Sister Helen, the Angel of Death Row

As soon as I was old enough to hold the cards, my mother taught me to play poker. At the same time, she taught me to be a good loser: more useful than the cultivation of a deadpan expression.

At 16, in 1963, I took part in my boarding school’s debating society. I was selected to defend the abolition of the death penalty. Up till then, I had never given the subject much thought but, while preparing my speech with as much help as was available in the school library, I became convinced this punishment was totally wrong, and I have thought so ever since.

I lost that debate by a high number of votes; I was furious and I let it show.

It still strikes me as shocking that so many well-brought-up teenagers, educated in a Roman Catholic school with allegedly Christian values, could have reached the conclusion they did.

The same fury was brought back to me recently when I read Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking, an account of her fierce and persistent protests against the death penalty in the USA.

My admiration for Sister Helen knows no bounds. As the result of corresponding with an inmate on Louisiana’s death row some 30 years ago, she not only got involved with him, helping him right up to the moment of his death, but also became an outspoken critic of state executions.

She brought to public attention the inefficiency of the electric chair, and the appalling death for which it was responsible: a shorter death than when someone was burnt at the stake, but involving the same sort of agony.

She also raised the question of the morality of any state’s killing its citizens, and pointed out that while the Old Testament condones the death penalty, the New Testament says nothing at all about its justification.