Reading Guide:
The Honors College encourages readers to engage the text critically and suggests the following questions to consider:
1. How does the question of capital punishment relate to other social issues? (Examples: poverty, race, education, intelligence, geography, mental health, etc.)
2. What moments of transformation do you see in this book? More importantly, were there any moments that transformed your thinking on these ethical issues?
3. Sister Helen often speaks about how the way you tell a story changes people’s understanding of your argument. What is effective about how Sister Helen tells this story, and how do her arguments differ from others you have heard concerning crime and capital punishment? Is her story fair to the various sides of the argument?
4. Which story was the most meaningful for you? Why?
5. How has your opinion about criminal justice and capital punishment changed?
6. In her essay, “Living My Prayer,” Sister Helen wrote “I watch what I do to see what I really believe.” Where do you see this idea in The Death of Innocents? How does this idea speak to you?
7. If you had the chance to talk with Sister Helen (which you will in October), what would you want to ask her?
Comment Guide:
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In response to the second prompt, I believe that the most noticeable and important moment of transformation as far as the argument against the death penalty is the section where the case of Karla Faye Tucker is addressed. Indeed, more than the first half of the book is dedicated to Dobie Williams and Joseph O’Dell, two prisoners whom Helen Prejean believed to be innocent. The argument that the death penalty shouldn’t exist because of the possibility of executing innocents is a strong argument. The case of Karla Faye Tucker, though, is different: she was actually guilty of her crimes. Now, the murders she committed were difficult to digest, and it seems paradoxical to bring up such a heinous crime while trying to argue against the death penalty, but this point in the book was the most powerful for me. No one would argue that it’s right to execute an innocent individual. But this case was poignant in that it acknowledged her grave mistake, but still remained firmly against the death penalty. The book became more about the concept of the death penalty rather than the potential for mistakes in exactly who was to be killed. The segment on page 245 was most telling of this transition.
“Yes, she’s guilty of a horrible crime–she killed two helpless people with a pickaxe–but she seems genuinely remorseful for her crime…Couldn’t she spend the rest of her life helping other prisoners to change their lives? Is a strict ‘eye for an eye’ always called for?”
This transformation of the book brings our attention not to the poor men who were likely wrongly executed but rather to the idea that even those guilty of the worst crimes have the potential to change and become better. The idea of the humanness of everyone is essential in this argument, and I felt as though it was an incredibly important point of transformation for the book.
For me, there was one more specific point in the book that changed my view of the death penalty. I agreed with Helen Prejean on almost every point she made throughout the book. However, there was always something in the back of my mind asking myself whether I would really adhere to those anti-death penalty ideals if it had been someone I loved who was killed. It’s something to take under consideration, and I’m sure that I have no way of knowing how I’d react if someone I loved was killed. Would I want revenge? I had a hard time thinking I wouldn’t. Wouldn’t anybody want the sort of divine justice offered by the execution of a killer? The issue bothered me and, while there were only a couple of pages to go in the book, I resigned myself to believing that Helen Prejean probably wouldn’t address it in whole. However, it was just then that my thoughts concerning revenge and the satisfaction thereof were transformed. The brief story of Bud Welch, whose daughter was killed, made me understand what it really would mean for that “divine justice” to be carried out. These feelings were best conveyed by Welch’s statement: “Whatever happens to McVeigh really had nothing to do with my spiritual task. I have to reconcile myself to the empty chair, where once our precious Julie once sat.” This statement, though brief and concise, gave me a world of understanding. Thankfully, I’ve never had to worry about such weighty issues as the murder of a loved one. But this made me believe that, were it ever to happen, it would be not so much the aspect of revenge that I would give the most thought, but instead the aspect of emotional healing. This little excerpt gave me the biggest transformation of opinion than the rest, with which I readily agreed.