Sister Helen Prejean walked out of the Louisiana State Prison execution chamber April 5, 1984, and vomited after she watched Elmo Patrick Sonnier die in the electric chair for the murder of two teenagers.
The image of the execution stuck in Prejean’s mind for days, leaving her sleepless and turning to sleeping pills. Her mission was born that night. The death penalty itself needed to be put on death row.
Prejean, a member of the congregation of St. Joseph in New Orleans, came to Nazareth Academy in La Grange Park last week to see the students’ stage production of “Dead Man Walking,” based on Prejean’s best selling book of the same title. La Grange Park is one of seven of the founding communities of the congregation nation-wide.
“Dead Man Walking” is the story of the relationship Prejean developed as spiritual counselor to Sonnier, whose name was changed to Poncelet in the stage and movie production, while he awaited his sentence on death row. The book also decries the practice of taking a life for a life in the name of justice.
The senseless, brutal killing by Sonnier and his brother, Eddie, galvanized New Orleans community to seek extreme justice for the 18-year-old girl they raped and murdered and her boyfriend, also shot in the back of the head as they kneeled before their killers. The experience turned Prejean into one of the nation’s leading advocates for abolishing the death penalty.
Students gathered in the school auditorium Oct. 22 while Prejean spoke on social justice and how capital punishment flies in the face of God. She first warmed up the crowd by asking if they could handle a Southern accent.
“We’re going to go on a deep journey,” she continued. “I’m gong to take you to a dark place. It’s my own journey. I never dreamed I was going to go to death row. You know if you Google me, and put ‘death penalty nun’ my name pops up? Now, who seeks to be the death penalty nun, right?
There are 15 defendants on death row in Illinois, a state with a moratorium on executions since 2000. As most people will never be exposed to an execution as Prejean has, the stage becomes the next best platform to investigate the ethical issues.
“Everybody struggles with the issue — we experience the outrage of innocent life violently snuffed out, and the outrage over the death of the innocent is ethical,” she said.
Prejean was working in the impoverished St. Thomas projects of New Orleans when she first came in contact with Poncelet through letters sent to her order. She visited Poncelet in jail and became his spiritual counselor.
Prejean makes no attempt to paint Sonnier as a hero for the cause. But she discovered a human being behind the murderer’s mask on their first meeting.
“I looked into his eyes and said to myself, there’s more to this man than what he has done.”
Giana Angelillo of Oak Brook, who portrayed Prejean in the play, said meeting her prior to the performance gave her an insight to her character.
“The funny thing about meeting the person you’re playing is that you really don’t get to do it that often, so meeting her was very surreal because she is such a very powerful woman,” Angelillo said. “I think what I was lacking until now is more of that tougher aspect, more of that integrity to go on and do what she has done because I don’t think I would have that strength if I were counseling somebody like Matt Poncelet. But I feel like now after meeting her, I know what I have to do to get that across. She just held her own.”
Dan Beedie of Western Springs, who took the part of Matt Poncelet, said his life in the suburbs made getting into the mind of Poncelet a challenge.
“Coming from an almost like perfect society, I rarely see situations such as this other than in the movies,” he said. “You really got to dig deep, you really got to look at this character and break him down from the beginning, where he is such a harsh person, to the end, where he goes through this change.”
