Dead Man Walking

This story is based on the eyewitness account described by Sister Prejean . A sister of St. Joseph of Medaille gets asked to become a spiritual adviser for death-row inmates. Sister Prejean is caught between torn families of victims and the murderer’s execution. . Throughout her journey she sees the many ways that economics, race, and geography play a big role in the death penalty.
Sister’s Prejean of St. Joseph of Medaille was teaching high school dropouts in the New Orleans projects when her friend , Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition asks her to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate. She had come to St. Thomas to serve the poor, and assumed that someone occupying a cell on Louisiana’s death row would fit that category. In 1977, at a lecture by John Vodicka, one of the founders of the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons (where her friend Chava works), she learned that the death penalty in the United States had mostly been applied in Southern states – mostly toward t...