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Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking Essay

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Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking Dead Man Walking was an autobiography written by Sister Helen Prejean. The novel tells about Prejean's life in dealing with her intimate journey through her dealings with capital punishment. Prejean was a Roman Catholic nun that worked in St. Thomas. She worked in a New Orleans housing project for black residents. In January of 1982, Prejean was asked to be a pen pal with a death row inmate named Pat Sonnier. Prejean accepted because she believed that the work seemed to fit with what she was doing at the time. Prejean wrote to Sonnier, believing that she would not be written back. Sonnier, convicted of the brutal murder of two highschool students at a local football game, surprisingly …show more content…

After her ordeals with the two inmates, Prejean begins to get along with her own life. In 1988 Prejean, and her pilgrimage, successfully established the New Orleans Victim Assistance Group. Prejean never stopped fighting against the death penalty. Throughout the novel, Prejean displays exactly how inhumane, unethical and faulty the death penalty is. Prejean proves that the electric chair is not an ethical act at all, to say the least. The electric chair has had many faults. The electric chair consists of two main parts. Being placed into the designated electric chair. This entails being hooked up to electrodes, having a hood placed over your head and being tied down so you can't move. The second part involves having up to 2,400 volts of electricity passed through ones body for up to five minutes. Surely this kind of process will kill a man instantly. This is not so. As Prejean explains in her novel Dead Man Walking not all people die right away. Only the lucky ones do. The only man to walk away from an electric chair alive was seventeen-year-old Willie Francis. On May 2, 1946, he was strapped into Louisiana's portable electric chair in the jail in St. Martin Parish. As the current hit his body, witnesses reported that the youth's "lips puffed out and he groaned and jumped so that the chair came of the floor, and he said, 'Take it off. Let me breathe.'" The officials applied several more jolts but Francis was still

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