Helen Prejean by Joyce Duriga

Author:Joyce Duriga
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2017-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The Death of Innocents

After working for many years with inmates on death row and looking into the details of their trials, Sr. Helen began to notice patterns of abuse and injustice in the legal system that resulted in innocent people being put to death. She wrote about this in her 2005 book The Death of Innocents: The Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 159 people on death row were exonerated as of June 2017. Before she started ministering to those on death row, Sr. Helen believed that the United States had the best court system in the world. Now she knows differently. She also knows that just because one is a faith-filled person doesn’t mean one’s beliefs are just. For example, Southern states in the Bible Belt have historically and continue to impose the death penalty most often and make up the majority of all executions.

In The Death of Innocents Sr. Helen featured the cases of two men—Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph Roger O’Dell III. Based on evidence and how their cases had been handled by the justice system, she believes they were innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted. Both men were poor, indigent, accused of killing white people, and had inadequate defenses. Sure, each had run-ins with the law before, but that didn’t mean they were guilty of these particular crimes.

Dobie was on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola and was the fifth person Sr. Helen accompanied. Dobie faced the same death chamber where Patrick Sonnier was executed, but instead of the electric chair, lethal injection was now the means of execution.

Dobie was a black man with an IQ of 65 (below the level of 70, when someone is considered to have a mental disability). When arrested for murder, he was home for the weekend on furlough from a minimum-security detention facility where he was serving time for burglary. Prison officials allowed him the furlough because he was a model, nonviolent prisoner.

On July 8, 1984, Sonja Merritt Knippers, a forty-three-year-old white woman from Many, Louisiana, was stabbed to death in her bathroom. Her husband, Herb, was home at the time and told police he heard her yell, “A black man is killing me.” In response to the husband’s information, police arrested three black men on suspicion of her murder. Sister Helen wrote:

At 2:30 a.m., police officers seized Dobie, asleep on the couch at his grandfather’s house, brought him to the police station and began interrogating him. They told him that they would be there for the rest of the night and all morning and all the next day if need be, until they ‘got to the bottom of this.’ Three police officers later testified that Dobie confessed, and at the crime scene investigators found a bloodstain on a bathroom curtain, which the state crime lab declared was consistent in seven categories with Dobie’s, and statistically, that combination would occur in only two in one hundred thousand black people.

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