In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying.She alsocame to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing.
Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of...