Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, presents - 'Dead Man Walking: The Journey Continues'. Sponsored by the vanderHeyden Endowment for the Fine Arts, with additional support from the McCarthy Fund and the Society of St. Edmund. Sister Helen Prejean sparked a national dialogue on the death penalty and has helped shape the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to state executions. While living and working with the poor in New Orleans, Sister Prejean was asked to correspond with a death row inmate Patrick Sonnier at Angola. She agreed and became his spiritual adviser. After witnessing his execution, she wrote, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. It became a movie, an opera and a play for high schools and colleges.
Since 1984, Sister Helen has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners. She has accompanied six men to their deaths. This inspired her second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, which was released by Random House in 2004.
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