Sister Helen Prejean argues the death penalty is morally wrong, based on the inequalities of the law. An extreme majority of those on death row are, what one would, consider under-privileged, or poor. In 1989 37.7 million working American, accounting for 39 percent of the total of income tax returns, received had incomes below $15,000. Instead of putting money into childcare, low-income housing, employment training and food subsidies, the Regan administration put enormous amounts of funding towards the building of

It wasn’t until Prejean became involved in the plea for Patrick Sonniers life that she began to fully see the social divide within the law. The bases of their argument were quite simple, had Pat had enough money to afford a good lawyer, they wouldn’t then be pleading for his life. Before the Pardon Board, Pat’s new lawyer, Millard Farmer, states the ineffectiveness of the state appointed lawyer, almost to the point of claiming he was totally incompetent and should have never been before a judge trying a case in which the death penalty was sought. Capital Punishment, Millard argues to the Board, “as practiced in the United States is a poor man’s punishment. You will never see a rich person come before this Board, its not because the rich never commit terrible crimes, but because the expert legal council they can afford to hire, know how to ‘play the system’.” During the Pardon Board hearing for Robert Lee Willie, Prejean asked the members of the board “Will you dare to condemn the unfairness inherent in the judicial system which metes out on brand of justice for the rich and one for the poor? How can one morally justify upholding verdicts of death knowing that such social injustices are apparent?

Having looked at the immorality of various aspects of law Sister Helen Prejean questions whether or not society has a good understanding of capital punishment are public opinions faceted around irrelevant facts or misconstrued ideologies, would values change through a better moral understanding? Justice Thurgood Marshall argued upon conclusion of Gregg vs. Georgia (1976), that “Informed public opinion about the death penalty was, in fact, anything but, informed…the American people are largely unaware of the information critical to a judgment on the morality of the death penalty….if they were better informed they would consider it shocking unjust and unacceptable.

Throughout her novel Sister Helen Prejean raises a series of question pertaining to the morality of the capital punishment in the U.S. She questions the equality of one before the law. Prejean argues that allowing the government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which the American nation was built: the inviolable dignity of human persons. She asks, how can one condemn a man to die if he is financially unable to equally represent himself within a court of law? How can one punishment for his under privileged upbringing? Or for the colour of his skin? Why should death sentences be upheld to further a political career? How can one morally justify a killing of a citizen by its own government in a legal system plagued with injustices, loopholes and flaws? Dostoyevsky once wrote “society is judged not by how it treats its upstanding citizens but how it treats it criminals.” Why are people put to death when prisons are built at the expense of other social needs? Sister Helen Prejean’s moral argument is best said using the words Robert Lee Willies last spoke before the State put him to death “Killing is wrong…it makes no difference whether it’s citizens, countries or the government. Killing is wrong.”

Once in contact with Pat, one thing struck Prejean as surprising and it wasn’t his poor upbringing it was his race-he was white. “That’s a surprise, I assumed he would be black”, she writes . Racial divide was still in issue in 1980’s Louisiana as Prejean very well knew. Living and working in St. Thomas, a New Orleans housing project for poor black residents, she was center to it all, she describes it “like living in another country:” The fear of violence, drugs and guns, law breakers and murder were not new to Prejean what became chilling were the racial inequalities within the law. Her friendship with Millard opened her eyes to a world where not all races are treated equal, he told her of case after case, where black men were tried before all white juries and that within Louisiana every

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