By Roxanne Stites
Record Staff
Writer
Sister Helen Prejean challenged a packed audience at University of the Pacific on Friday evening to visit with death row inmates as she has.
To talk to them, as she has. To look
into their eyes and hear their stories. Then, to again question whether capital
punishment should exist.
She said it would then be difficult to still wish death on that person.
Prejean delivered an impassioned address to 400 Stocktonians who packed a campus theater to hear the nun talk about her experiences counseling death row inmates, then being present when they died.
She has been to five such executions.
Prejean, an opponent of the death penalty and nominee for the 1998 and 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, is most noted for her book "Dead Man Walking," which was adapted into a motion picture in 1996 starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon.
The book has since been translated into 10 languages, and the San Francisco Opera Company is now directing an opera based on it.
The continued attention is exactly what Prejean wants.
At the UOP address, there were petitions available for those opposed to the death penalty.
Prejean's journey into the social and political issue of capital punishment began in 1982, when she agreed to be a pen pal for a man who was sitting on death row. At the time, Prejean said, she had no idea she would continue the relationship and ultimately watch him die in the electric chair.
She said she was appalled by what she saw, and has spent every year thereafter struggling with the segregation of society, whether it be by race or income.
She began to look at the numbers of those on death row vs. the number who commit murders and questions the selective nature of who is sentenced to die and who instead spends life in prison.
"Once you have the death penalty as an option, it's tremendous pressure on the prosecutors and the jury to give them the death penalty," Prejean said, "because there are all those suffering families if they do less than that."
"It's like they're disrespecting the families," she added.
A jury is weighing whether a Stockton man should be put to death. Louis Peoples was convicted of killing four people and injuring a fifth in a three-week crime spree. Now, a jury has to decide whether he should die.
"It sounds like it will be something of a miracle if it doesn't because of all these dynamics and pressures," she said of the Peoples case.
However, this doesn't mean she doesn't feel for the victims' families.
"I've thought that if somebody killed my mother, killed my sister, my niece, I know there would be a part of me that would want to see that person die," she said. "Now, hopefully, I wouldn't stay there."
Prejean also formed a victims family support group in New Orleans.
Earlier in the day Friday, Prejean was one of four panelists who spoke to about 100 university students in a 90-minute discussion about "vocation and social justice."
The panelists also included a county supervisor and instructors. They encouraged the students to broaden their educations and their lives by pursuing something meaningful.
"Finish school, get a degree, get your feet stable, then give back to the community," San Joaquin County Supervisor Dario Marenco said. "When you touch people's lives, it also changes you."
Sabrina Mahil, 18, said she took their advice to heart. While she plans to go into dentistry, she hopes to volunteer some of her services to the poor.
"Everybody has a purpose, and they have a certain goal they'd like to reach," she said. "This is what I want to do."
