The Death of Innocents (Hardcover) ~ Helen Prejean (Author) Cover Art

The Death of Innocents (Hardcover)

By: Helen Prejean (Author)

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Review

"THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS comes alive when the author discusses her time with Williams and O'Dell. Her prose is, as in DEAD MAN WALKING, luminous, undecorated, angry and very moving."

"[Her] ambition to stir up emotion may not suit all readers, But Sister Prejean also excels in pressing her case through analysis and argument. Here many of the points so well made in DEAD MAN WALKING are reinforced, with fresh instances and telling detail."....THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS is a deeply convinced and deeply convincing book."

"THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS eloquently chronicles two executions Prejean witnessed....In addition to these men's stories, Prejean provides compelling evidence that the death penalty is systematically applied in a horrifyingly unjust manner....She eloquently argues that these disparities show that the state should never be entrusted with taking human life...."

Publisher's note

Sister Helen Prejean was a little-known Roman Catholic nun from Louisiana when in 1993, her first book Dead Man Walking, challenged the way we look at the death penalty in America. It became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Now in The Death of Innocents, she takes us to the new moral edge of the debate on capital punishment: What if we’re killing the wrong man?

Dobie Gillis Williams, an indigent black man from rural Louisiana with an IQ of 65, was accused of a brutal rape and murder. Williams’s inept defense counsel, later disbarred for unethical practice for unrelated cases, allowed the prosecution’s incredibly contrived scenario of the crime to go unchallenged. Less than two years after Williams’s execution in January 1999, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to kill a man so mentally disabled.

In 1986, Joseph Roger O’Dell was convicted of murder in Virginia despite highly circumstantial evidence from a jailhouse snitch. For twelve years, O’Dell sought DNA testing on the forensic evidence, which he claimed would exonerate him, but the courts refused. After his execution on July 23, 1997, the state destroyed the evidence. As a result, its conviction of O’Dell could never be scrutinized.

“The reader of this book will be the first ‘jury’ with access to all the evidence the trial juries never saw,” says Prejean, who accompanied both men to their executions. By using the withheld evidence to reconstruct the crimes for which these two men were convicted, Prejean shows how race, prosecutorial ambition, poverty, election cycles, and publicity play far too great a role in determining who dies and who lives.

Prejean traces the historical underpinnings of executions in this country, demonstrating that it is no accident that over 80 percent of executions in the past twenty-five years have been carried out in the former slave states. She also raises profound constitutional questions about an appeals system that decides most death cases on procedural grounds without ever examining their merits.

To date, 113 wrongfully convicted persons have been freed from death row. If constitutional protections–due process, assistance of counsel, and equal justice under law–are truly being respected, how is it possible that these people were convicted in the first place? And how can we accept a system so rife with error?

Sister Helen Prejean takes us with her on her spiritual journey as she accompanies two possibly innocent human beings to their deaths at the hands of the state. Prejean implores us to reflect on what is perhaps the core moral issue of the death penalty debate: Honorable people disagree about the justice of executing the guilty, but can anyone argue about the injustice of executing the innocent?

Annotation

Through the stories of two men who were convicted and sentenced to capital punishment, Sister Helen Prejean argues against the death penalty, and shows how the criminal justice system is unfairly balanced against defendants. Prejean is convinced that both men were wrongfully convicted, and she shows just how the system went wrong, with terrible consequences. THE DEATH OF INNOCENTS follows Prejean's powerful and influential DEAD MAN WALKING, which was made into an award-winning film.

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