"The Death of Innocents"
Carolina's 2007 Summer Reading Book Takes a Bias Look at the Death Penalty.
By FITZ E. BARRINGER
Summer 2007
Sister Helen Prejean makes no secret of why she penned the Death of Innocents. The book’s page count is still in Roman numerals when Prejean writes that she hopes that those reading about her account of the death penalty will be “set on fire” – consumed with a zeal to fight, what she calls, the “spirit of vengeance” that dominates the hearts and minds of Americans who support state executions. Yet with the author’s forceful and impassioned views exposed at such an early juncture, it is difficult to shake the feeling that the Death of Innocents is ultimately a book about Prejean’s version of guilt and innocence, of justice and retribution, of life and death – a version of reality so clearly impacted by her deep desire to rid the world of executions that careful readers will hardly find it compelling.
It’s not that Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun from New Orleans, lies or even bends the truth. Rather, her inflamed writing style and seemingly endless passion for abolishing the death penalty make her something less than a credible eyewitness. Whether she is making the case for a prisoner’s innocence or pounding away at the logic of the death penalty, Prejean tends to view the American justice system through a lens of heavy skepticism. A healthy questioning of government is, of course, no vice, but Prejean’s constant refusal to place any faith in the American courts moves her well beyond the point of objectivity.
In the case of Joseph O’Dell, for instance, a man convicted of the rape and brutal murder of a forty four year old woman, Prejean tosses neutrality aside early on. When she is invited to a press conference to support a new DNA test intended to prove O’Dell’s innocence, Prejean readily agrees to attend without even reviewing the facts of the case. Indeed, Prejean tells readers that the first time she read about O’Dell’s particular circumstances – and the rational behind his request for a new DNA test – was when she was in a plane heading to the prisoner’s defense. Whether or not the DNA test was merited does little to quell the uneasy feeling that Prejean will do anything – even fly halfway across the country on nothing more than an assumption – to interfere with an execution. While such passion is certainly helpful for prisoners facing execution, Prejean’s clear willingness to do almost anything to stop or slow an execution makes her a difficult figure to trust when it comes to discussing the nuances of a trial or the interpretation of a prisoner’s supposed innocence.
Because the death penalty is so wrapped up in the law, much of the Death of Innocents is an examination and, if Prejean has her way, indictment of the American legal system. While Prejean often speaks like an expert on legal precedent, however, it is worth remembering that she has no judicial experience of her own and that she often gets advice from those equally unqualified to expound upon the nation’s laws. In the O’Dell case Prejean readily quotes a woman named Lori Urs on legal matters. Like Prejean, Urs, a social worker committed to serving those on death row, is passionate enough, but seems wholly unqualified to speak objectively about the legal system. Not only is Urs without a law degree, but she ends up marrying O’Dell in a short ceremony just hours before he is executed. For readers without hard evidence supporting O’Dell’s innocence – and a bevy of legal verdicts, including one from the Supreme Court, in addition to several blood tests (which Prejean deems inconclusive) pointing to O’Dell’s guilt – legal explanations from an emotionally involved Urs are unconvincing.
Still, whatever issues of objectivity Prejean raises in the O’Dell chapter of the book, she at least casts some doubt about the prisoner’s guilt. In the opening chapter that deals with the case of Dobie Williams, Prejean is less successful. Williams was convicted of killing a married woman in her own home in 1984. A habitual criminal who had spent time in and out of jail since his teenage years, Williams was questioned within hours of the woman’s murder and found guilty by an all-white jury shortly thereafter.
Prejean describes in careful detail how Williams suffered from an inept and possibly corrupt lawyer during his trial, but when the case dissolves into a matter of interpreting evidence Prejean can do little more than establish a he-said, she-said environment. Williams, Prejean argues, could not have possibly fit through the victim’s bathroom window, the way the murderer gained access to the victim’s house; the Louisiana prosecutor, not to mention twelve of Williams’s peers, found that he could have crawled through. Prejean concludes that certain blood spatters found at the murder scene could not tie Williams to the crime; the prosecutor, a forensic laboratory, and the jury thought otherwise. The point is, with Prejean proven to be a biased witness it is hard to take her account as fact – especially when a jury of supposedly disinterested individuals unanimously found Williams guilty.
Ultimately, though, it’s not the guilt or innocence of the executed that matters in the Death of Innocents. As Prejean hints in the first two chapters and makes abundantly clear in the second half of the book, her purpose is to undermine and abolish the death penalty for the innocent and the guilty. Williams and O’Dell are, then, nothing more than vehicles to grab her readers’ attention and heighten the book’s sense of emotion – not to mention provide the basis for a catchy title. Starting in Chapter Three, Prejean launches her full assault on the “machinery of death” – the legal system, judges, prosecutors, governors, and wardens who support or tolerate the death penalty.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia bears the brunt of Prejean’s attack. After relating a personal encounter that she had with Scalia, Prejean goes on to question the justice’s ability to objectively interpret the Constitution, the sincerity of his belief in the Roman Catholic faith, and even his ability to feel human emotions. After dismissing Scalia’s contention that Catholicism and the death penalty do not conflict, Prejean writes that she “can’t help wondering how any human being could be called upon to decide life or death for his or her fellows and not break a moral sweat.” Later, Prejean argues that Scalia’s “rigid” belief that all humans have free will and know right from wrong “makes compassion impossible.”
Still, Scalia is merely the most ready emblem of Prejean’s scorn, and the Death of Innocents holds no punches in questioning the humanity of any person who supports the death penalty. Prejean singles out judges on the Fourth and Fifth circuit courts, numerous governors, members of the Bush administration, and American citizens as part of the “machinery of death” that send dozens of convicted murderers to their deaths each year.
To some extent, of course, Prejean is correct. The death penalty could not exist without popular support. But as in her unbridled defense of O’Dell and Williams, Prejean’s facts soon give way to passion. After exhausting her political and social evidence against the death penalty, Prejean moves beyond reasoned arguments and simply attacks people. In one passage she claims that President Bush has a “callous indifference to human suffering” because of his willingness to support the death penalty while governor of Texas. According to Prejean, who has no discernible connection to the President or those close to him, Bush lied when he claimed in a television interview that he felt compassion for a woman who was executed. And in a phrase that surely tickled the hearts of the book selection committee and liberals everywhere, Prejean writes that Bush “is comfortable with using violent solutions to solve troublesome social and political realities.”
Once again here is evidence of Prejean speaking with certainty on matters that seem well beyond her qualifications. In Prejean’s world where the death penalty is an inexcusable evil and those who support executions are hardly capable of human emotion, perhaps her conclusions about Bush make sense. But in the real world – where Prejean is not an omnipresent being and the death penalty, for all its flaws, remains an important part of the nation’s criminal justice system – the nun from Louisiana is not in a position to interpret Bush’s feelings with such expertise.
More than anything else, such personal attacks, grounded in Prejean’s emotions rather than in fact, speak to the flaws inherent in the Death of Innocents. Prejean’s zeal in attacking people detracts from the force of her facts. Her willingness to speak as an expert on matters beyond the scope of her knowledge turn her into a questionable resource, especially when it comes time to make judgments based only on her interpretation of the evidence. And her inability to remain a balanced narrator, clear from the first pages of the book, shakes the persuasiveness of nearly everything she has to say.
Considering the subject matter, however, perhaps it is fitting that the Death of Innocents is poorly executed.