Dead Man Walking
By Helen Prejean
Vintage
304 pages
Paperback
$15.00
About This Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and author
biography that follow are intended to enhance your
group's reading of Sister Helen Prejean's Dead
Man Walking. We hope they will give you a
number of interesting angles from which to
consider this gripping story of two condemned
men and the courageous nun who became their spiritual adviser.
About This Book
One day in 1982 the Prison Coalition of Louisiana asked Sister Helen Prejean, a
Catholic nun who lived and worked among the poor of New Orleans, to correspond
with a death-row inmate-- a convicted killer of two teenagers. As she got to know
Patrick Sonnier and to measure his fear, remorse, and humanity, her aversion to
capital punishment-- an integral part of her faith and philosophy-- developed into a
conviction that it can, and must, be abolished. In Dead Man Walking, the chronicle of
her personal experiences with death-row inmates, Prejean introduces us not only to
the prisoners themselves but to the grieving, furious families of their victims; to the
people who administer the sentence of death; to the inefficient legal system; and to
the expedient, occasionally capricious political choices that determine whether a
prisoner will live or die. Dead Man Walking is an extraordinary and thought-provoking
book that makes us reexamine some of our most fundamental beliefs.
Question & Answer
1. Sister Helen Prejean looks back on the life and career of her father-- a good man who
helped the black people in his segregated community-- and reflects that "systems inflict
pain and hardship in people's lives and...being kind in an unjust system is not enough" [p.
7]. Do you find her judgment to be true?
