Mercy

Lethal Injection - San Quentin

Justice is not truth. My mother believed, in her heart and soul, that mercy was truth.
Douglas Adams Richards

In 1982 , we hadn't executed anybody since the '60s. I never dreamed they were going to kill him in the end. I was telling him, "Patrick, when they do this thing, look at me. Look at my face." He had tried to protect me. We had known each other for two and a half years. "Look, Sister," he said, "you've been great and you've been with me. Just pray God holds up my legs, but you can't be there at the end. It could psychologically scar you." The love of him to me, trying to protect me, and then me knowing there was no way on God's earth that man was going to be killed and not have a loving face to look at. It's not like it was virtue, it's not like it was courage, it was just simply what you or anyone would do when you're with a human being who's about to be killed.

That was a transforming point in my life. You cannot be there behind a Plexiglas screen and see the scripted death of a human being, see him being led into the room, strapped into a chair, a mask put over his face, and being killed in front of your eyes--you cannot be there and be in the presence of that kind of blinding light, and walk out and say, "I'm not going to do this any more." Something ignited in my own soul, and I guess the basic thing was that I realized that I was a witness. I had seen the death penalty close up. I got conscripted.

I remember saying to myself, when I came out of that execution chamber, "If the American people could see this, they wouldn't choose this. They don't know what's going on." This was a practice of torture, this was wrong, it's against our whole moral tradition.
Sister Helen Prejean, With a Human Being Who's About to be Killed