Dead Man Walking

Vernon Harvey gloats to reporters over Willie’s death, saying only he died too quickly. Prejean tells reporters that all they have done is killed another person, wrecked another family. Prejean is invited for a televised interview with Peter Jennings, anchor of ABC Evening News, and despite her fatigue, she changes and hurries to the studio. The segment opens with Vernon Harvey before turning to Prejean, who is accompanied by the conservative commentator George Will (who still writes a column for the Washington Post). Prejean argues that if people were exposed to executions, they would turn against them, while Will upholds capital punishment as an expression of the public’s righteous outrage. Will and others argue that a public encounter with executions would “make a vulgar spectacle, of the most dignified event” (216), whereas Prejean strongly rejects the idea that an execution is dignified. The switch from the electric chair to lethal injections helped to create the façade of executions as a kind of euthanasia with no visible pain and suffering. Prejean is hardly in favor of bringing back public executions, but she is concerned that its sanitization obscures its brutal realities. Given the number of people exonerated from death row, it is a near certainty that an innocent person has been put to death, although some of the most fervent advocates argue that a few mistakes are worth the overall benefits of the practice.

Prejean attends Willie’s funeral, where the casket is open. His mother collapses to the floor upon viewing him. After delivering brief remarks on loving one’s neighbor no matter what, Prejean encounters Willie’s father at the burial plot and cannot get words out before she begins to cry. Prejean is invited back to Willie’s mother’s house, where she gives her two photographs of Willie, one as a child and the other as a young man, the latter inscribed with his handwriting that it is “the picture of me living every day to the fullest” (222).

In 1986, two years after Willie’s execution, Prejean and others are holding a seminar on death penalty abolitionism at Loyola University in New Orleans, and Prejean is surprised to find the Harveys in attendance. To her surprise, they invite her to return to their home, and she brings a homemade apple pie, which Vernon happily eats. They tell her that they feel like they have no rights as the family of a victim, that friends and family stayed away from them lest they be forced contemplate something so terrible happening to themselves. Willie’s death provided a brief satisfaction, but Vernon “could watch Robert killed a thousand times and it could never assuage his grief” (226). Months later, Prejean again met the Harveys at the end of a protest in Baton Rouge, this time at the state Supreme Court. Despite their differences, they come together to support state funding for victims’ assistance. In 1987, Prejean meets them again outside the gates of Angola, Prejean there to support a nun whose nephew was put to death, and the Harveys there to champion the execution. Another parent of a murder victim subjects Prejean to harsh questions, but the Harveys urge her to back off. The Harveys then convince Prejean to attend the next meeting of Parents of Murdered Children, where she hears stories of unbearable suffering and grief. Prejean then works with churches to help direct resources to victims of violent crime through an organization started by her friend Dianne Kidner called Survive. Prejean also calls for the criminal justice system to incorporate principles of restitution for victims as well as punishment for offenders. She argues that abolishing the death penalty can actually free up the money and time for actual crime-prevention measures, which have paid great dividends in large cities of states without capital punishment.

By 1989, Vernon Harvey is recovering from heart surgery and starts talking about how he wants executions to be gruesome and public. Over the following years, Kidner’s support group grows and caters to an overwhelmingly Black population, unlike the all-white group the Harveys are part of. In 1991, Prejean attends a meeting of Kidner’s group, again overwhelmed by the sheer ubiquity of horrors that people in the poorer communities of New Orleans face every day, often with little help from the police. Prejean seeks to build connections between Survive and her own death penalty abolition group, Pilgrimage.

Prejean ends the book by returning to Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of one of Pat Sonnier’s victims. Prejean and LeBlanc had maintained contact over the years, although his wife did not approve. After testifying at the Pardon Board in favor of Sonnier’s execution, his conscience came to haunt him, and he started praying for Sonnier and his family. When Gladys Sonnier was dying, Lloyd went to visit her. Prejean and Lloyd meet at a chapel, and they pray the rosary together. He tells Prejean that he only went to the execution to seek an apology, not to take pleasure in his death. He still feels tremendous agony over the loss of his son, and anger toward Sonnier, but his prayer at that moment is one step on the long journey toward forgiveness.