Book Review

Paul went to the library and brought home this book: _The Death of Innocents_ by Sister Helen Prejean. Several years ago, we watched the movie Dead Man Walking. It was an extremely disturbing movie, a very powerful movie, and we feel a very important movie. Sister Helen Prejean is a Catholic nun who works directly with prisoners on death row. She acts as spiritual advisor to them, and has walked several of them right to death's door and witnessed their execution. The movie Dead Man Walking shows one such relationship from her first contact with a prisoner right up to his execution. It is very difficult to watch, and we were very glad to be watching on a 13 inch screen instead of in a movie theater.

After watching the movie, we read the book by the same name. Sister Helen is an ardent supporter of abolishing the death penalty, for reasons that the state should not be killing in order to teach not to kill. But in this new book, she takes on cases where those executed are not violent criminals, but who have been scapegoated. They are just someone to punish because they don't have hard evidence on anyone.

She starts out talking about Dobie, whom she walked with to his death. Dobie was a young black man, with an IQ of 65. He was home on leave from a minimum security prison, where he was serving a term for burglary. He was deemed not violent, and so he was allowed to go home for the weekend. When there was a murder in the middle of the night, and the husband of the woman murdered said his wife had yelled "A black man is killing me," they went and found Dobie, at 2 am, roused him from sleep and hauled him to jail. At every turn, he was discriminated against. He was black, so he fit the description that the woman cried out. When DNA testing came available, the judge only allowed one test to be done by the prosecutor, and he chose a lab of dubious ethics. They declared the DNA test to be conclusive, even though it came back inconclusive on several points.

And that's only chapter one! That's as far as I've gotten, since it IS Paul's book....I'll be reading it when he's done, or maybe when he's gone to work.