The nun who took on America

The USA's death penalty hits cinema screens throughout Britain this week. Cecilia Bromley-Martin investigates the work of the Catholic nun which inspired Dead Man Walking AREN'T THERE some rights fundamental to human beings such as the right not to be tortured or killed that everyone, including governments, must respect?
The question comes from Sr Helen Prejean, America's most outspoken and controversial nun, and is the driving force behind her life's work fighting for the abolition of the death penalty.
Her book, Dead Man Walking, charters the deep and compassionate friendships she has forged with two convicted murderers on Death Row, from when they first made contact by letter, until she witnesses their terrible deaths in the electric chair. It recently spent two weeks at No 1 in the New York Times Best Seller List, has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and is now the inspiration behind a new Hollywood film of the same name.
Susan Sarandon plays Sr Helen, while Sean Penn gives a devastating performance as a defiant, remorseless killer a combination of the two reallife murderers Sr Helen befriended. The director, Tim Robbins, deliberately steered clear of the typical Hollywood glamorisation of "the bad guy": "I don't have any romanticised notion of criminals. I wanted to show him for what he was; ... a mean person, and almost unredeemable."
Consequently, while the book is unremitting in its compassion, understanding and love (and leaves the reader more than doubtful about the culpability of the first of the two men executed), the film is angrier: Sr Helen is caught up with "Matt", rather than willingly involved; his crime and the suffering he caused are focused on at the expense of his remorse; flashes of the murders, in stark black and white, recur throughout in case we start to sympathise with the killer and we see the crime in its fullest and most explicit detail during the execution itself. A subliminal reminder that he deserves everything he is getting.
Yet the whole motive behind the original book was to make a stand against the death penalty. An attempt to show that, however vile and indefensible the crime, we have no right to take another person's life. Although lethal injection is used in the film, Sr Helen's experiences are with the electric chair, and she incorporates many graphic and disturbing details about the history of America's death penalty. She takes the reader through the mental and emotional torture of the condemned and is adamant that the electric chair has never been the quick and painless death we would love to convince ourselves it is quoting numerous first-hand descriptions to back her point "The current had been passing through his body for 15 seconds when the electrode at the head was removed. Suddenly the breast heaved. There was a straining at the straps which bound him. A purplish foam covered the lips and was spattered over the leather head band. The man was alive.
"Everybody lost their wits. There was a startled cry for the current to be turned on again... An odor of burning flesh and singed hair filled
the room, for a moment, a blue flame played about the base of the victim's spine. This time the electricity flowed four minutes..." That was in the New World newspaper in 1890. A century later, and the executioners are still far from perfecting the process: The 1985 electrocution of Indiana's William Vandiver took 17 minutes, and required five charges of electricity, while in 1983, "smoke and flame erupted" from the temple and leg of John Louis Evans "but the man was still alive".
Yet her horror of capital punishment and her utter commitment to its abolition never blinker Sr Helen to the murderers' crimes; indeed,
she is consistently open about the intense horror, grief and disbelief she feels at learning the extent of these men's grotesque deeds, and is more than capable of understanding the victims' families' desperate need to see the "animals" die. Of Robert Willie, her second case, she writes: "I recoil at the thought of him. How dare he calmly read law books and concoct arguments in his defense? He should fall on his knees, weeping, begging forgiveness from these parents. He should spend every moment of his life repenting his heinous deed." But it is for God to choose who lives and dies, and she can never condone a state's decision to make that choice for Him.
Dead Man Walking (a title which echoes "the words San Quentin guards used to yell when a Death Row inmate was let out of his cell") has received international acclaim. This week, Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for best actress, the film has been nominated for four Academy Awards, and is the first winner of a new Templeton Prize for "inspiring movies and television".
Meanwhile, the University of Notre Dame has awarded its 1996 Laetare Medal to Sr Helen Prejean. With previous winners including President Kennedy, it is awarded annually to a Catholic "whose genius has ennobled the Arts and Sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity".
Although many abolitionists were unhappy at the film's failure to contain enough arguments against the death penalty, they are using its publicity constructively. "We're realising that hitting people over the head with our arguments doesn't work. Our main strategy now is to work for open dialogue," said the programme coordinator of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Ricardo Villalobos. "Largely due to the movie, but also because of some of the executions occuring, this is our year."