The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions

Amazon.com Review
Since the 1993 publication of her memoir Dead Man Walking and the 1995 film it inspired, Sister Helen Prejean has become a powerful and articulate presence in the fight against the death penalty in America. In The Death of Innocents, Prejean focuses her argument on the ways in which an unjust system may be killing innocent people. She tells the story of two inmates she came to know as a spiritual adviser. Dobie Williams, a poor black man with an IQ of 65 from rural Louisiana, was executed after being represented by incompetent counsel and found guilty by an all-white jury based mostly on conjecture and speculation. Joseph O'Dell was convicted of murder after the court heard from an inmate who later admitted to giving false testimony for his own benefit. O'Dell received neither an evidentiary hearing nor potentially exculpatory DNA testing and was executed, insisting on his innocence the whole while. Besides exploring the shaky cases against them, Prejean describes in vivid detail the thoughts and feelings of Williams and O'Dell as their bids for clemency fail and they are put to death. The second part of the book details "the machinery of death," the legal process that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, dismayed at the inequities of the death penalty, cited as his reason for resigning and that current justice Antonin Scalia has boasted of being a part of. Prejean is impassioned as she describes what she sees as an arrogant attitude by both Scalia and the contemporary judicial system. Her chance confrontation with Scalia at an airport is a gripping collision of disparate worlds. In recent years, DNA testing has overturned the convictions of scores of prisoners, including many on death row. As the death penalty is increasingly called into question, Sister Helen Prejean will surely be a force in that debate. --John Moe --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Starred Review. Activist nun Prejean, whose crusade against the death penalty became widely known after Susan Sarandon portrayed her in the Oscar-winning film adaptation of her first book, Dead Man Walking, has again crafted a passionate indictment of the American criminal justice system. This time, with gripping, heartrending detail, Prejean draws on her experience advocating for two men she believes to have been innocent, but who were condemned to death row—Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O'Dell. While the book's subtitle removes any element of suspense, few readers will miss it. Instead, many will be outraged at a "machinery of death" weighted against the poor and African-Americans, featuring technical obstacles placed in the way of men desperately fighting for a fair hearing of evidence never elicited at their trials (O'Dell was denied appellate review by the highest court in Virginia because his lawyers typed one wrong word on his petition's title page). Prejean's tale involves a tragic, but not atypical, confluence of aggressive prosecutors (such as those in Louisiana, who display a "Big Prick" award featuring the state bird clutching in its talons a hypodermic needle used in lethal injections in its talons) and inept, ill-trained and apathetic defense attorneys. This damning critique should make even supporters of capital punishment pause, and the author's celebrity status, coupled with a timely message, should propel this onto bestseller lists.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
In The Death of Innocents, Sister Helen Prejean, author of the justly renowned Dead Man Walking, continues her crusade against capital punishment. While her earlier book sought to generate opposition to the execution even of people who had committed "unspeakable" crimes, this volume, as its title indicates, focuses on the execution of those she believes to be innocent. "Honorable people have disagreed about the justice of executing the guilty," she writes, "but can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent?"

Unfortunately, Prejean gets off to a bad start: reproducing an embarrassingly banal poem by a man who was executed. But her book soon becomes more compelling. In addition to exposing the astonishingly shoddy cases against two men she accompanied to their executions, Prejean offers general criticisms of the justice system involved in the death penalty. She also discusses the public's shifting attitudes, traces the growth of the Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty, excoriates Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's rationale for reconciling his Catholicism with his support of capital punishment and -- in moving but unoriginal terms -- tells the story of her own political transformation. ("Before, I had asked God to right the wrongs and comfort the suffering, but once in [a housing project in New Orleans] I realized that God had entrusted these tasks to me.")

In her attack on the death penalty in practice, Prejean convincingly recounts appalling injustices. These include prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, reliance on untrustworthy jailhouse informants, unreasonable procedural rules, arbitrariness in sentencing, racial bias, politicized pardons boards and a public defender system frequently so inept that, as residents of her housing project put it, "Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment."

Yet Prejean also outlines various proposed reforms and describes Colorado's public defender system as one of the best in the nation and "the reason that Colorado has only one person on death row." So why suppose that the aforementioned abominations are intrinsic to capital punishment?

In her attack on the death penalty in principle, Prejean resorts to some questionable arguments. Consider her dismissal of even the possibility of reserving the death penalty for the "worst of the worst" murders. "Aren't all murders stunningly extraordinary in their singular and irrevocable impact?" she asks. The obvious answer, however, is yes, but not equally so. There are degrees of evil. Does anyone really doubt that raping and torturing a woman to death is worse than slipping painless, quick-acting poison into her tea? Prejean gives impressive evidence that the death penalty, as actually applied, often singles out underprivileged murderers whose victims are white. This is intolerable, but it is a far cry from her claim that "now we know [it] is impossible to determine" which murders are the "worst of the worst."

Such a dubious argument is especially regrettable in view of the availability of better ones. Although there is a sense in which, as George Bernard Shaw said, "Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death," there is a sense in which it is not. Unlike the wrongfully executed, the wrongfully imprisoned can at least be compensated. Thus, unless the possibility of executing innocent people can be entirely eliminated (and how could that ever be done?), capital punishment intrinsically risks injustice of a magnitude way beyond that of lesser punishments. Prejean quotes the claim of Judge Jed Rakoff of the U.S. District Court of New York that this risk is substantial because persuasive proof of the innocence of people sentenced to death "often does not emerge until long after their convictions," though whether this would hold true in a better justice system cries out for further discussion. Prejean's willingness to give religious beliefs a role in influencing public policy also warrants more discussion -- as any sick person hoping for a cure from embryonic stem cell research can appreciate.

Much of Prejean's book is engrossing. But her prodigiously detailed critique of the cases against the two men whose executions she witnessed will be heavy going for readers not enamored of "true crime" stories. Later she provides more concise grounds for believing that capital punishment has had innocent victims. She points out that even "George F. Will, a strong death penalty supporter who once called a community's desire for execution a 'noble' sentiment, was shaken by the book Actual Innocence," which includes stories of 64 wrongly convicted people freed via DNA testing, and acknowledged that "some innocent people have been executed."

One surprising attraction of Prejean's book is its store of nuanced, offbeat observations. ("Southern hospitality is a real thing in Louisiana," she writes. "This is the death house, where killing is done by quiet-spoken, polite people who first serve you a fine meal and pray with you before they kill you.") Also surprising, though, are her often starkly uncharitable remarks about those with whom she disagrees. For example, she calls public support of the death penalty an "unreflected response [that] arises more from the spleen than from the brain" and writes that Justice Scalia's "icy sophistry" in a capital punishment case reveals him as "someone profoundly separated from the human family." Such invective cheapens her book.

Will The Death of Innocents succeed in increasing opposition to capital punishment? Already opposed before ever hearing of Prejean, I cannot judge from my own case. Yet I would expect, as well as hope, that her impassioned exposé will sway many readers. Although the book would have profited from more rigor and less rhetoric, it has much to recommend it just as it is.

Reviewed by Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.