PERRYSBURG – In a presentation mixing gravity with flashes of humor, Sr. Helen Prejean brought a message
of awareness and action against the death penalty to the Owens Community College Mainstage Theatre
Tuesday night.
Prejean, a Catholic nun of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, is perhaps best known as the author of
"Dead Man Walking," a book chronicling her experiences in the early 1980s as spiritual advisor
to Patrick Sonnier, a death row inmate in Angola State Prison in her native Louisiana. The book spawned
the 1995 film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. Sarandon won the 1996 best actress Oscar for her
portrayal of Prejean.
Prejean began her talk by discussing the "miracle" of the film’s production.
"The book wanted to go into the lap of Susan Sarandon," she said. Sarandon was a major force in
getting the film made. Following the Oscars, the book was on the New York Times Bestseller list for
about 31 weeks, she said, noting that she later told the film’s writer and director, Tim Robbins
"The movie plows the ground and the book tills the soil."
She said that, when she first became a nun in the 1950s and began teaching middle school she never
thought she would "go to death row." Indeed, she early-on was resistant to nuns working for
social justice with the poor "and I didn’t get it."
It was after attending – reluctantly – a three-day talk on the subject by a nun in Terra Haute that her
mind was changed.
"What poverty does is it lessens your choices" and strips them down, she said.
"You don’t have a way to exercise your constitutional freedoms."
Prejean’s relationship with Sonnier began in 1981 when a friend at the Louisiana Prison Coalition asked
her if she would like to be a pen pal with someone on death row. She agreed.
"I never dreamed they were going to kill this person," she said of her naivete at the time.
God is sneaky, Prejean said, noting that she never expected that the experience would change her life, or
that two years later Sonnier would be killed before her eyes. Their letters evolved into visits with him
at the prison, and she became his spiritual advisor. She said she was shocked when she first met him.

"I couldn’t believe how human his face was."
"I remember thinking to myself ‘I have met a human being,’" saying that she knew that he was
worth more than the worst thing he had ever done.
Meeting with Lloyd LeBanc, the father of David LeBanc, one of the teenagers killed by Sonnier and his
brother, also taught her the pressures and pain that the families of victims themselves can be under due
to the death penalty. LeBanc, she said, was against the death penalty, but was told by others that if he
was against it, he didn’t love his son. Families of victims, she said later, can be greatly affected by
the delaying of closure in death penalty cases, because the executions can be held off for decades.
Four states – New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and recently Illinois – have passed legislation banning
the death penalty, but " ’til the people get involved, ’til the people write letters," the
same thing won’t happen in Ohio.
"I’ve been to the killing chamber in Texas, and yours isn’t any different."
During her talk, Prejean noted that 149 innocent people have thus far been freed from death row by the
Innocence Project, and that Ohio is second only to Texas in executions.
"Because of democracy, all of our names are on that gurney," she said.
"If in a democracy you have never raised your voice" or been in opposition to what the state is
doing in your name, silence is complicity, said Prejean later.
Among those in the audience at the presentation was Lynne Brand, niece of Lloyd LeBlanc. During a
question period following Prejean’s talk she stood and thanked her for her ability to help her uncle and
other family members.
After her talk, reacting to news from an Associated Press report that Ohio will soon be using
phenobarbital in lethal injections – a drug used by, among others, veterinarians in pet euthanasia, as
well as an anesthetic in surgeries – because of the scarcity of drug previously used, Prejean called the
situation "appalling."