Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean

and Daddy laughed too.” He laughs. “We got drunk as a couple of coots and there we were at one in the morning trying to make it home on our bicycles, weaving and hitting every garbage can along the road.”
    He has feelings for his father, I can tell by the way he speaks of him, and he says that when he and his cousin, Robert, had been arrested for stealing a truck (the plan was to run away to Texas and start a new life) Robert’s father had come to the jail to talk to the authorities and had gotten his boy off, but by then his own fatherwas dead — cancer of the liver — and so Pat served time in Angola. “But you can bet your bottom dollar that if Daddy had been living, he’d been there to get me out,” he says.
    The guard announces that visiting time is over.
    I rise to leave. I thank him for the picture frame and promise to come back in a month, and again he thanks me for making the long drive. “Be careful on that highway,” he says. “People drive crazy.”
    I have a roaring headache when I emerge from the prison, and I take two Bufferins before I begin the drive back. Pure tension. I have never been in such a strange place in my life. When I get home, I promise myself, I’m going to take a bath to wash the place off me.
    Freedom. How blessed it is to be outside the bars, and the windows are down in the car and the road is open before me and I take deep gulps of the fresh, good air. I wonder how I would bear up day after day, month after month in such a tiny cell.
    I notice — the omission is glaring — that Pat said nothing about the crime. Maybe he’s blocked it out or feels no remorse for what he did. Or maybe he just can’t talk about the worst thing he ever did in his life to someone he meets for the first time. I have no right to demand that he confess to me his terrible sin. That kind of revelation demands trust and should be freely offered. I respect that.
    His words drift back: what he said about his ex-wife turning him in to the police and his getting drunk and smashing furniture and her warning the sheriff that he was dangerous. If I had lived in St. Martinville I probably would have been terrified to meet him on the streets.
    But I am not meeting him on the streets. I am meeting him in a crucible, and I am surprised by how human, even likable, he is. Despite his friendly letters I had half expected Charles Manson — brutish, self-absorbed, paranoid, incapable of normal human encounter.
    But even if he were unlikable and repulsive, even if he were Manson, I still maintain that the state should not kill him. For me, the unnegotiable moral bedrock on which a society must be built is that killing by anyone, under any conditions, cannot be tolerated. And that includes the government.
    Ten years have passed since I first met Patrick Sonnier. Over the years I have clarified my perspective. Back in 1982 I was an exuberant activist, having just joined the fray against social injustice, andI see now that I devoted my energies exclusively to Pat Sonnier’s plight when I should have shouldered the struggles of victims’ families as well. I should have reached out to the Bourques and LeBlancs immediately and offered them love and comfort, even if they chose to reject it. Now, as I befriend each new man on death row, I always offer my help to his victim’s family. Some accept my offer. Most angrily reject it. But I offer.
    I also realize how naive I was about the criminal justice system. I had always known, of course, that there were imperfections in the system, but I honestly thought that when a person faced death, he or she would at least be given adequate legal defense. I thought the Constitution promised that. It took me longer than it should have to realize the shamefully inadequate legal counsel that Pat Sonnier and others like him get. By the time I sought remedial legal help for him it was too late. If I had acted sooner, I believe he would be alive today — imprisoned at Angola where he