Books & Articles on The Theme of Work
Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J.

Personal Responsibility

In 1982 Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., was asked to correspond with a man sentenced to die by electric chair for the murder of two teen-agers. She undertook this task knowing very little about the criminal justice system in America.

Her beautifully written book, Dead Man Walking, gives a moving account of her spiritual journey as she became knowledgeable about our system of capital punishment through her involvement in the lives and deaths of several convicted murderers, their families, the families of their victims and the people whose job it is to carry out executions. Sister Helen brings a profound compassion to all the people she meets, reflecting on her experiences from an engaged Christian perspective.

One part of this rich and remarkable book includes an exploration of the moral implications of the work we do. After witnessing an electrocution for the first time, Sister Helen reflects on the process. “Who killed this man? Nobody. Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job--the governor , the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man.”

In her efforts to understand, sister Helen interviews a number of people, including the head of the Department of Corrections., a “good Catholic man,” who supervises executions and designed the execution process for the state of Louisiana. She finds him to be a “caring and intelligent man,” very aware that the system produces a highly arbitrary application of the death penalty. She says to him: “Yet you played a part. You don’t seem to believe that the death penalty is morally right, but here you are lining up the witnesses, designing the protocol. Do you experience any conflict of conscience between your personal religious beliefs and what your job calls you to do? If Jesus Christ lived on earth today, would he supervise this process?”

She finds his reply predictable and chilling. “...he explains that he didn’t make the law, he’s only following the law, doing his best to make the ‘process’ as ‘humane’ as possible. He says that if something is required by law and a function of a job, then it’s not ‘optional.’” He says that those in the Department of corrections who actually carry out the executions “don’t have to take any personal responsibility for what they are doing. It’s their job. They are told to do it. ...It’s like a drill, like an exercise, so they have no personal responsibility.”

Sister Helen sees a “severance of personal values from public duty.” She asks “whether it isn’t ethically dangerous to submerge personal convictions so that they have no bearing on one’s work....If a policy or law is morally wrong and we know it’s wrong, aren’t we bound in conscience to oppose it?”

He replies “that if he’s opposed to doing any part of his job he should quit.” Sister Helen asks, “‘ Will you attend an execution and witness for yourself the end result of this process?’ ‘Never in a million years,’ he says. Which doesn’t surprise me . I have a hunch that if this man were to remove the bureacratic gauze and see with his own eyes this killing laid bare, he’d quit this job.”

But sister Helen meets other people for whom this separation of work and values is not so easy, like the Major in charge of death row at Angola State Prison. He says: “I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to keep doing this. I’ve been through five of these executions and I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I’m dreaming about executions. I don’t condone these guy’s crimes. I know they’ve done terrible things.” Sister Helen notes that he is not like some of the other men in this system; “he can’t persuade himself that he’s just doing his job. My heart goes out to him.”

Sister Helen also becomes acquainted with another man who suffers from “just doing his job” when it goes against his moral convictions. Howard Marsellus, head of the Louisiana Pardon Board, ends up in prison himself for his participation in the corruption of the system, involving payoffs for pardons. Sister Helen remembers him speaking at a Board hearing years before, saying, when clemency for a condemned murderer was denied, “that the members of the Board hadn’t made the law and they were not personally responsible for this man, or any man, dying in the electric chair.”

Now, after having served his term in prison, he speaks with Sister Helen, describing to her how the corruption worked and how he participated, not for personal gain, but out of “the loyalty required of me when I took the job.” He then describes driving home after the execution of a man he was convinced was innocent, but about whom testimony was tampered with for political reasons. Marsellus, with tears streaming down his face, asked his wife, “How have I let myself get involved in this horror?”

Sister Helen says, “I feel sorry for Marsellus. His boat got caught in a current and he went along. It must have been a terrible ordeal to know all the wheeling and dealing going on and yet sit there...and look into the faces of people about to die and then turn down their requests for clemency. I ask him about this. He is crying, ...and I think of St. Peter, ...who legends say, cried until the end of his life because he had denied Jesus. Peter cried so much, the legend says, that tears cut permanent furrows in his cheeks.

“‘From day one I was doing political things that were morally wrong,’ Marsellus says. ‘The whole administration was corrupt from the top down, but I chose loyalty above integrity....I sat in judgment on these men like that --the guilty and the innocent. But who was I to sit in judgment? It still bothers me. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’"

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