Sister Helen

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But I got to tell you, Phoebe, we just, my little brother just died yesterday. He got COVID, so. Oh, I'm sorry. In a moment of, yeah. He had a lot of underlying conditions. He was 76, and so he just, it's just a terrible disease. And, you know, we're Louisiana. We love, people love being. We love being with each other. And, you know, you can just see how people get it, because they want to have these gatherings, and people, you know, drop their guard, and it spreads. And I think that's maybe how he got it anyway. But I'm at peace with it, because he would have hit such a terrible road if he had made it through. And so I'm glad God took him. You said you've been around death for a long time, or at certain moments. Is it any easier for you to mourn someone or accept death now that you've seen it and seen it in such a public way, but also in a private way with your own family? Yeah, well, private, of course, is your flesh and blood, your heart, your soul, you know. And it, mother, father, sister, brother. I used to set the table for five, and now it's me. And it's really, it's kind of, in a way, too big to get a hold of. There was this little kid in the St. Thomas housing projects. A reporter was interviewing him. There'd been another shooting in the projects here in New Orleans. And so the interviewer was talking to the kid. He's probably, like, about eight. And just trying to see how this all was impacting his life. And at one point in the interview, the kid said, "I'm too young to understand this." Well, I'm 81, and I'm too young to understand this. This huge mystery is that we all die. And I've seen so many die. There's a part of me, I can go through the whole ritual of it, but to take it in, and there's a part of me, I can go through the whole ritual of it, but to take it in, and there's a part of me, I can go through the whole ritual of it, but to take it in, and there's a part of me, I can go through the whole ritual of it, but to take it in, and that I'm gonna die. That's what's impossible. Everybody dies but me, you know, that feeling. So it's just a big old mystery, and what I'm thrown back on is, Louie lives inside me now, my little brother, and then moving over into the public sphere of the six human beings that I've accompanied to execution. And what you do, what I do, with death, is I'm alive. I want to live my life to the full, as authentically as I can. I want to live in the reality that death is part of it, but to live. Because death can just punch you in the stomach and knock the wind out. You know, it just knocks the joy of life, the desire to, it's stunned in a way. And then it like comes back, and you go, it's a new day. And just from being alive as it is, it's a new day. a human being existential way of putting it is, the truth is I'm alive and I want to live and I want to live authentically and I want to live to the full. And that's to me is what it leaves me with is this mandate to live and to live fully, which means to love as fully as I can. And when it comes to loving in the criminal justice system, it means working really hard for justice and for people's voices to be heard. I wonder if you'd mind introducing yourself. Yeah, I'd like to say about time. I would have stopped you, but I like to hear you talk. So I just said, well, we'll get her name later. We'll get her name later. Nothing. Nothing like drinking from a fire hose. Okay. I'm Sister Helen Prejean. I'm a sister of St. Joseph, a Catholic nun. When Sister Helen Prejean was young, she declared that she would either grow up to be the president or the pope. Instead, when she was 18, she became a nun. A fellow nun once described her as a hurricane. She's 81. Do you think that you are the most famous nun? What does that word famous mean? A lot of people know your name. Yeah, probably. I would say yeah, if that's what that means. Because I've been out there so much. I guess I got street cred because I've been in it 30-something years. And I do speaking. I'm not traveling anymore because of COVID, but I'm zooming my blooming head off. I mean, because you can still talk and be present to groups. And so I'm doing a lot of that. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Tell me a little bit about your life before you became known, a nun. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Daddy believed in traveling, his education. So we'd head out of Louisiana for a month, six weeks. All across the United States, Canada, Europe, too. And the thing in the family car, maybe you can picture it, kids in the back seat. You're getting a little restless. People start jabbing each other. And there goes mom in the front seat. In the name of the Father, and we begin a rosary. And by the time you go through all the mysteries of the rosary and the life of Christ, you have 150 Hail Marys done, and a whole bunch of Our Fathers, and another prayer of glory be. And you got a whole bunch of our fathers, and another prayer of glory be. And you got a whole bunch of our fathers, some quieter kids. I call it Catholic Prozac. And it was a loving, happy family. Then I joined the convent right after high school. I had great nuns that taught me. They taught me to use my mind. They had a great sense of humor. They had a great sense of faith. And so I was, that's what I'm going to do. And that's what I did, and have been a nun ever since. And did you know that you wanted to have a religious life, to become a nun? Was that clear to you at an early age? Oh, yeah. Because I belonged to a really deeply devout family. And like we'd go to mass, that whole spiritual dimension, the mystery of God and Jesus and Jesus's life, and then how that's translated into the way you love, how you live, always has fascinated me. And then the call after Vatican II happened in the 60s, where for the first time, the church leaders gathered to reach out to the modern world and to be part of its suffering. And so then that sparked a lot of debate in our community as nuns. What was our role in the world going to be? How could you stand present to the suffering of people that came out of systemic racism and injustice, and just be kind to individuals without tackling the system of injustice that was causing people to suffer? So that was a big wake-up moment for me. And that was in debate in the community and real growth. And when I awakened to that, and I moved into the St. Thomas housing projects and began to serve African-American people, who were my servants all while I was growing up in Baton Rouge. It was during the Jim Crow days, which I never questioned, because you get to be part of a culture. Well, honey, this is the way we do things here. My good mom and daddy, never questioning the system because culture gives you eyes, gives you ears. This is the way you do things. So I awakened and moved into the St. It was only like a 16th of a mile from where I was serving in the suburbs of New Orleans, but it was like another country. All the rules were different. The way the police treated people. What happened if your child got sick and you don't have health care and you've got to go sit and wait from 11 o'clock at night till 3 in the morning with a sick child before some tired little intern is going to see your child? Everything was different. And so that was a huge moment of awakening. I had never even heard the word white privilege before I went to St. Thomas. I didn't know I had any kind of privilege. My daddy had worked hard. He had come out of poverty, became a lawyer. I just. Because. When you're white and you have the privilege that comes just with never being questioned because of the color of your skin is going to just get you through. You never have somebody follow you in a department store thinking you're going to be trying to shoplift. Or I wasn't scared when I'd be stopped for speeding, which has happened more than once, by a policeman. I wasn't scared of them. So I awakened to all this, see? And it's there. Working in the projects, learning about all this stuff, that one day I got the invitation to write a man on death row. And I thought that's all I was going to be doing was writing letters. And lo and behold, two years later, I am in that execution chamber and watch him be electrocuted to death by the state of Louisiana for his crime. Terrible crime. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for Criminal comes from Wayfair. Improving your home doesn't need to be complicated. 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In 1978, a 28-year-old man named Elmo Patrick Saunier was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a teenage girl and the murder of a teenage boy. His brother, Eddie James Saunier, was ultimately given a life sentence for his role in the murders. Sister Helen Prejean was asked to write Patrick Saunier a letter. Tell me a little bit about when you got that letter, saying, would you like to. I mean, was it just give this man some comfort? Give him, uh. someone to speak to? What was the ask? It was Chava Cullen coming down St. Andrews Street with a clipboard, and everybody he met that day, he was going to invite him to be part of this project, and he bumps into me. He says, hey, Sister Helen, you want to be a pen pal? Somebody on death row? I go, yeah, I could do that. You know, as an English major, I figured I'd write some nice letters, maybe a poem or two. It was just to correspond. What was under it was that I sensed that person was a human being who had been condemned to death, and it must be very lonely to sit in that cell. It was just like a human being. I'll write some letters. And he wrote back, and I wrote and he wrote, and then it unfurled. It was integral, the way it happened, because I never planned on going to visit people on death row, or much less being with people who were executed. But at one point, I realized, well, he didn't have anybody to visit him. He never asked me to come. But I thought of him, and I thought, well, I could do an in-run sometime and just go to Angolo, two and a half hour drive from New Orleans, go visit him. So I told him that in a letter, and in the return mail, it was the visitor forms. And in the visitor forms, you have different categories of visits. He said, look, I'm a Catholic, and you're a nun. Would you be my spiritual advisor? And so I fill out the form, and lo and behold, two years later, when he's executed, the only one who can stay in the death house with him, the only one who can walk with him to his death and be there for him to look at your face is the spiritual advisor. I didn't know it was going to go. I don't know if I'd have had the courage. To just say, oh, yeah, you write this letter. You know where it's going to lead? Right to that execution chamber. Can you do that? I would have said, heck no, I can't do that. But it unfurled. You had never seen an execution before. So few people ever will. What is it like to be with someone? It's a rare thing that someone knows the exact minute that they will die. I'm trying to think of other circumstances where someone knows the exact minute that they will die. So few come to mind. How surreal an experience is it? And how surreal an experience was it for you for that first execution? Surreal, you got the right word, Phoebe. A human being who's alive, not in a hospital, not fading, not dying, alive, talking the way you and I are talking now, and looking at his watch. You now have three hours to live, two hours to live, one hour to live. And in the midst of that experience, there might be one of the red phones that goes off in the death house where it comes from a court or it comes from a governor that you are not going to die. In fact, you've gotten a stay of execution and they bring you back to your cell. Then you're brought back a week later and you get another stay of execution. Then you're brought back another week later and then they kill you. It's actually the experience of torture for a conscious, imaginative human being who has an imagination and anticipates dying. The nightmare that everybody has that I've known, I've accompanied six people to execution. The nightmare everybody has is they're coming for me. The guards are coming to my cell. They're dragging me out. I'm kicking, screaming, going, no, no. And then I wake up and I look around, I'm in my cell. It's a dream. But they are there. They are going to be coming for me. Then you watch as others are led. It is the definition of torture is an extreme mental or physical assault on someone rendered defenseless. What greater mental assault or suffering could there be than to be told, we're going to kill you in two weeks. We're going to kill you in three hours. When Brandon Bernard was killed recently, one of the federal executions that happened I was with his lawyer. I was praying. He was supposed to be killed at six o'clock. This is at Terre Haute. This is on December 10th, ironically, Human Rights Day. And so I'm praying. I stopped everything I'm doing to try to accompany him, pray for him spiritually that his passage would be without suffering. And at 6.20, I get a text from those lawyers saying, It's odd, they haven't come far. him so what's happening he's he's prepared to go he's waiting to go gets to be 6 20 gets to be 7 20 they're not coming for him and does it mean that a stay is going to be given by court what does it mean you don't know and then at eight something the two the guards come and said well time to go and they take him and they kill him because it's in human hands and human machinations and the way that it's set up how could it not be torture an extreme mental assault on a person who's been rendered defenseless what is it like to think about the execution or to be with someone on death row speak with them when you know they're guilty and what is it like when you believe that they're innocent is it different for you well here's the bedrock every human being is worth more than the worst thing they've ever done every human being so when i'm with the guilty i'm very conscious of that and recently the catholic church coming to that awareness after a long dialogue that's the bedrock principle the environment that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle that's the bedrock principle dignity of the human person innocent there the outrage is about our system and about the ignorance because people aren't awake to it because people aren't close to it because they don't see what it means for people to be executed i'm with a man right now i've been accompanying him on death row manuel artis is his name for 20 years i've been i take them one at a time so he's lasted 20 years and they haven't killed him and i've been with him and he is innocent and how do i know that because i have studied the case i've seen the case i know what happens when prosecutors have the power have the evidence can hide things and um and he gives me a lot of courage and but then i'm an advocate see when somebody's innocent you gotta fight for them do they need a good lawyer do they need to change lawyers do they need to get an expert witness do they need to get dna tested i'm right there by his side not just simply visiting him how is it manuel i hope you're not having a bad day but you're by their side and you do whatever it takes for justice to be done and for the truth to come out and uh that is just happening right now with this case where we're getting in an expert on dna to to really look at what happened but then generally people are poor and don't have good attorneys and don't have what they need and you begin to see it's inevitable that you're going to have innocent people in the system that are going to end up being on death row no wonder we have a mistake rate as high as we do does he think he's he's going to be executed he doesn't know it's a slow death being in prison the way it is i'm you know he talks about a death penalty sitting on you like a thousand pound gorilla on your back it's always this threat of death and knowing how the system can work uh and people have been executed you know so it's always over him it's always that cloud over him he's never completely free of it until they would lift the death sentence off of him uh and he's really clear that he wants to press for his innocence that of course he wants death to be lifted but he wants to work to get to prove his innocence so that he can be freed it's unbelievable suffering phoebe that people go through and it see you you want to know why i'm talking to you now you want to know why i'm zooming with people because i can't get to them in person now is people are unawake about the issue they don't know i didn't know when i came out of that execution chamber i was so traumatized i threw up i never watched a human being deliberately step by step put to death and that's when i realized you know the people are never going to see this i've been a witness to a secret ritual there's only a few witnesses behind prison walls all these federal executions people don't see it there have been two court cases to try to make executions public and they both have been defeated and i go i'm a witness so i gotta tell the story i wonder for you you said that you only work with one person at a time um you're only by the side of one person at a time no matter how long that is why did you decide to work that way and i think it's all i can handle i want to be true to what i do i don't want to take on people's lives i want to be true to what i do i don't want to take on people's lives i want to be true to what i do i don't want to take on people's lives i want to be true to what i do i don't want to and then neglect them because it's very very intensive to accompany a person who's all alone had this huge injustice uh done to them or in a position where the state is really serious about killing them how do you offer comfort to someone in a position in the last moments of their life how that feels like a great burden's not the right word responsibility what what can you say to make someone feel better i am here for you in fact with patrick sonia he had said to me sister you can't be there then you can't watch this it's electrocution it could scar you psychologically to see this he was really trying to protect me and i said to him pat i don't know what i've never done this before but i know this you are not going to die without seeing one face in that witness room that loves you and believes in your dignity and when they do this you look at me i will be there for you i'll be the face of christ for you he was christian i'll be the face of love for you and that is what you do you are present and they know they've been down the road with them and when you say you'll be there with them you'll be there and that's what you do it's presence it's the most helpless feeling in the world to be present to a human being being killed like that and and not to be able to stop it not to be able to do something and so different you know i've been with people in the hospital who died they they fade they you can see life ebbing out of them and they're not going to be there for you and that's what you do but to be fully alive fully conscious and then to walk across this you know room here into this place where they're going to kill you it's one you know the catholic church i played a little part in helping the catholic church developed on this issue that we cannot ever give over to states the right to take life and the the selling point i think in the letter that i wrote to pope john paul ii was your holiness does the catholic church only believe in the dignity of innocent life i mean a lot of people who say they're pro-life but they mean innocent life but guilty people they draw a line and if they're guilty they don't deserve any kind of dignity well when i'm walking with a man to execution i was and i was patrick sonia that is the one i i was mentioning to him and they have him shackled hand and foot he's surrounded by six guards he's being he's completely defenseless and they're going to walk him across this room and kill him and he turns to me and he says sister please pray that god holds up my legs when i make this walk and i said your holiness where is the dignity in killing a man who's been rendered defenseless does the catholic church only believe in the dignity of innocent life what about the guilty and so there's dialogue i wasn't just the only one doing this of course but pope john paul laid the foundation which later pope francis built on when he announced in may 2018 that there would be a change in the catechism and on the teaching of the death penalty that under no conditions could a state government ever be given the authority to choose that some of their citizens could die and it was that inviolable dignity of the person and so when pope john paul this letter to him happened in 97 he came to saint louis in 99 he was talking and giving a public address and for the first time voiced even those among us who have done a terrible job of crime have an inviolable dignity that must not be taken from them do you believe in good and evil that's a tricky question. You feel like the right person to ask. I don't want to answer it. I don't know. Let's go ask that nun about good and evil. I mean, people have written, you know, all this stuff written on this. I can tell you this, that when a state tries to kill a human being and the so-called worst of the worst, they are very anxious to get you to believe that is an evil person. And you can never say that about a human being because you come to this mystery of the human person. So good and evil things happen, but the cause of them are, if you can put it in the person, no, you can't. It's evil when you have a systemic killing of your citizens like this in a very broken system filled with ignorance and bias and prejudice and political ambition. Those acts are evil. That system is wrong. It's morally wrong. So that's, I think, the best I can say about that. We'll be right back. Thanks to Fetch Pet Insurance for their support. You might know I have a dog. Her name is Eight. 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Sister Helen Prejean was present at the execution of Patrick Saunier in 1984. She's been present at the executions of six men. And she's the author of several books, most famously Dead Man Walking, which was made into a movie, and details her experience getting to know Patrick Saunier. The book came out in 1995. In 1993, at a time when support for the death penalty was very high, in 1994, 80% of Americans supported it. You must try to put yourself, I would assume, in the shoes or think about the victims, the men that you've been with, the victims' families who are there to witness executions and who want it, who need it. Do you think about them and what they're going through? Or why they need it? Yeah, that's really important for us to talk about. I didn't know what to do about the victims' families when I took that first man on death row, Patrick Saunier, and the killing of two teenage kids, these innocent kids. And I stayed away from them. But I met them at the worst possible time, the most polarized situation. It was the pardon board hearing. It was the last step before Patrick was executed. And that's when I met them. And that was a public meeting where when you walk in, you actually sign a book which side you're going to be on for this person, Patrick Saunier, to live or for him to die. There were only a few names on the life side in that. And that's when I met the families. The parents of both of those young people had been killed. And it was terrible in terms of the tension because there I was speaking. Why was I there to speak that Patrick Saunier, because of his human rights, should not be executed? And they were there, you know, with all their friends and all their neighbors, relatives, packed the room to just say, we are asking for the execution. And they have been told, part of this is, they were told by the prosecution, this is the way you honor your dead child. This is how you get justice. They killed your child, we're going to kill them. We need your voices at that meeting. And they can kind of get caught up in that. And they're in such trauma and grief and loss. I don't blame them. And then I ran into them while the pardon board was voting. Outside the building, we were both walking. And boom, we ran into each other. The girl's parents were furious at me. They didn't say a word. They just avoided my face, walked past. And right behind them were the boy's parents, Lloyd and Eula LeBlanc. Their son, David, had been killed. And the father, Lloyd, walked right up to me. And he said, sister, all this time, you didn't come to see us. Sister, you can't believe the pressure we've been under with this death penalty. And I haven't had anybody to talk to. Why didn't you come? Why didn't you come to see us? Oh, God, I was so wrong. It was a terrible mistake. But this man, the father of David, he said, sister, I'll pray in this little chapel. Why don't you come pray with me? And I began to do that. And gradually, we got to be friends. And he trusted me. He said, sister, people think forgiveness is weak. Like, oh, you killed my son. Like, you condoned him. Oh, it's OK. You killed my son. It's OK. He said, weakness? All I knew was that I was going to lose my own life and who I was. God, my wholeness as a person, my kindness, if I let that hatred overtake me. He visited Mrs. Sonia, the mother of the man who had killed the teenage kids. She had people cutting up dead animals and throwing them on her front porch. She couldn't go in the grocery store. She couldn't go in the grocery store without people whispering loud enough for her to hear, oh, there she is, the mother of the murderers. What is she doing in here? What is she doing in our town? And one day, Mrs. Sonia hears someone on the front porch. She opens her blinds to look. And it's Mr. LeBlanc. It's Lord LeBlanc. He has a basket of fruit. And he gives it to her. And he said, Miss Sonia, I know you're having a tough time. Look, I'm a parent, just like you. And as parents, we don't really know what our kids might do. I don't hold you responsible for what your sons did. And here's my phone. If you need anything, you call me. He's the hero of Dead Man Walking. How you could go through that kind of suffering and not be broken by it or not so shaped by it that you become a part of it. I'm a person who wants that same kind of hurt to be visited on another human being and their life taken. Ever after that, Phoebe, you've got to know, when I took someone on death row, the first thing I always did was reach out to the victim's families and say, I want to introduce myself. I'm the spiritual advisor. And the first thing you say is, I am so sorry about your. dead loved one and what happened to them. Maybe they'll reject you, and most of them do. Lloyd LeBlanc is the only one of the person that I've been with on death row that I was ever able to be friends with. Most of them, or some of them even, have lawyers that send me a letter saying, don't you dare approach these people because they put you, you know, on one side or the other. How has. does this work? You know, you've, devoted your life to helping people. You're a nun. But I wonder how your work on death row has changed you. What has that done? What that path that you've taken? How has that changed you? It's affected my life profoundly that you got one life to live. So spend it on essential stuff and hang out in the company of people where things are soul-sized. You're working on big stuff, even though it may take years and you may never personally see the success of it. That's one of the spiritual, I think it comes from the Bhagavad Gita. Do your work for the authentic reason of the work itself and not because you seek the fruits of it. You don't seek any extraneous kind of rewards. As I understand it, it means you do what you do because it's the right thing. And it's a moral imperative. It's written in your bones. As the prophet Jeremiah would say, it's burning in my bones and I got to speak out. Do you think it's true that as we get older, we become less judgmental? I mean, the more that we've seen, the more mistakes we've made of our own, seen our own faults. That maybe we're less sure that we know what's right. I think it's if we get wise as we get older, we're less judgmental. If our own lives are besieged or starved in any way, or we never have a chance to reflect deeply on the soul part of us, I think you can go to your death being as judgmental as when you start, if not more, it depends. If we can achieve some kind of wisdom to understand about life, like on my side to understand my privilege, see, I haven't done any bad things to people. I'm a good nun. Yeah, she's a good nun. I mean, people look up to you or will you pray for me, sister? As if my prayers, simply because I say them, has more effect on the way things go than if they say a prayer. And so when you reflect on these things and you realize it's because I was so cushioned, I was so resourced in every way that I can afford to be a good person and not to be judgmental against people. I mean, that, so I'm not sure that as people get older, you necessarily get less judgmental. I think the less secure we are in life, and we have a need to put other people down in order to raise ourselves up, can be operative in people till they die because they don't have any other experiences to counter it. Sister Helen Prejean once wrote, it's important to take stock, to see where I am. The only way I know what I really, believe is by keeping watch over what I do. I want to thank you so much for taking this time to talk to me today. And I'm, I'm very sorry about your brother. Thank you. Thank you. It was a good thank you. Thanks, Phoebe. Manuela Ortiz is still on death row. Sister Helen Prejean is still visiting him. She's 86 years old. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Tsujiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus time. You'll get bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other Criminal listeners. 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