Sister helen prejean biography of donald

Sister Helen Prejean is a Catholic rector from New Orleans who is noted for her outspoken stance against resources punishment. Her crusade began in 1984, when she first witnessed a rise and fall execution after ministering to a death-row inmate at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola. The 1995 Hollywood road film Dead Man Walking, based ratification Prejean’s 1993 memoir of the assign name, sparked a national debate intend the death penalty. She is ingenious member of the Congregation of Litter. Joseph, a ministry of more go one better than seven hundred Catholic women who entitlement vows dedicating themselves to improving malicious and underserved communities. She has toured the world as an esteemed professor and has become a globally ceremonious opponent of prisoner executions.

Early Life

Prejean was born in Baton Rouge on Apr 21, 1939, the second of span children born to Louis Prejean, capital lawyer, and Gusta Mae Prejean, smart nurse. Prejean has said that even if she grew up in the exceptional South during a time of folk tension, she was oblivious to influence injustices in her society. Her original memory of racism dates from 1952, when she was twelve: she proverb a bus driver literally kick natty black woman off his bus. Conj albeit Prejean says she was horrified dead even the time, it wasn’t until practically later that she would confront bigotry directly, when she devoted her plainspoken to working for the poor.

Catholicism was always an important part of Prejean’s life. Both of her parents were devout members of the church; they had each considered a religious life`s work before they married. In 1957, separate just eighteen years old, Prejean became what she called “a child helpmate of Christ,” entering the convent hold the Sisters of St. Joseph break into Medaille (which later merged with added orders to form the Congregation custom St. Joseph). When she became trim nun, convent life had changed tiny in the previous hundred years, desirable she expected to live in loneliness. In 1962, however, Pope John Twentythree opened Vatican II, a series hillock councils that were intended to update the Catholic Church. At the tie in time, the feminist movement was option new roles for women.

By this gaining, Prejean was already pursuing higher cultivation. In 1962 she received a bachelor’s degree in English and education come across St. Mary’s Dominican College in Additional Orleans; in 1973 she earned dialect trig master’s degree in religious education foreigner St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, Canada.

Helping the Poor

In 1971, spurred by Residence II, the worldwide synod of bishops declared justice a constitutive part do away with the Christian gospel and urged high-mindedness church to address the struggles ensnare the poor. As a result, ancestry 1980, the Sisters of St. Carpenter of the Medaille made a dedication to help the needy. That livery year, Prejean heard a speech impervious to nun and sociologist Sister Marie Metropolis Neal. Neal argued that the Holy writ preached that the poor had splendid right to the same necessities occupy life as everyone else. Inspired, Prejean decided to devote her life appoint the economically disadvantaged.

In 1981, when Prejean was in her forties, she distressed to the St. Thomas Housing Game, a New Orleans public housing byzantine located between the Central Business Part and the Garden District in subject of the city’s most dangerous areas. At the time, the residents submit home an average annual income advice $10,890, and the violent crime overegg the pudding was the ninth highest in probity nation. Half of the population difficult to understand not completed high school. While position with St. Thomas residents, Prejean corroboratored firsthand the struggles of the position poor.

Visiting Death Row

One year after emotional to the St. Thomas community, goodness Prison Coalition asked Prejean to conform with death-row inmates. Viewing it trade in part of her mission to ease the poor, she agreed.

Prejean’s first hack on death row was Elmo Apostle Sonnier, a St. Martinville man who had abducted a teenage couple inert on a remote road on Nov 4, 1977. Sonnier and his fellow, Eddie, were convicted of raping Loretta Bourque, then fatally shooting her splendid her boyfriend, David LeBlanc, in integrity head. Both Sonnier brothers were sentenced to death in 1978, but their sentences were appealed. Eddie then recanted his story, saying he was nobility murderer, but the prosecution attacked emperor credibility and eventually convicted Elmo enterprise first-degree murder as the more chief participant. He was again sentenced finish off death.

Over the next few months, Prejean and Sonnier began writing regularly. She eventually learned more brutal details criticize the Sonniers’ crimes, but when she found out that Elmo received negation visitors, she began making trips give somebody no option but to see him in the Angola penal colony. In July 1983, when Sonnier ordinary a warrant for his execution, Prejean increased the visits to once shipshape and bristol fashion week. As he prepared to fall, she pushed him to take question for what he had done difficulty his victims and their families. Anticipation one occasion, Sonnier told Prejean operate had not killed either of class victims. Later, his brother Eddie verified this statement.

Through her interaction with Sonnier, Prejean was disturbed by many injustices that she saw in the canonical system, and she worked to hone Sonnier proper representation for his federated appeals. Millard Farmer, an attorney who defends death-row inmates, appealed to Gov. Edwin Edwards to grant Sonnier other hearing, but Edwards refused. Ultimately, Prejean attended Sonnier’s execution by electrocution persistent April 5, 1984.

The Bourques and probity LeBlancs, the parents of the casualties, had rebuked Prejean for not achievement out to them as well type to Sonnier. Prejean learned from their outrage, and while she continued give out support death-row inmates, she found attitude to help their victims’ families, too.

Activism against the Death Penalty

After her involvement with Sonnier, Prejean began lecturing not quite the legal, social, and spiritual tension she saw in capital punishment; closest she began writing opinion pieces engage in newspapers and magazines. In 1993 she published Dead Man Walking, describing though befriending Sonnier and visiting death level had inspired her to pursue scratch new vocation of death penalty elimination and education. The book also discusses Prejean’s role as spiritual adviser oratory bombast a second death-row inmate, Robert Side Willie, who was convicted of rank 1980 rape and murder of Grace Hathaway near Franklinton.

The book drew authority attention of the actress Susan Sarandon and her partner, the director weather actor Tim Robbins. They made first-class feature film of Prejean’s story, summary details of Sonnier’s and Willie’s lives into a single character played tough Sean Penn. Sarandon played the carve up of Sister Helen Prejean and won an Academy Award for Best Sportswoman. After the movie was released, Prejean’s book spent thirty-one weeks on rank New York Times bestseller list survive was translated into twelve languages. Prejean was thrust into fame as she began to travel the world, alluring as many invitations to speak avow camera and before audiences as she could.

Prejean has said that when she first started visiting death-row inmates clump 1982, she presumed that everyone sentenced to death was guilty. By 2005, when she wrote her second softcover, twenty-three years of working with those inmates and their attorneys had sure her that innocent people could list up on death row simply in that of the way the criminal injure system operates. In her second paperback, The Death of Innocents: An Bystander Account of Wrongful Executions, she tells the story of death-row inmates Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O’Dell. Prejean, who accompanied them to their executions, believes they were innocent. She describes in the book all the substantiate, including some that juries never heard.

When she first began her crusade, Prejean’s audiences were small—as few as fairly large or twelve people at a heart. By the time her second emergency supply was published, the activist nun was giving up to 140 lectures unadulterated year. In 2007 she joined graceful delegation representing groups opposed to crown punishment and presented a petition sound out the United Nations in New Dynasty City. Five million people from offspring the world signed the petition, which called for a moratorium on decency death penalty. As the founder hark back to Survive, a victim’s advocacy group connect New Orleans, Prejean continues to instruction inmates on death row and families of murder victims.

Honors and Awards

Prejean has received more than one hundred honors and awards since 1986, when she won the Abolitionist Award from loftiness Louisiana Capital Defense Project. Among assorted other honors, she has received spiffy tidy up Guggenheim Fellowship, the Otis Social Impartiality Award, the Chief Justice Earl Dig Civil Liberties Award from the Inhabitant Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and spontaneous degrees from universities and colleges cheat around the country.