Sister Helen Prejean: Granting clemency to death row inmates is "what we have to do"

“What’s the news?” Sister Helen Prejean asked a reporter Tuesday afternoon as she stepped outside a Lower Ninth Ward cathedral, where an international film crew had interviewed her for hours without reprieve.

Louisiana’s most prominent death-penalty abolitionist had not yet heard: Attorneys with the New Orleans-based Capital Appeals Project made a historic request that morning, filing clemency applications for 51 of the 57 people on the state’s death row.

Yet her eyes conveyed no surprise behind her tortoiseshell glasses.

“It’s what we have to do,” she said.

Prejean, an 84-year-old Congregation of St. Joseph nun who lives in New Orleans, has advocated for more than four decades to eliminate capital punishment. She has been an outspoken voice against the practice in criminal trials, educational campaigns and non-fiction books, and has served as a spiritual adviser to men sentenced to die.

Louisiana has executed 28 people since 1976, the year the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.

Prejean has walked six of them to their deaths.

The first was Elmo Patrick Sonnier.

‘Mine was the last face he saw’

In 1978, an Iberia Parish jury convicted Sonnier and his brother, Eddie, of killing a teenaged couple, after raping the 17-year-old girl.

Guards strapped Sonnier six years later to the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s oak electric chair. Prejean, his spiritual adviser, watched from the witness room as 1,900 volts of electricity bolted through Sonnier’s body and smoke wafted from his left leg. “Mine was the last face he saw,” said Prejean.

The experience sparked Prejean into activism.

“I came out, threw up and my whole life was changed,” she said. “I didn't know how. But I knew I had been a witness. People were nowhere close to seeing this and what it meant. And I had tell the story.”

Prejean later wrote a book about Sonnier and another man, Robert Lee Willie, whom she also watched die in Gruesome Gertie, the nickname for the state’s electric chair. “Dead Man Walking” — and the 1995 Oscar-winning movie by the same name, in which Susan Sarandon stars as Prejean — put the nun on a national stage.

If he were alive today, Prejean believes Sonnier would have gladly joined Tuesday’s organized effort for clemency. People on death row are not allowed to work, but “he always had said, ‘I can work,’” Prejean said. “His whole wish was that he could have worked at Angola, driven one of the farm machines, because he knew how to work.”

Decades removed from Sonnier’s death, Prejean wore a reminder of him Tuesday: a silver cross looped onto a black string. The necklace was a gift from Eddie Sonnier, who sold his plasma so that he could afford to pay another incarcerated man to make it. It was a thank-you present “for being with his brother, Pat, during his execution,” Prejean said.

Today, Prejean leads Ministry Against the Death Penalty, a nonprofit housed in an apartment steps from Liuzza’s by the Track. Through it, she continues to speak and write, “to bring people closer to the reality of this,” she said.

Dignity in death

One of the 51 people requesting clemency is Manuel Ortiz, a El Savodoran native convicted in the 1992 murder-for-hire slaying of his wife, Tracie Williams Ortiz, and another woman, Cheryl Mallory in Kenner.

Prejean is Ortiz’s spiritual adviser. She has made the five-hour roundtrip drive to the state penitentiary in Angola once a month to see him for the last 20 years.  

She believes, wholeheartedly, he is innocent.

“He’s the seventh person I’ve taken on death row, and he’s the third innocent one,” Prejean said, gesticulating, her hands as passionate as her mind. “That’s how broken this thing is.”

The Louisiana Supreme Court has upheld Ortiz's convictions, and in 2013, reinstated his death sentence after a two-year reprieve.

Ortiz will appear in Prejean’s next book, which she is writing now: “Beneath Our Dignity,” will be about “we the people are shutting down the death penalty,” Prejean said. 

The clemency applications will next be reviewed by the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole. Edwards will have an opportunity to grant requests that the board approves.

If Prejean could speak with Edwards, she said, “I would talk to him as a fellow Catholic, about the dignity of all life.

“Dignity is not just for people who are innocent,” she said. “And to strap a person down — to render them completely defenseless — and kill them, what kind of dignity is in that death? We don't have to do this be safe.”