of David Leblanc and Loretta Ann Bourque, a high school couple, in Iberia Parish, Louisiana. His brother, Eddie James Sonnier, had also been found guilty, but his death sentence was later reduced to life without parole.

Patrick Sonnier began a correspondence with Prejean in 1982, and the nun eventually became his spiritual adviser. It was this relationship that formed the basis of Dead Man Walking, although far from being exclusively about Sonnier or the story of his redemption, it was a more philosophical reflection on the societal impact of the death penalty. According to Prejean it was a "sustained meditation on love, criminal violence, and capital punishment. In a larger sense, it is about life and death itself. Are we here to persecute our brothers or bring compassion into a world that is cruel without reason?"

Her book became an international bestseller and catapulted Prejean to international fame. Dead Man Walking was on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-one weeks and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was also translated into ten different languages.

In 1994, Susan Sarandon and her partner Tim Robbins bought the film rights to Dead Man Walking, which was released a year later to popular acclaim. The film closely followed the book, although certain details were fictionalized. Robbins wrote and directed it, while Sarandon played Prejean. Sean Penn played Matthew Poncelot, a character based on Patrick Sonnier. It was nominated for four Oscars at the 1996 Academy Awards Ceremony, including best director, best actor, and best actress. Sarandon collected the latter award.

PRIMARY SOURCE

DEAD MAN WALKING

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

Dead Man Walking was the latest in a series of critically and commercially successful films that brought marginalized political issues into mainstream public debate. Just as Mississippi Burning (1988) tackled racism in the south, Philadelphia (1993) highlighted prejudice against homosexuals in corporate America, or The Shawshank Redemption (1994) dealt with the brutality of America's prison system, so too did Dead Man Walking bring capital punishment to public attention. Yet while each of these films heightened public interest in issues that were previously widely disregarded, it was not matched by a clamor for legislative change that followed, for instance, the nineteenth century plays Ten Nights in a Barroom (prohibition), Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery), or Harper Lee's 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (segregation). Indeed from 1993, the year Helen Prejean's book was first published, the number of death penalties carried out has risen dramatically, roughly doubling.

Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon had long been among Hollywood's most outspoken campaigners on social issues and were well known for their liberal views. Dead Man Walking was widely regarded as a statement against the death penalty, although that view disregarded the film's inherent subtlety. Several reviewers wrote of being undecided on where Robbins stood on the death penalty, such was the emotional neutrality he took in directing it.

Nevertheless, Dead Man Walking heightened the position of Robbins and Sarandon as the so-called conscience of Hollywood. Over subsequent years they used their standpoint to speak out on issues ranging from animal rights to domestic violence. In 2002 and 2003, they were among President George W. Bush's most vocal and fervent critics when he led the United States into war in Iraq, views that were acclaimed and derided by the American public in equal measure.

The film release of Dead Man Walking changed Sister Helen Prejean's life too. Already globally famous after the publication of her international bestseller, Sarandon's immortalization of her on film made her the world's leading opponent of capital punishment. Her crusade against the death penalty has come to incorporate many facets, and she has sought to learn from the experiences of not just the criminal, but victims and their families, and even executioners. One of her more contended arguments is that the effect of capital punishment on the men who administer it is as destructive as it is on the individual sentenced to death.

Since his election in 2000, President Bush has been among Prejean's principal targets. During his six years as Texas governor Bush presided over 152 death penalties and scrutiny of the way justice was carried out in Texas has suggested that justice was sometimes applied unfairly and that Bush was less than diligent in the way in which he dealt with appeals for clemency. Prejean has accused Bush of using execution as a tool to boost his political fortunes and of "callous indifference to human suffering." He had, she wrote in the New York Review of Books, "no quality of mercy."

Such attacks have continued to win her admirers, but she has also been the target of criticism and vitriol. Advocates of the death penalty and some victims groups have made her the target of letter-writing campaigns and protests to her archdiocese. She has also been verbally abused by supporters of the death penalty.

While Sister Helen Prejean attracted considerable and widening support following the success of her book and her depiction in film, America seems no more likely to end its use of capital punishment. The death penalty "isn't and never will be [acceptable] because of what it does to us," she told Time magazine in 2005. "There's a death of innocence in all of us … I say, for our own sake as a society, let's take death off the table. We can't handle it."