Well known US campaigner for the abolition of the death penalty, Sr Helen Prejean, has said she was “shocked” by the findings of the Commission of Investigation’s Report on Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland.
The 81-year-old Congregation of St Joseph Sister spoke of the “inviolable dignity of women” and lamented that women’s situation in Ireland was such that their babies could even be taken from them – “the equivalent of what we do with murderers”.
Sr Prejean, who penned the best-selling book, Dead Man Walking, blamed patriarchy in the Church and highlighted how “women’s voices still are not heard in making policies in the Church”. She added, “that disrespect of women, that sexism, is really at the root of this”.
She also blamed the Church’s fixation on sex which saw the “sins of sex” as the only sins that mattered. “All of that undergirds the terrible atrocity of taking the babies from the women and what was done there,” she told RTE Radio’s Drivetime programme this week.
Speaking about former US president Donald Trump’s spate of 13 federal executions, of which five were carried out in the final weeks of his term of office, including the only woman to be executed by the US government in 70 years, Sr Prejean said, “dominance and violence has been his style”.
She recalled Trump’s words to US governors in the wake of the outcry over the killing of George Floyd when he told them to be dominant and that they were too weak. “How can he show his dominance best – by using violence and killing a woman who had been tortured and raped her whole life and traumatised.
“His decision to start killing people simply because he had the power throws a laser beam on the fault-lines of the way the US Supreme Court set up the death penalty in the first place because it gave discretionary power to prosecutors to decide when to seek death or not.
“He had the power to kill people as president and so he started to kill people. You cannot have a system of death where it is left in the hands of venal politically-driven individuals who have that power over life and death.”
The federal death penalty was reinstated by the US Supreme Court in 1988 but executions by the federal government have remained rare. Prior to Mr Trump’s term of office, just three federal executions had taken place since 1988.
His support for five executions ahead of the inauguration of President Biden on 20th January broke with a 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.
According to Sr Prejean, there had been an outcry about this, especially the “capriciousness” of Trump’s actions and she believed that President Biden would “change everything”.
“I have great hopes for the Biden administration. I am seeing what he is going to do in his first ten days in office – getting back into the Paris Climate Accord, ending the federal death penalty, getting vaccinations across the country – he is a life man and I love it! He is a catholic who is a real catholic and doesn’t just invest all his energy into one moral issue and let all the others go.”
She criticised Trump Attorney General William Barr, who was given the Christifideles Laici (Faithful Christian Laity) award by the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast (NCPB) at their virtual prayer breakfast on 23 September 2020, the day after an execution on 22nd September which Barr as the attorney general had ordered, and the day before another execution on the 24th September.
“Here was a catholic group giving him an award for being an outstanding catholic. So, what does catholic mean? You have got to measure it against the prism of the Gospel of Jesus: are you a person of compassion or vengeance? Are you a person of justice for the poor and all the people or are you only for just a certain few?”
Expressing her hope in the people of America, Sr Prejean said she operated on hope and believed “hope is an active verb”.
“Our work is to educate the people” on capital punishment she said, and she described the American people as “waking up” to the issue.
“Thirty-four states in the United States still have the death penalty on the books and have not executed anybody in 10 years. The truth is, at the state level, we are putting the death penalty down and this huge spree of executions by Trump, I think, has really upped the ante and the dialogue and discourse. We have work to do. But I believe we are much closer to ending the death penalty.”
“My state Louisiana in the deep south killed eight people in eight and a half weeks in the ‘80s – we haven’t had an execution in Louisiana in 17 years.”
“When I came out of the execution chamber in 1984 having seen that first man electrocuted to death; it was the middle of the night and I thought to myself, the people are good but they have been made to be afraid and they don’t see what is going on here. I am the witness. I’ve got to get out there and tell the story to the people – to wake up the people. Well the people are waking up and I am full of hope. We are going end the death penalty and we are on the way to doing that.”
Loading ...
