Sister Helen

0:01For our last episode of the year, we wanted to share one of my favorite conversations, which we recorded back in January of 2021.

0:12Sister Helen Prejean:Are you in New Orleans? Yeah, I am. How is New Orleans today? It's fine, from what I can see from my house. You know, New Orleans is New Orleans. It's a great city. we're doing all right but I gotta tell you Phoebe we just my little brother just died yesterday he got COVID oh I'm sorry yeah he had a lot of underlying conditions he was 76 so he just it's just a terrible disease and you know we're Louisiana we love people love being with each other And, you know, you can just see how people get it because they want to have these gatherings and people, you know, drop their guard and it spreads. And I think that's maybe how he got it anyway.

1:05But I'm at peace with it because he would have hit such a terrible road if he had made it through. And so I'm glad God took him. You said you've been around death for a long time or at certain moments. Is it any easier for you to mourn someone or accept death now that you've seen it and seen it in such a public way, but also in a private way with your own family? Yeah, well, private, of course, is your flesh and blood, your heart. His soul, you know. And it, mother, father, sister, brother, I used to set the table for five. And now it's me. And it's really, it's kind of in a way too big to get a hold of.

2:04There was this little kid in the St. Thomas housing projects. A reporter was interviewing him. there'd been another shooting in the projects here in New Orleans. And so the interviewer was talking to the kid. He's probably like about eight. And just trying to see how this all was impacting his life. And at one point in the interview, the kid said, I'm too young to understand this. Well, I'm 81, and I'm too young to understand this. this huge mystery, is that we all die, and I've seen so many die. There's a part of me, I can go through the whole ritual of it, but to take it in, and that I'm going to die.

2:52That's what's impossible. Everybody dies but me, you know, that feeling. So it's just a big old mystery, and what I'm thrown back on is Louis lives inside me, now my little brother, and then moving over into the public sphere of the six human beings that I've accompanied to execution. And what you do, what I do with death is I'm alive. I want to live my life to the full as authentically as I can. I want to live in the reality that death is part of it, but to live. because death can just punch you in the stomach and knock the wind out. You know, it just knocks the joy of life, the desire. You're stunned in a way.

3:43And then it, like, comes back, and you go, it's a new day. And just from being alive as a human being, existential way of putting it is, the truth is I'm alive, and I want to live, and I want to live authentically, and I want to live to the full. And that, to me, is what it leaves me with is this mandate to live and to live fully, which means to love as fully as I can. And when it comes to loving in the criminal justice system, it means working really hard for justice and for people's voices to be heard. I wonder if you'd mind introducing yourself. Yeah, I'd like to say about time. I would have stopped you, but I like to hear you talk.

4:36So I just said, well, we'll get her name later. Nothing like drinking from a fire hose, okay? I'm Sister Helen Prejean. I'm a sister of St. Joseph, a Catholic nun. When Sister Helen Prejean was young, she declared that she would either grow up to be the president or the pope. Instead, when she was 18, she became a nun. A fellow nun once described her as a hurricane. She's 81. Do you think that you are the most famous nun in America? What does that word famous mean? A lot of people know your name? Yeah, probably. I would say, yeah, if that's what that means. Because I've been out there so much.

5:27I guess I got street cred because I've been in it 30-something years. And I do speaking. I'm not traveling anymore because of COVID. But I'm Zooming my blooming head off. I mean, because you can still talk and be present to groups. And so I'm doing a lot of that. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

5:54Tell me a little bit about your life before you became known a nun. Where did you grow up? Grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Daddy believed in traveling, his education. So we'd head out of Louisiana for a month, six weeks, all across the United States, Canada, Europe too. And the thing in the family car, maybe you can picture it, The kid's in the back seat. He's getting a little restless. People start jabbing each other. And there goes Mom in the front seat. In the name of the Father, and we begin a rosary. And by the time you go through all the mysteries of the rosary and the life of Christ, you have 150 Hail Marys done and a whole bunch of Our Fathers and another prayer glory be, and you got some quieter kids.

6:43I call it Catholic Prozac. And it was a loving, happy family. Then I joined the convent right after high school. I had great nuns that taught me. They taught me to use my mind. They had a great sense of humor. They had a great sense of faith. And so I was, that's what I'm going to do. And that's what I did. And have been a nun ever since. And did you know that you wanted to have a religious life, to become a nun? Was that clear to you at an early age? Oh, yeah. Because I would belong to a really deeply devout family. And like we'd go to mass, that whole spiritual dimension, the mystery of God and Jesus and Jesus's life.

7:37And then how that's translated into the way you love, how you live, always has fascinated me. And then the call after Vatican II happened in the 60s, where for the first time the church leaders gathered to reach out to the modern world and to be part of its suffering. And so then that sparked a lot of debate in our community as nuns. What was our role in the world going to be? how could you stand present to the suffering of people that came out of systemic racism and injustice and just be kind to individuals without tackling the system of injustice that was causing people to suffer. So that was a big wake up moment for me.

8:28And that was in debate in the community and real growth. And when I awakened to that and I moved into the St. Thomas Housing projects and began to serve African-American people who were my servants all while I was growing up in Baton Rouge. It was during the Jim Crow days, which I never questioned because you get to be part of a culture. Well, honey, this is the way we do things here. My good mom and daddy, never questioning the system because culture gives you eyes, gives you ears. This is the way you do things. So I awaken and move into the St. Thomas housing projects. It was only like a 16th of a mile from where I was serving in the suburbs of New Orleans, but it was like another country.

9:17All the rules were different. The way the police treated people. What happened if your child got sick and you don't have health care and you got to go sit and wait from 11 o 'clock at night till three in the morning with a sick child before some tired little intern is going to see your child. Everything was different. And so that was a huge moment of awakening. I had never even heard the word white privilege before I went to St. Thomas. I didn't know I had any kind of privilege. You know, my daddy had worked hard. He had come out of poverty, became a lawyer. I just, I, because when you're white and you have the privilege that comes just with never being questioned because of the color of your skin is going to just get you through you know never have somebody follow you in a department store thinking you're going to be trying to shoplift or I wasn't scared when I'd be stopped for speeding which has happened more than once by a policeman I wasn't scared of them.

10:18So I awakened to all this, see? And it's there, working in the projects, learning about all this stuff, that one day I got the invitation to write a man on death row. And I thought that's all I was going to be doing was writing letters. And lo and behold, two years later, I am in that execution chamber and watch him be electrocuted to death by the state of Louisiana for his crime. Terrible crime.

10:54We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

11:09Hi, I'm Maria Sharapova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high-achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, clinical psychologist and founder Dr. Becky Kennedy and I unpack what it really means to raise kids today. I think parenting is the most important job in the world and the one that has the most impact on your world and the world. It is nonstop. Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app.

11:46Support for Criminal comes from Shopify. If you have your own business or want one, you might be asking yourself a lot of questions that start with, what if? Like, what if something goes wrong? Or what if I fail? But there are other what ifs you might not be asking. Like, what if this is a great success? Shopify can help you figure out the answers to those questions. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. You might recognize the names Gymshark and Magic Spoon. But there are a lot of brands who are just starting to make names for themselves. Also with Shopify.

12:19And if you ever worry, what if I get stuck? Shopify has award-winning 24-7 customer support that can help. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash criminal. Go to shopify.com slash criminal. That's shopify.com slash criminal.

12:45In 1978, a 28-year-old man named Elmo Patrick Sonnier was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a teenage girl and the murder of a teenage boy. His brother, Eddie James Sonnier, was ultimately given a life sentence for his role in the murders. Sister Helen Prejean was asked to write Patrick Saunier a letter Tell me a little bit about when you got that letter Saying would you like to court Was it just give this man some comfort Give him someone to speak to What was the ask? It was Chava Cullen coming down St. Andrews Street With a clipboard and everybody he met that day He was going to invite him to be part of this project, and he bumps into me.

13:34He says, hey, Sister Ellen, you want to be a pen pal? Somebody on death row? I go, yeah, I could do that. You know, as an English major, I figured I could write some nice letters, maybe a poem or two. It was just a correspondence. What was under it was that I sensed that person was a human being who had been condemned to death, and it must be very lonely to sit in that cell. It was just like a human being. I'll write some letters. And he wrote back, and I wrote and he wrote, and then it unfurled. It was integral the way it happened because I never planned on going to visit people on death row, much less being with people who executed.

14:20But at one point, I realized, well, he didn't have anybody to visit him. He never asked me to come. But I thought of him, and I thought, well, I could do an in-run sometime and just go to Angelo, two-and-a-half-hour drive from New Orleans, go visit him. So I told him that in a letter. And in the return mail, it was the visitor forms. And in the visitor forms, you have different categories of visits. He said, look, I'm a Catholic, and you're a nun. Would you be my spiritual advisor? And so I fill out the form. and lo and behold, two years later when he's executed, the only one who can stay in the death house with him, the only one who can walk with him to his death and be there for him to look at your face is the spiritual advisor.

15:13I didn't know it was going to go. I don't know if I'd have had the courage to just say, oh, yeah, you write this letter. You know where it's going to lead? Right to that execution chamber. Can you do that? I would have said, heck no, I can't do that. But it unfurled. You had never seen an execution before. So few people ever will. What is it like to be with someone? It's a rare thing that someone knows the exact minute that they will die. I'm trying to think of other circumstances where someone knows that. So few come to mind. How surreal an experience is it? And how surreal an experience was it for you for that first execution?

15:59Surreal, you got the right word, Phoebe. A human being who's alive, not in a hospital, not fading, not dying, alive, talking the way you and I are talking now, and looking at his watch. You now have three hours to live, two hours to live, one hour to live. And in the midst of that experience, there might be one of the red phones that goes off in the death house, where it comes from a court or it comes from a governor, that you are not going to die. In fact, you've gotten a stay of execution, and they bring you back to your cell. Then you're brought back a week later, and you get another stay of execution.

16:41Then you're brought back another week later, and then they kill you. It's actually the experience of torture for a conscious, imaginative human being who has an imagination and anticipates dying. The nightmare that everybody has that I've known, I've accompanied six people to execution. The nightmare everybody has is they're coming for me. The guards are coming to my cell. They're dragging me out. I'm kicking, screaming, going, no, no. And then I wake up. And I look around, I'm in my cell. It's a dream. But they are going to be coming for me. Then you watch as others are led. It is the definition of torture is an extreme mental or physical assault on someone rendered defenseless.

17:31What greater mental assault or suffering could there be than to be told, we're going to kill you in two weeks. We're going to kill you in three hours. When Brandon Bernard was killed recently, one of the federal executions that happened, I was with his lawyer. I was praying. He was supposed to be killed at 6 o 'clock. This is at Terre Haute. This is on December 10th, ironically, Human Rights Day. and so I'm praying I stopped everything I'm doing to try to accompany and pray for him spiritually that his passage would be without suffering and and at 6 20 I get a text from those lawyers saying it's odd they haven't come for him so what's happening he's he's prepared to go he's waiting to go gets to be 620 gets to be 720 they're not coming for him and does it mean that a stay is going to be given by court what does it mean you don't know and then at eight something the two the guards come and said time to go and they take him and they kill him because it's in human hands and human machinations and the way that it's set up.

18:57How could it not be torture? An extreme mental assault on a person who's been rendered defenseless. What is it like to think about the execution or to be with someone on death row, speak with them, when you know they're guilty? and what is it like when you believe that they're innocent? Is it different for you? Well, here's the bedrock. Every human being is worth more than the worst thing they've ever done. Every human being. So when I'm with the guilty, I'm very conscious of that. And recently the Catholic Church coming to that awareness after a long dialogue, That's the bedrock principle, the inviolable dignity of the human person.

19:51Innocent. There the outrage is about our system and about the ignorance because people aren't awake to it, because people aren't close to it, because they don't see what it means for people to be executed. I'm with a man right now. I've been accompanying him on death row. Manuel Ortiz is his name. For 20 years, I've been. I take them one at a time. So he's lasted 20 years, and they haven't killed him, and I've been with him. And he is innocent. And how do I know that? Because I have studied the case. I've seen the case. I know what happens when prosecutors have the power, have the evidence, can hide things.

20:33And he gives me a lot of courage. But then I'm an advocate, see. When somebody's innocent, you've got to fight for them. Do they need a good lawyer? Do they need to change lawyers? Do they need to get an expert witness? Do they need to get DNA tested? I'm right there by his side, not just simply visiting him. How is it, Manuel? I hope you're not having a bad day. But you're by their side, and you do whatever it takes for justice to be done and for the truth to come out. And that is just happening right now with this case where we're getting in an expert on DNA to really look at what happened. But then generally people are poor and don't have good attorneys and don't have what they need.

21:19And you begin to see it's inevitable that you're going to have innocent people in the system that are going to end up being on death row. No wonder we have a mistake rate as high as we do. Does he think he's going to be executed? He doesn't know. It's a slow death being in prison the way it is. He talks about a death penalty sitting on you like a thousand pound gorilla on your back. It's always this threat of death and knowing how the system can work and people have been executed. So it's always over him. It's always that cloud over him. He's never completely free of it until they would lift the death sentence off of him.

22:10And he's really clear that he wants to press for his innocence, that, of course, he wants death to be lifted, but he wants to work to prove his innocence so that he can be freed. It's unbelievable suffering, Phoebe, that people go through. and see, you want to know why I'm talking to you now, you want to know why I'm Zooming with people because I can't get to them in person now, is people are unawake about the issue. They don't know. I didn't know. When I came out of that execution chamber, I was so traumatized, I threw up. I never watched a human being deliberately step-by-step put to death, and that's when I realized, you know, the people are never going to see this.

22:55I've been a witness to a secret ritual. There's only a few witnesses behind prison walls, all these federal executions. People don't see it. There have been two court cases to try to make executions public, and they both have been defeated. And I go, I'm a witness, so I've got to tell the story. I wonder for you, you said that you only work with one person at a time. You're only by the side of one person at a time, no matter how long that is. Why did you decide to work that way? I think it's all I can handle. I want to be true to what I do. I don't want to take on people and then neglect them.

23:43Because it's very, very intensive to accompany a person who's all alone, has had this huge injustice done to them, or in a position where the state is really serious about killing them. How do you offer comfort to someone in a position in the last moments of their life? That feels like a great, burden's not the right word, responsibility. What can you say to make someone feel better?

24:20I am here for you. In fact, with Patrick Sonnier, he had said to me, Sister, you can't be there at the end, you can't watch this. It's electrocution. It could scar you psychologically to see this. He was really trying to protect me. And I said to him, Pat, I don't know what, I've never done this before, but I know this. You are not going to die without seeing one face in that witness room that loves you and believes in your dignity. And when they do this, you look at me. I will be there for you. I'll be the face of Christ for you. He was Christian. I'll be the face of love for you. And that is what you do.

25:06You are present. And they know you've been down the road with them. And when you say you'll be there with them, you'll be there. And that's what you do. It's presence. It's the most helpless feeling in the world to be present to a human being being killed like that. And not to be able to stop it. Not to be able to do something. And so different. I've been with people in the hospital who died. They fade. You can see life ebbing out of them, but to be fully alive, fully conscious, and then to walk across this room here into this place where they're going to kill you. It's one, you know, the Catholic Church, I played a little part in helping the Catholic Church developed on this issue that we cannot ever give over to states the right to take life.

26:06And the selling point, I think, in the letter that I wrote to Pope John Paul II was your holiness. Does the Catholic Church only believe in the dignity of innocent life? I mean, a lot of people who say they're pro-life, but they mean innocent life. But guilty people, they draw a line. And if they're guilty, they don't deserve any kind of dignity. Well, when I'm walking with a man to execution, it was Patrick Sonnier that is the one I was mentioning to him, and they have him shackled hand and foot. He's surrounded by six guards. He's completely defenseless, and they're going to walk him across this room and kill him.

26:50And he turns to me, and he says, Sister, please pray that God holds up my legs when I make this walk. And I said, Your Holiness, where is the dignity in killing a man who's been rendered defenseless? Does the Catholic Church only believe in the dignity of innocent life? What about the guilty? And so there's dialogue. I wasn't just the only one doing this, of course. But Pope John Paul laid the foundation, which later Pope Francis built on, when he announced in May 2018 that there would be a change in the catechism on the teaching of the death penalty that under no conditions could a state government ever be given the authority to choose that some of their citizens could die.

27:46And it was that inviolable dignity of the person. And so when Pope John Paul, this letter to him happened in 97, he came to St. Louis in 99. He was talking and giving a public address. And for the first time, voiced, even those among us who have done a terrible crime have an inviolable dignity that must not be taken from them. Do you believe in good and evil?

28:20That's a tricky question.

28:25You feel like the right person to ask. I don't want to answer it. I don't know. Let's go ask that nun about good and evil. You know all the stuff written on this. I can tell you this, that when a state tries to kill a human being and the so-called worst of the worst, they are very anxious to get you to believe that is an evil person. And you can never say that about a human being because you come to this mystery of the human person. So good and evil things happen, but the cause of them are if you can put it in the person, no, you can't. It's evil when you have a systemic killing of your citizens like this in a very broken system filled with ignorance and bias and prejudice and political ambition.

29:18Those acts are evil. That system is wrong. It's morally wrong. So that's, I think, the best I can say about that.