The Death of Innocents; An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions

New York: Random House, 2005. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xvi, [1], 310, [2] pages. Illustration. Author's Note on Resources. Notes. Index. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Minor soiling to top edge and pages 306/7. Sister Helen Prejean was a little-known Roman Catholic nun from Louisiana when in 1993, her book Dead Man Walking, challenged the way we look at the death penalty in America. It became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In The Death of Innocents, she takes us to the new moral edge of the debate on capital punishment: What if we re killing the wrong man? Dobie Gillis Williams, a black man from rural Louisiana with an IQ of 65, was accused of a brutal rape and murder. Williams s inept defense counsel, later disbarred for unethical practice for unrelated cases, allowed the prosecution s incredibly contrived scenario of the crime to go unchallenged. Less than two years after Williams s execution in January 1999, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to kill a man so mentally disabled. Prejean shows how race, prosecutorial ambition, poverty, election cycles, and publicity play far too great a role in determining who dies and who lives. Prejean traces the historical underpinnings of executions in this country, demonstrating that it is no accident that over 80 percent of executions in the past twenty-five years have been carried out in the former slave states. She also raises profound constitutional questions about an appeals system that decides most death cases on procedural grounds without ever examining their merits. Sister Helen Prejean takes us with her on her spiritual journey as she accompanies two possibly innocent human beings to their deaths at the hands of the state. Prejean implores us to reflect on what is perhaps the core moral issue of the death penalty debate: Honorable people disagree about the justice of executing the guilty, but can anyone argue about the injustice of executing the innocent?