“I know you’re anxious, but you know Jesus was anxious, too.
“But you’re about to step over into the merciful arms of God.”
This was the scene in the execution chamber at the state prison in Huntsville, Texas in the early evening of Feb. 28 last year.
With Sister Helen Prejean, an unwavering presence of compassion and commitment and courage at his side, Ivan Cantu was being executed for two murders he said he did not commit.
Many people, including Sister Helen, believed him.
Based on testimony that later was recanted, he was convicted of killing his cousin, James Mosqueda, and his cousin’s fiancé, Amy Kitchen, in November 2000.
Although religious leaders, politicians, activists like our own Martin Sheen, and even three of the jury members who convicted him sought to get Cantu’s case retried, Texas governor Greg Abbott ignored those requests.
That left Sister Helen — a Catholic nun from the St. Joseph of Medaille order and a leading advocate for the abolishment of the death penalty — the task of bolstering the faith and fortitude of the 50-year-of Cantu, who had asked her to accompany him to his execution.
“He was about to die, he wasn’t making speeches,” Sister Helen told me with no-frills assessment in her Cajun-cured voice. “But he was listening.”
And when he finally did speak, she said his last words were to the victims’ families:
“I know you are here. You have been through a great pain of losing your loved ones, losing your son and your daughter, but I did not kill them.
“If I’d known who had, I would have tried to help you.”
She said he then nodded to the warden. He was ready.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
With Sister Helen whispering to him and holding his hand, he was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital.
Soon, she said, he took three breaths, his mouth flew open, and all she could think of was the Luke 23:46 reference to Jesus’s own death:
“He breathed forth his spirit.”
When she finally walked out of the execution chamber, she was hit with the weight of the moment once again:
“What does that do inside a person? It will either paralyze you: ‘Oh my God, the evil is unconquerable! They’re just going to keep killin’ people!’
“Or, you realize you’re a witness to things other people have never seen and you take the fire of what you know and you bring it to the people. That’s your new mandate.”
And that’s what she’s been doing for 41 years now.
While she’s in the process of finishing her fourth book — on Manuel Ortiz, an man on death row for 32 years at the Louisiana state prison known as Angola who says he’s innocent — it was her first publishing effort that caught everyone’s attention and still strikes a chord.
“Dead Man Walking” — an account of the executions of two Angola prisoners she counselled, as she did Cantu, and the effects of their deaths on everybody who helped carry out the sentences — came out in 1993.
Two years later it was made into a critically acclaimed movie of the same name starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of Sister Helen.
The work became an opera that was produced in cities around the world and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera 18 months ago.
It also was turned into a stage play, thanks to a collaboration of Sister Helen and director Tim Robbins, and, according to the Catholic Mobilizing Network, it has been presented at over 250 colleges and high schools around the county.
Sister Helen continues to run her advocacy organization — “Ministry Against the Death Penalty” — from New Orleans where she lives.
She still ministers prisoners on death row — over the years she’s been at the side of eight men put to death — and she has a full slate of speaking engagements around the country.
“I’m not trying to preach and come off as an expert,” she said.
And with that she dropped her voice an octave to sound like some basso profundo know it all: “‘Let me tell you all the wrong ideas you have!’
“No, I just want to tell you what I’ve seen and heard and felt. I want to get people thinking. I try to bring people close to the quick on what an execution means.
“There is a saying in Latin America: ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t feel.’”
She’ll be working on the hearts and minds when she takes the stage at 7 p.m. April 8 at the Victoria Theater to headline “Another Evening for Justice,” an event in its second year that will benefit the Ohio Innocence Project, which is based at the University of Cincinnati Law School and has a chapter at the University of Dayton.
The evening will be hosted by Gilbert King, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Devil in the Grove,” and the creator of the popular true crime podcast “Bone Valley.”
The evening will conclude with a panel discussion and a VIP reception.
The star of the evening will be Sister Helen, a charming, resolute, sometimes funny, always indefatigable force who’ll be 86 in April.
I talked to her by phone from New Orleans on the Sunday before last, a rarity for her, she said:
“Sunday is the Sabbath Day for me. I stop all work and do spiritual reading and reflect and write in my journal.
“I try to go back into the gospel of Jesus and what it calls us to do. I usually turn off my cell phone and just reflect, and pray, and replenish.
She agreed to talk, she said, because “we’re in terrible times right now. There’s been a change of mood in the country; a ramping up to get executions going again.
“There’s a hard-nosed, tough-on-crime approach some politicians are using to score political points.
“You can see the relationship between executing people in the United States and the extreme language used on immigrants, painting them all as criminals and rapists and gang members.
“You have to make people afraid to push your agenda. In the case of executions, you demonize; make them not human, so you’re justified in killing them.”
Her views today have come after experiencing a world far different and more diverse than the one in which she grew up.
How did this come to be?
Her short answer:
“Sneaky Jesus.”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
God’s prerogative
She grew up in Baton Rouge, a product of white privilege in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s and ‘50s.
She entered the convent at 18 and eventually began teaching children in suburban districts of New Orleans.
In the early 1980s, she moved to the notorious St. Thomas Housing Project in the city’s Lower Garden District.
Although it was one of the most impoverished and dangerous projects in the nation then, it provided her with a social and spiritual awakening.
“For the first time, African American people were my peers, my teachers, and that put me in the soil,” she said.
It gave her the footing she needed to work at Hope House with its neighborhood assistance programs.
It was during that time that a friend asked if she’d write to a prisoner — Elmo Patrick Sonnier — who was on Angola’s death row.
“I said, ‘Yeah, I can write some letters. I was an English major.’ I thought that was all I’d be doing.
“And that’s when Sneaky Jesus went to work.”
Sonnier wrote back and invited her to visit him. As she walked into Angola — once known as “the bloodiest prison in the South” — she’s said the ominous setting made her realize, “Well, I can’t play the nun card here.”
As she got to know Sonnier — convicted of killing two teenagers — she saw there was a humanity in him. And that reinforced the idea that, guilty or not, all human beings have dignity.
“That’s Sneaky Jesus at work,” she said. “You gotta watch out for him.
“That started a spiritual awakening in me, and I realized following the ways of Christ wasn’t just praying for people and being nice and charitable to those around you.”
Sonnier convinced her to be his spiritual advisor, and then came the big ask: Would she accompany him to the electric chair?
She soldiered forward — “The nun was in over her head,” Tim Robbins once noted when making the movie on her, and she agrees. She said she learned as she went and then shared that knowledge with the outside world.
“I was there when he was electrocuted — April 5th, 1984 — and I remember going out into the parking lot early that morning after and promptly throwing up.
“And that’s when the journey began. I was a witness. Executions are part of a semi-secret ritual that happen behind closed doors. People can’t get close to it, so I had to bring them there.”
As she wrote in her 2019 book “River of Fire,” the memoir of her spiritual journey: “What I saw set my soul on fire, a fire that burns in me still.”
She not only shared insights on the executed men, but what happened to the victims’ families, some of whom she got to know well, and which prompted her to start Survive, an organization that counsels families of violence victims.
And she wanted people to know the effect on the guards who had to do the killing.
“I wanted to bring people to face a personal conscience question: ‘Could you do it? The person you are killing tonight, after 10 to 15 years (of waiting), is it the same person? Do people change?’
“That’s the essential message now of Pope Francis and the Catholic Church — the belief in the redemption of human beings.
“One time I had a guard in the execution chamber tell me, ‘You know, the guy we’re killing tonight is very different from that young, brash animal that came in here cursing God and everybody.’
“‘But we got to kill him anyway.’”
Sister Helen believes that’s not the case; that society can be kept safe with imprisonment, but without killing a person:
“There’s an arrogance in deciding that God is finished with a person and we’re going to decide to send you into eternity. There are a lot of moral questions about this thing.”
She comforts both the guilty and the innocent and has had conversations on the issue with two Popes — the late Saint John Paul II and now Pope Francis.
She takes issue with fellow Catholics who say they are Pro Life, but only when it comes to the innocent.
“Jesus said, ‘Love your enemy. Not kill the hell out of them!’” she noted in a recent podcast.
She expanded that thought when we spoke:
“In 2018, Pope Francis officially changed the teaching in the Catholic catechism, saying, ‘No matter how grievous the crime, we can never give that right over to the state to take life.’
“’That’s God’s prerogative.’
“‘God gives life … God takes life.’”
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Iron Horse
Originally, “Another Evening for Justice” was supposed to be in February and feature Leo Schofield, who spent 35 years in Florida prisons for the murder of his wife, a crime he did not commit.
Thanks to the work of the Innocence Project and people like Gilbert King, he finally was released from prison in April 2024.
Nine months later, on Jan. 20, he was riding his motorcycle with his daughter Ashley on back when they were hit by a car near Lakeland, Florida.
Both suffered multiple injuries, and the February program was postponed.
That’s when Sister Helen stepped in as the headliner.
I won’t say this mirrors the baseball story where an ailing Wally Pipp was replaced in the New York Yankees’ 1925 lineup by Lou Gehrig — called the Iron Horse because he played 2,130 straight games and today is revered as one of baseball’s all-time greatest players — but there are similarities.
Sister Helen — an octogenarian still going strong after more than four decades of doing some of the God’s most difficult work — is an Iron Horse, too.
Manuel Ortiz, the 67-year-old Salvadoran she’s now shepherding, was convicted of a murder-for-hire killing of his wife that many call a setup.
“It was the case of a hotshot prosecutor wanting to cut another notch on his belt,” Sister Helen said.
The verdict was rendered with racial dismissiveness, if not pure racial bias.
“It took the jury only 17 minutes to find him guilty and that includes a five-minute bathroom break,” Sister Helen said.
It was found out later that key information was withheld from the defense team and eventually another man confessed to the murders.
The prosecutor, Ronald Bodenheimer, went on to become a judge until he went to prison on several federal corruption and drug charges.
Meanwhile, Ortiz remains on Angola’s Death Row.
In 1984, when she was in the death house there, Sister Helen said a guard asked:
“What’s a nun like you doing in a place like this?”
In the decades since, she’s answered that question:
She does it for men like Patrick Sonnier, Ivan Cantu and Manuel Ortiz.
On April 8, she’ll do it for us.
HOW TO GO
What: Another Evening for Justice, featuring Sister Helen Prejean and Gilbert King
When: 7 p.m., April 8
Where: Victoria Theater
Event benefits: Ohio Innocence Project
Cost: $39.50 to $85.50 with VIP reception
Tickets: Daytonlive.org/events/another-evening-for-justice/
More information: 937-228-3630
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