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Helen Prejean: Antonin Scalia's position on death penalty flouted Catholic teaching and hewed to archaic ideas on mental disability
Editor’s Note: Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph, ministers to prisoners on death row. She is the author of “Dead Man Walking.” The views expressed are her own.
(CNN) —
I’m praying for Justice Antonin Scalia, that his passage into eternity was peaceful. I respect his sincerity, even though on the subject of the death penalty, he was my nemesis.
As I was writing “The Death of Innocents,” I happened to run into him in an airport, and I said teasingly that I was “taking him on” in my book. And he, personable as he was, jabbed his finger in the air and said, “And I’ll be right back at ya!”
In “Innocents,” I wrote about two men I believe were innocent: Joseph O’Dell and Dobie Gillis Williams, whose executions Scalia summarily authorized without an apparent qualm, acknowledging that his role on the Supreme Court made him part of the “machinery of death.”
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Helen Prejean
Scalia’s experience of the “meaning” of capital punishment, as he described it in one of his dissenting opinions, couldn’t have been more different from my own. In the marble confines of the court, he argued interpretation of Constitutional texts, while I, in state killing chambers, accompanied real human beings – six of them – to their deaths, which were a direct result of Scalia’s interpretations.
In grasping the “meaning” of state killings, I had one advantage over Scalia. I was there, close up to the anguish and terror of the condemned and their grieving mothers. Scalia, in the cerebral confines of the Court, never touched a tear-stained cheek, never stood present at the grave as families buried their loved ones killed by the state.
One thing the justice and I did have in common, however, was this: he stumped around the country to persuade citizens of the rightness of his “originalist” approach to the Constitution; I stumped around the country (still do) to persuade citizens to abolish the death penalty, laying out my arguments through stories of personal experience, beliefs of my Catholic faith and logical, fact-infused arguments, including Constitutional analysis.
After all, as citizens, are we not the ultimate proprietors of the Constitution and its meaning for our lives? Are not its protections of life and liberty far too precious to blindly be turned over to legal “experts,” every bit as prone to prejudice and blind spots as the rest of us?
Photos: Death row's nun
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Sister Helen Prejean has been on a mission to end the death penalty for three decades. The Roman Catholic nun rose to fame after the success of her book and the subsequent 1995 film adaptation, "Dead Man Walking."
Photos: Death row's nun
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Courtesy Helen Prejean
A young Prejean, right, and her sister Mary Ann with their father. She grew up, she says, in a privileged home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, oblivious to the racism and poverty around her.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Courtesy Helen Prejean
In her youth, Prejean jokes, a Catholic woman had two choices: get married or become a nun. She picked the latter and joined the Congregation of St. Joseph in 1957.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Prejean on the set with Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins during the filming of "Dead Man Walking."
Photos: Death row's nun
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Prejean visits Dobie Gillis Williams on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1996. Williams, who had an IQ of 65 and was convicted by an all-white jury, was executed in 1999. Prejean says he was innocent.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Courtesy Helen Prejean
Prejean's sister Mary Ann and brother Louie accompanied her to Notre Dame University when she won the 1996 Laetare Medal, awarded for outstanding service to the Catholic church and society.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Steve Helber/AP
Prejean speaks to the media after Lori Urs, right, married Joseph O'Dell just hours before his execution in Virginia in 1997. Prejean believes O'Dell was innocent, too.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Courtesy Helen Prejean
Prejean visited Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in 1998 for murders. Tucker said she got sexual gratification from the killings but later became a Christian. Prejean thought the clemency board ought to have considered the change in Tucker.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Courtesy Helen Prejean
Prejean wrote her second book, "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions" in Montana. In it, she challenges Justice Antonin Scalia's support for the death penalty and questions his Catholic faith.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Brett Coomer/AP
Prejean, right, talks with James Allridge's attorney Jim Marcus after the execution of his client in 2004. Allridge had asked for clemency based on apparent rehabilitation and a quest for redemption. Prejean believes Texas should have looked at those factors because its capital statute emphasizes, as it did in Allridge's death sentence, the "future dangerousness" of the convicted.
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Prejean was by Gov. Jon Corzine's side in 2007 as he signed a bill to repeal the death penalty in New Jersey, the first state to abolish executions through legislation since it was reinstated in 1976.
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Jeremy Portje/Telegraph Herald/AP
Prejean speaks to an audience at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012. Even at 75, she's on the road many days a year speaking to audiences about why she believes the death penalty is wrong.
Photos: Death row's nun
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Prejean leaves the courthouse in Boston on May 11, 2015, after testifying in the death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. She said she believed Tsarnaev was "genuinely sorry" for the pain and suffering he inflicted on his victims. Three people were killed and 260 were injured in the 2013 bombings.
I have profoundly disagreed with Scalia on two fronts: jurisprudence and religious faith.
As for his jurisprudence, I do not think that the only correct way to interpret the Constitution is to interpret its words (text) as, supposedly, our 18th century framers understood them.
Given what we now know about the fluid nature of text and context in linguistics, that’s an impossible task. Even more impossible is to confine ourselves to the practice of punishment as they practiced it, which, to most modern eyes, was harsh in the extreme.
In 1999, I accompanied Dobie Gillis Williams into the killing chamber of Louisiana three times before my native state finally killed him. An African American with a very low IQ, Dobie was sentenced by an all-white jury to die for supposedly killing a white woman.
I say supposedly because even though the appeals courts upheld Dobie’s guilt, I am convinced of his innocence. I tell Dobie’s story in”The Death of Innocents,” taking readers through our broken system of justice that masks truth and gets poor men like Dobie executed.
Three years after Dobie’s death came a Supreme Court decision that, had it come earlier, might well have saved his life, a decision in which Scalia fiercely dissented. In Atkins v Virginia (2002), the court ruled 6-3 that executing people with mental disabilities – that is with an IQ of 70 and below – violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments.”
In his dissent, Scalia used as his moral criterion an 18th century dictionary’s definition of “idiot” as “such a person who cannot account or number twenty pence, nor can tell who was his father or mother, nor how old he is.” According to Scalia’s perception of the Constitution as not living but dead, that archaic definition should have guided the court’s decision and not any modern understanding of diminished mental capacity. Dobie, who had an IQ of 65 but knew exactly who his mama was, would have failed Scalia’s “idiot” test.
My second argument with Scalia was the way he interpreted Catholic teaching about the death penalty. Church opposition to government executions has developed considerably in recent years, which to Scalia was anathema. He interpreted his Catholic faith as he interpreted the Constitution, staking his position in unchangeable tradition, upheld by Saints Augustine in the 5th century and Thomas Aquinas in the 12th.
These stalwart teachers, he maintained – unlike Catholic American bishops so easily swayed by “modern trends,” as he saw it – upheld the righteousness of government-imposed executions as God’s will, justified in the same way as the killing of a rabid dog or the amputation of a gangrenous limb.
Photos: Women of death row
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Georgia Department of Corrections
Kelly Renee Gissendaner was executed by lethal injection on Tuesday, September 29. She was the only woman on Georgia's death row. She was convicted in a February 1997 murder plot that targeted her husband in suburban Atlanta. Women make up fewer than 2% of the inmates sentenced to die on death row in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Photos: Photos: Women of death row
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Alabama Dept. of Corrections
Women of death row —
Patricia Blackmon was 29 when she killed her 2-year-old adopted daughter in Dothan, Alabama, in May 1999. Blackmon was sentenced on June 7, 2002.
Photos: Women of death row
Tierra Capri Gobble was 21 when she murdered her 4-month-old son in Dothan, Alabama, on December 15, 2004. She was sentenced on October 26, 2005.
Photos: Women of death row
Shonda Johnson was 28 when she murdered her husband in Jasper, Alabama, on November 30, 1997. She was sentenced on October 22, 1999.
Photos: Women of death row
Christie Michelle Scott was 30 when she murdered her 6-year-old son and committed arson in Russellville, Alabama, on September 16, 2008. The jury recommended a life sentence, but the judge sentenced her to death in August 2009.
Photos: Women of death row
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Arizona Dept. of Corrections
Wendi Andriano was 30 when she murdered her husband in Mesa, Arizona, on October 8, 2000. She was sentenced on December 22, 2004.
Photos: Women of death row
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Arizona Dept. of Corrections
Shawna Forde was 41 when she murdered a 29-year-old man and a 9-year-old girl in Arivaca, Arizona, on May 30, 2009. She was sentenced on February 23, 2011.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Maria del Rosio Alfaro was 18 when she committed burglary, robbery, and murdered a 9-year-old girl in Anaheim, California, on June 15, 1990. She was sentenced on July 14, 1992.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Dora Luz Buenrostro was 34 when she murdered her two daughters, ages 4 and 9, and her 8-year-old son in San Jacinto, California, on October 25 and October 27, 1994. She was sentenced on October 2, 1998.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Socorro Caro was 42 when she murdered her three sons, ages 5, 8, and 11, in Santa Rosa Valley, California, on November 22, 1999. She was sentenced on April 5, 2002.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Celeste Simone Carrington was 30 when she murdered a 34-year-old man during a burglary on January 26, 1992, in San Carlos, California, and a 36-year-old woman during a burglary in Palo Alto, California, on March 11, 1992. She was sentenced to death on November 23, 1994.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Cynthia Lynn Coffman was 24 when she murdered a 20-year-old woman in San Bernardino County, California, on November 7, 1986. She was sentenced to death on August 31, 1989.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Kerry Lyn Dalton was 28 when she murdered a 23-year-old woman in Live Oak Springs, California, on June 26, 1988. She was sentenced to death on May 23, 1995.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Susan Eubanks was 33 when she murdered her four sons, ages 4, 6, 7, and 14, in San Marcos, California, on October 27, 1996. She was sentenced to death on October 13, 1999.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Veronica Gonzalez was 26 when she murdered her 4-year-old niece in San Diego on July 21, 1995. She was sentenced to death on July 20, 1998.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Valerie Dee Martin was 35 when she murdered her boyfriend in Lancaster, California, on March 28, 2003. She was sentenced to death on March 26, 2010.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Maureen McDermott was 37 when she murdered a 27-year-old man in Van Nuys, California, on April 28, 1985. She was sentenced to death on June 8, 1990.
Photos: Women of death row
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California Dept. of Corrections
Michelle Lyn Michaud was 38 when she kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered a 22-year-old woman in Pleasanton, California, on December 2, 1997. S
