Dead Man Walking; Life Or Death

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Dead Man Walking: Life or Death? Sister Helen Prejean’s factual, personal experiences while working as a spiritual counselor to convicts on Louisiana’s death row, was published in 1993. Dead Man walking tells the story of the executions of two inmates and the injustices associated with each. Prejean brilliantly lays out her case for abolishment of the death penalty. The reader cannot help but second-guess any preconceived notion of the death penalty as a just punishment in the United States. The story begins as a Catholic schoolgirl who was raised by a loving family in an affluent neighborhood in 1950’s Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In her adult life, she becomes a nun and works with the poor in a government housing project in New Orleans. When a colleague suggests that she begin corresponding with Patrick Sonnier, a convicted murderer awaiting the death penalty, her life takes a turn she never could have imagined. She begins counseling death row inmates, starts a victims’ families support group, and becomes a spokesperson for the abolishment of the death penalty. The novel describes her experiences in dramatic detail and offers a view as to how she deduced her strong opinions about the death penalty. In the novel, Sister Helen Prejean offers her personal experiences, conversational language, the manifestation of facts, and the moral and ethical conflict of capital punishment as a basis for her arguments. In a 1993 article titled “Dead Man Walking – a book review” Hilary Hochman analyzes Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean. Hochman refers to the novel as a Catholic nun’s personal “journey from working with residents of New Orleans housing projects to advising inmates on Louisiana’s death row, to counseling crime victims’ families” (1). A steep contrast exists between the life experiences of the inmates and the narrator’s own life experience as a
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