|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Monday, 24 January 2005 |
Sister Helen Prejean takes on the death penalty in her new book
By Thomas Peele
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
IN A WORLD FILLED with leaders who can't even feign curiosity and who possess a nanosecond's attention span, Sister Helen Prejean gazes into your soul, not through it.
In another time, she would have been called a handsome woman, clipped gray bangs framing sweet features and eyes that won't look away. She looks nothing like the actress Susan Sarandon, who made her famous.
For six men executed by governments of the state, those eyes provided their last glimpse of compassion on Earth. Those eyes didn't falter when poison bought with taxpayers' money raced through their veins, paralyzed their lungs, took their hearts to the final beat.
Dobie Gillis Williams, a black man with an IQ of 68 convicted of killing a white woman in rural Louisiana, died with those eyes fixed on his. So did Joseph O'Dell, found guilty of first-degree murder in Virginia. Both, Prejean says, were innocent.
Prejean, the author of the 1994 best seller "Dead Man Walking," has again taken on the death penalty with a new book, "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions," in which she uses the executions of Williams and O'Dell to make powerful arguments against capital punishment.
The difference between the books is this: In "Walking," Prejean chronicled the case of a guilty killer. In "Innocents," she rails against a system that kills innocent people.
Trying to stop her from talking about Williams, O'Dell and the death penalty is like trying to stop a rooster from calling to a rising red sun.
Prejean sat in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel a block from the city's Tenderloin district on Friday morning. Earlier, she had talked about the new book at a television studio in Oakland. Later, she would read and lecture in Santa Cruz. Now she is talking, kibitzing, advocating. She seems as comfortable in her own skin as any person imaginable.
"When you love and care, and you have passion, you can do this," she said of accompanying people to their deaths. "I tell them, 'Look at my face.' It's like being a hospice nurse. You're seeing a person through."
Counseling the condemned gives Prejean a personal perspective on executions that few obtain, said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. "When she speaks to people, it moves them."
She'd like to stop witnessing state-sponsored killings. For that to happen, United States would have to join most of the civilized world in banning executions.
Prejean, author, speaker, spiritual advisor to the condemned, has become perhaps America's best-known and most vocal death-penalty abolitionist. She is Southern and charming, funny and relentless. She can deliver the facts: 117 condemned people exonerated since 1973, 14 of them with the help of DNA evidence.
But she also touches hearts, shakes up souls with her humility, humor and fire. She does not hide from her celebrity but does not embrace it. This isn't about her, she insists. It's about the condemned and their redemption. "It would be obscene if this were about me," she said.
There is a passage in "Innocents" that is illustrative of her wry and direct humor. The warden of Angola State Prison, home of Louisiana's death house, she writes, is a polite man who treats the condemned with respect right up to the moment he kills them. He had commented that making painstaking arrangements for Dobie Williams' family was "killing" him.
Prejean touched his shoulder. "Killing you?" she said. "This is killing you?"
Williams' case ignites Prejean. An inept defense, overzealous prosecutors and racial injustice manifested in an all-white jury never gave him a chance, despite an implausible scenario that he killed a woman in her bathroom and escaped out a tiny window, she said. In the end, Williams went to his death telling Prejean that no one would ever know what happened to him.
She promised Williams she'd tell his story. She also promised his mother. In the South, "a promise to someone's mama" is a tie that cannot be unbound, Prejean said. She kept it. It is her way.
Helen Prejean was born on April 21, 1939, in Baton Rouge, La. She entered the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille at 18. "A child bride of Jesus," she said. She learned to be "a regular nun doing regular nun stuff."
The great reforms of the Catholic Church that sprang from the Second Vatican Council in 1965 set her on a particular path. Pope John XXIII's message was "get in with the people. No one took that more seriously than the women of the Catholic Church."
With a B.A. in English and a master's in religious education, she taught junior high school and became director of a New Orleans parish. Still, she found herself needing a deeper connection to humanity. "I asked, 'why aren't we working more for social justice?' I thought charity was enough. But look who Jesus was with. The poor. The marginalized."
In 1981, Prejean moved into a housing project in rural Louisiana. "If you understand the struggles of the poor over the years, then you are in the prisons and in death row." She met a condemned killer named Patrick Sonnier waiting in Angola to die. He needed a spiritual advisor. So did another inmate, Robert Lee Willie.
It was after "Dead Man Walking," after its nomination for a Pulitzer Prize, after the movie and Sarandon's best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Prejean, after Bruce Springsteen's haunting slide guitar on the soundtrack, that Prejean knew her work had only started.
Prejean wears her emotions like the cross that hangs around her neck. The political climate against death-penalty reform is immense. She can't and won't hide her ire that President George W. Bush professes to be a born-again Christian who signed 152 death warrants as Texas governor. "I see in him a crass manipulator of religion," she said.
When then Gov. Bush refused to spare Karla Fay Tucker, convicted of killing two people with a pickax, but who embraced Christianity on death row, he ended his remarks by saying "God bless Karla Fay Tucker."
But God, Prejean said, had given Bush the power to bless Tucker himself by sparing her.
"Every bad word I ever heard of was in my head," Prejean said. She was moments away from appearing on "Larry King Live." A world audience almost saw and heard a cursing nun, but by time the camera focused on her, she'd had a moment to compose herself.
She is equally critical of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Despite studying theology at Georgetown University, he professes a view on the death penalty that is "no better than a fundamentalist preacher in Alabama" by claiming the government is "anointed by God" to carry out his vengeance.
"Scalia says, 'We follow God,' " Prejean said, nearly springing from her chair. "Clearly, though, Jesus is saying to forgive. Jesus was executed by the powers of his day."
In her lectures, Prejean reminds people "that you can barely trust government to fix potholes," let alone decide who should die. "You have to ask yourself, 'Could I do it? Could I inject him?' If you have to hesitate, part of your soul has not yet said yes to it, and you have to reflect on it."
Her call for reflection is often delivered to those who want vengeance the most. "She wants to get close to the victims families," said Robert Cushing, director of Murder Victims Families for Civil Rights. "Holding pain in both hands is something she does."
Many to whom those hands are extended seem drawn to them.
Cushing visited the Texas death row with Prejean. "The prisoners were in their cells, cages really, and she was reaching down, touching them. There was a smell to the place, the smell of men sweating and waiting to die, and she was touching their humanity."
The prisoners, he said, were calling out "The nun's here. The nun's here." No one had to tell them which nun, Cushing said.
The nun was there. She is never very far away.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/10719246.htm?1c
|
|
