Dead Man Walking

Helen PrejeanNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1993

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-11

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Key Figures

Helen Prejean, C. S. J. (The Author)

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to violent crime. It also contains references to the execution of prisoners.

Helen Prejean is an American nun, author, and activist, best known for her work opposing the death penalty in the United States. She gained a public profile with the 1993 publication of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, which chronicles her experiences with capital punishment in Louisiana and the many injustices she discovered in its application. The Oscar-winning 1995 film of the same name bolstered her profile even further, and she has been one of the best-known death penalty abolitionists in the US ever since.

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Born in Baton Rouge in 1939, she joined the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Medaille at the age of 18. After receiving a Bachelor’s in English and Education and a Master’s in Religious Education, she spent many years as a teacher. In 1982, while working at a housing project in New Orleans, she accepted an offer to exchange letters with a death-row inmate. By her own admission, she had thought little of the issue of capital punishment up until this point. Shocked and outraged by a system that she viewed as tilted against the poor, especially those who are Black and poor, she took on the role of spiritual advisor for many inmates, not only seeking to bring them solace as they approached their scheduled death, but also seeking all available legal means to postpone or even avoid their execution.

The 1993 publication of Dead Man Walking publicized Prejean’s work, and ever since she has been a routinely sought-after speaker and activist. Prejean has appeared on 60 Minutes, ABC World News Tonight, and The Dr. Phil Show. She is also a frequent guest speaker at universities. She has written several books, including The Death of Innocents (2004), which chronicles a series of cases where there is strong evidence that wrongfully convicted men were put to death, and a memoir, River of Fire (2019), which chronicles both her activism and her personal faith journey. In 2018, shortly after a meeting with Prejean, Pope Francis I announced that the Catholic Church was now categorically opposed to capital punishment in all cases.

Elmo Patrick Sonnier

“Pat” Sonnier, a native of St. Martinsville, Louisiana, who was born on February 21st, 1950, was the first death row convict to have Sister Helen Prejean as a spiritual advisor in the leadup to his execution. By his own account, he grew up in abject poverty, frequently switching between the custody of his divorced parents and therefore rarely staying in the same school system for long. Dropping out of school after the eighth grade, he worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and then later earned a Commercial Driver’s License, which he said was his favorite work.

Sonnier also claims to have been first arrested at the age of nine for various low-level offenses. He also spoke about having problems with women in his young adulthood, living with several girlfriends but always ending on bad terms. He had one daughter, Star, but he had few opportunities to meet her before she went into foster care. In 1977, Pat and his brother Eddie had been harassing couples at a local lover’s lane, pretending to be police and then handcuffing, robbing, and assaulting the victims. On November 4th of that year, an assault on David LeBlanc and Loretta Ann Borque ended in the rape of Borque and the murder of both. Previous victims led the police to the brothers. Pat was sentenced to death while his brother Eddie was sentenced to life in prison without parole, although there was controversy as to which of the brothers had really pulled the trigger. In 1982, Pat began a correspondence with Sister Helen Prejean, initiating what for Prejean would be several decades of advocacy against the death penalty. However, her efforts to commute Sonnier’s sentence fell short—possibly due to corruption on the Pardon Board—and Sonnier was executed on April 5, 1984. His burial in a Catholic cemetery met with public outcry.

Robert Lee Willie

Born in Mandeville, Louisiana, on January 2nd, 1958, Willie’s life was tied up with the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) practically from birth, when his father was convicted of aggravated burglary (he would later serve a life sentence for second degree murder). By his own account, Willie was frequently in fights with people who taunted him for being the son of a convict. His mother divorced his father shortly thereafter, and given a tense relationship between him and his new stepfather, Willie had an itinerant childhood passing through the houses of various family members. He did find some employment, enjoying his work as an oyster diver, but he developed substance abuse problems at a very young age, which put him in frequent trouble with the law.

Willie would claim that the influence of drugs led him and his accomplice, Joseph Vaccaro, to kidnap, rape, and murder 18-year-old Faith Hathaway just before her departure for the US Army. He and Vaccaro then went on a multi-state spree of kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder. After his arrest, Willie stoked a villainous image in the public eye, taunting his surviving rape victims as well as Hathaway’s parents. He professed to an interviewer his admiration for Adolf Hitler. In late 1984, he accepted Sister Helen Prejean as a spiritual advisor, and while she lobbied hard for a commutation to life without parole, she recognized it was a difficult case, with Willie’s own father publicly calling for his execution. He was put to death by the electric chair on December 28th, 1984, at the age of 26.