Since the 1993 publication of her memoir Dead Man Walking and the 1995 film it inspired, Sister Helen Prejean has become a powerful and articulate presence in the fight against the death penalty in America. In The Death of Innocents, Prejean focuses her argument on the ways in which an unjust system may be killing innocent people. She tells the story of two inmates she came to know as a spiritual adviser. Dobie Williams, a poor black man with an IQ of 65 from rural Louisiana, was executed after being represented by incompetent counsel and found guilty by an all-white jury based mostly on conjecture and speculation. Joseph O'Dell was convicted of murder after the court heard from an inmate who later admitted to giving false testimony for his own benefit. O'Dell received neither an evidentiary hearing nor potentially exculpatory DNA testing and was executed, insisting on his innocence the whole while. Besides exploring the shaky cases against them, Prejean describes in vivid detail the thoughts and feelings of Williams and O'Dell as their bids for clemency fail and they are put to death. The second part of the book details "the machinery of death," the legal process that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, dismayed at the inequities of the death penalty, cited as his reason for resigning and that current justice Antonin Scalia has boasted of being a part of. Prejean is impassioned as she describes what she sees as an arrogant attitude by both Scalia and the contemporary judicial system. Her chance confrontation with Scalia at an airport is a gripping collision of disparate worlds. In recent years, DNA testing has overturned the convictions of scores of prisoners, including many on death row. As the death penalty is increasingly called into question, Sister Helen Prejean will surely be a force in that debate. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Activist nun Prejean, whose crusade against the death penalty became widely known after Susan Sarandon portrayed her in the Oscar-winning film adaptation of her first book, Dead Man Walking, has again crafted a passionate indictment of the American criminal justice system. This time, with gripping, heartrending detail, Prejean draws on her experience advocating for two men she believes to have been innocent, but who were condemned to death row—Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O'Dell. While the book's subtitle removes any element of suspense, few readers will miss it. Instead, many will be outraged at a "machinery of death" weighted against the poor and African-Americans, featuring technical obstacles placed in the way of men desperately fighting for a fair hearing of evidence never elicited at their trials (O'Dell was denied appellate review by the highest court in Virginia because his lawyers typed one wrong word on his petition's title page). Prejean's tale involves a tragic, but not atypical, confluence of aggressive prosecutors (such as those in Louisiana, who display a "Big Prick" award featuring the state bird clutching in its talons a hypodermic needle used in lethal injections in its talons) and inept, ill-trained and apathetic defense attorneys. This damning critique should make even supporters of capital punishment pause, and the author's celebrity status, coupled with a timely message, should propel this onto bestseller lists. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In The Death of Innocents, Sister Helen Prejean, author of the justly renowned Dead Man Walking, continues her crusade against capital punishment. While her earlier book sought to generate opposition to the execution even of people who had committed "unspeakable" crimes, this volume, as its title indicates, focuses on the execution of those she believes to be innocent. "Honorable people have disagreed about the justice of executing the guilty," she writes, "but can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent?" Unfortunately, Prejean gets off to a bad start: reproducing an embarrassingly banal poem by a man who was executed. But her book soon becomes more compelling. In addition to exposing the astonishingly shoddy cases against two men she accompanied to their executions, Prejean offers general criticisms of the justice system involved in the death penalty. She also discusses the public's shifting attitudes, traces the growth of the Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty, excoriates Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's rationale for reconciling his Catholicism with his support of capital punishment and -- in moving but unoriginal terms -- tells the story of her own political transformation. ("Before, I had asked God to right the wrongs and comfort the suffering, but once in [a housing project in New Orleans] I realized that God had entrusted these tasks to me.") In her attack on the death penalty in practice, Prejean convincingly recounts appalling injustices. These include prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, reliance on untrustworthy jailhouse informants, unreasonable procedural rules, arbitrariness in sentencing, racial bias, politicized pardons boards and a public defender system frequently so inept that, as residents of her housing project put it, "Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment." Yet Prejean also outlines various proposed reforms and describes Colorado's public defender system as one of the best in the nation and "the reason that Colorado has only one person on death row." So why suppose that the aforementioned abominations are intrinsic to capital punishment? In her attack on the death penalty in principle, Prejean resorts to some questionable arguments. Consider her dismissal of even the possibility of reserving the death penalty for the "worst of the worst" murders. "Aren't all murders stunningly extraordinary in their singular and irrevocable impact?" she asks. The obvious answer, however, is yes, but not equally so. There are degrees of evil. Does anyone really doubt that raping and torturing a woman to death is worse than slipping painless, quick-acting poison into her tea? Prejean gives impressive evidence that the death penalty, as actually applied, often singles out underprivileged murderers whose victims are white. This is intolerable, but it is a far cry from her claim that "now we know [it] is impossible to determine" which murders are the "worst of the worst."Such a dubious argument is especially regrettable in view of the availability of better ones. Although there is a sense in which, as George Bernard Shaw said, "Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death," there is a sense in which it is not. Unlike the wrongfully executed, the wrongfully imprisoned can at least be compensated. Thus, unless the possibility of executing innocent people can be entirely eliminated (and how could that ever be done?), capital punishment intrinsically risks injustice of a magnitude way beyond that of lesser punishments. Prejean quotes the claim of Judge Jed Rakoff of the U.S. District Court of New York that this risk is substantial because persuasive proof of the innocence of people sentenced to death "often does not emerge until long after their convictions," though whether this would hold true in a better justice system cries out for further discussion. Prejean's willingness to give religious beliefs a role in influencing public policy also warrants more discussion -- as any sick person hoping for a cure from embryonic stem cell research can appreciate.Much of Prejean's book is engrossing. But her prodigiously detailed critique of the cases against the two men whose executions she witnessed will be heavy going for readers not enamored of "true crime" stories. Later she provides more concise grounds for believing that capital punishment has had innocent victims. She points out that even "George F. Will, a strong death penalty supporter who once called a community's desire for execution a 'noble' sentiment, was shaken by the book Actual Innocence," which includes stories of 64 wrongly convicted people freed via DNA testing, and acknowledged that "some innocent people have been executed." One surprising attraction of Prejean's book is its store of nuanced, offbeat observations. ("Southern hospitality is a real thing in Louisiana," she writes. "This is the death house, where killing is done by quiet-spoken, polite people who first serve you a fine meal and pray with you before they kill you.") Also surprising, though, are her often starkly uncharitable remarks about those with whom she disagrees. For example, she calls public support of the death penalty an "unreflected response [that] arises more from the spleen than from the brain" and writes that Justice Scalia's "icy sophistry" in a capital punishment case reveals him as "someone profoundly separated from the human family." Such invective cheapens her book.Will The Death of Innocents succeed in increasing opposition to capital punishment? Already opposed before ever hearing of Prejean, I cannot judge from my own case. Yet I would expect, as well as hope, that her impassioned exposé will sway many readers. Although the book would have profited from more rigor and less rhetoric, it has much to recommend it just as it is. Reviewed by Felicia Nimue Ackerman Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Sister Helen Prejean, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dead Man Walking (1993), has penned another wrenching firsthand account of the grim consequences of capital punishment. In her previous book, Prejean recounted the Death Row experiences and execution of an obviously guilty man. This time, she reexamines the cases of two men she fervently believes were executed for crimes they did not commit. Revisiting the trials of Joseph Robert O'Dell, an indigent Virginia man convicted of rape, and Dobie Gillis Williams, a mentally retarded man with an IQ of 65, convicted of raping and stabbing a woman to death in Louisiana, she argues convincingly that pertinent facts, forensic evidence, and eyewitness accounts that might have cleared both men were withheld from the juries by savvy prosecutors at both their trials. In addition to providing a searing indictment of capital punishment, Prejean also exposes the fundamental inadequacies of the American court system. Expect demand for this extremely thought-provoking book because of the author's previous one--especially because of its stunning movie version. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
Advance praise for The Death of Innocents

“Once again, Sister Helen Prejean has brought her fierce intelligence, critical eye and moral passion to the subject of the death penalty. The Death of Innocents is also a detective story about the flawed ways of justice in America. Sister Helen’s voice has never been more pained, more insistent–or more worthy of our attention.”
–Jeffrey Toobin

“The Death of Innocents tells us with intellect, wisdom, and passion an awful truth about the administration of capital punishment in America that we won’t or don’t want to believe–procedure arbitrarily trumps substance, maddening incompetence undermines best intentions, racism shames everyone, and innocents are executed.”
–Barry Scheck

“In Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean helped us face the questions of whether it is morally right for governments to kill the guilty. In The Death of Innocents, she ups the ante of moral reckoning: In a hopelessly flawed system of justice, what if we’re killing innocent people along with the guilty? This important and well-written book is a deeply personal, compassionate, searingly honest eyewitness account of the death penalty in America. If you are not outraged by the sheer inhumanity and unfairness of state-sanctioned killing after reading this book, it might be time for you to run for governor of Texas.”
–Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon

“The Death of Innocents points out the flaws of the system that exist not only in Louisiana, Texas, and Virginia, but in all death penalty states. Abolition will be a reality someday, thanks to the efforts and works of Sister Helen Prejean.”
—George H. Ryan, former Governor of Illinois

“Sister Helen Prejean remains the preeminent witness to our most persistent barbarism. Her eloquent testimony on behalf of the condemned and the wrongly convicted–and the example of her fellowship–can inspire all Americans to find a better way.”
–Ted Conover

“Once more Sister Helen enables us to connect on a deeply human level with those on death row. But in The Death of Innocents she also explains the seismic change in Catholic teaching on the death penalty. Following Pope John Paul’s lead, Catholics everywhere now work for the abolition of this evil.”
–Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, Auxiliary Bishop, Archdiocese of Detroit

“Sister Helen Prejean has done it again–she has written a powerful and poignant book about those whose lives are taken wrongly by our system of criminal justice.”
–Cornel West


From the Inside Flap
Sister Helen Prejean was a little-known Roman Catholic nun from Louisiana when in 1993, her first 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. Now 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, an indigent 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.

In 1986, Joseph Roger O’Dell was convicted of murder in Virginia despite highly circumstantial evidence from a jailhouse snitch. For twelve years, O’Dell sought DNA testing on the forensic evidence, which he claimed would exonerate him, but the courts refused. After his execution on July 23, 1997, the state destroyed the evidence. As a result, its conviction of O’Dell could never be scrutinized.

“The reader of this book will be the first ‘jury’ with access to all the evidence the trial juries never saw,” says Prejean, who accompanied both men to their executions. By using the withheld evidence to reconstruct the crimes for which these two men were convicted, 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.

To date, 113 wrongfully convicted persons have been freed from death row. If constitutional protections–due process, assistance of counsel, and equal justice under law–are truly being respected, how is it possible that these people were convicted in the first place? And how can we accept a system so rife with error?

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?


About the Author
Sister Helen Prejean travels extensively, giving, on average, 140 lectures a year, seeking to ignite public discourse on the death penalty. She has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight, 60 Minutes, Oprah, NPR, and an NBC special series on capital punishment. She is a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille and lives in Louisiana.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One

Dobie Gillis Williams

When I first met him I was struck by his name, Dobie Gillis, and then when I heard he had a brother named John Boy, another TV character, I knew for sure his mama must like to watch a lot of TV. Betty Williams, Dobie Williams’s mama, is here now in the death house of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a terrible place for a mama to be. It’s January 8, 1999, at 1:00 p.m., and she’s here with family members, two of Dobie’s lawyers, and me, his spiritual adviser, and we’re all waiting it out with Dobie to see if the state is really going to kill him this time.

Dobie’s had eleven execution dates since 1985 and close calls in June and November when the state came within a couple of hours of killing him but had to call it off because of last-minute stays of execution. I feel this is it, they’re going to get Dobie this time, and I’m praying for courage for him and for his mama and for me, too. I’ve done this four other times,1 accompanying men to execution, first with Patrick Sonnier in 1984, walking through this very room on his way to the electric chair, and here we are sitting with Dobie, hoping against hope he won’t have to make that walk through this room tonight. His execution by lethal injection is scheduled for 6:30. About five hours to go.

Dobie’s death is set to conclude a story that began more than fourteen years before, in the early morning hours of July 8, 1984. It was then that forty-three-year-old Sonja Merritt Knippers was stabbed to death as she sat on the toilet in her bathroom in Many, Louisiana, a small town in north central Louisiana. Mrs. Knippers’s husband, Herb, who said he was in the bedroom during the slaying, told investigators that he heard his wife yelling, “A black man is killing me,” which led police to round up three black men, Dobie Gillis Williams among them. He was home on a weekend furlough from Camp Beauregard, a minimum-security detention facility, where he was serving a term for burglary. He had been allowed the visit because he was a model prisoner, not prone to violence.

At 2:30 a.m., police officers seized Dobie, asleep on the couch at his grandfather’s house, brought him to the police station, and began interrogating him. They told him that they would be there for the rest of the night and all morning and all the next day if need be, until they “got to the bottom of this.” Three police officers later testified that Dobie confessed, and at the crime scene investigators found a bloodstain on a bathroom curtain, which the state crime lab declared was consistent in seven categories with Dobie’s, and statistically, that combination would occur in only two in one hundred thousand black people. Investigators also found a “dark-pigmented piece of skin” on the brick ledge of the bathroom window, through which the killer supposedly entered and escaped.

Dobie’s trial didn’t last long. Within one week, the jury was selected, evidence presented, a guilty verdict rendered, and a death sentence imposed.

Now, waiting here in the death house, I pray. No, God, not Dobie. I’ve been visiting him for eight years. He’s thirty-eight years old, indigent, has an IQ of 65, well below the score of 70 that indicates mental retardation. He has rheumatoid arthritis. His fingers are gnarled. His left knee is especially bad, and he walks slowly, with labored steps. He has a slight build, keeps his hair cropped close, and wears big glasses, which he says gives him an intellectual look. His low IQ forces him to play catch-up during most conversations, especially if he is in a group.

Earlier today, Warden Burl Cain asked Dobie if he wanted to be rolled to the death chamber in a wheelchair. “Dobie, we’ll do it your way, any way you want, so if you want the wheelchair, we’ll do that. It might make it easier on you, but if you want to walk, I mean that’s okay, too, no matter how long it takes. We’ll just go at your pace. If it takes a half hour, whatever it takes, it’s up to you, you can have it your way, like at Burger King, have it your way, and we’ll do anything you want to do.”

Dobie narrowed his eyes. “No way. I’ll walk.”

Later he says, “Man! Is he crazy? Let them people use a wheelchair on me? Man! No way. No way.”

The wheelchair is a sensitive issue. When Dobie got rheumatoid arthritis five years ago, his proud, fit body left him. Some of the guys on the Row started calling him “stiff,” and when they’d see a crippled person on TV, there’d be snickers as somebody yelled out, “Who does that remind you of?” Dobie would be silent in his cell.

“I just ignore them,” he’d tell me.

I notice how fast and soft and friendly the warden talks to Dobie. Of course he wants Dobie to use the wheelchair. I can tell he wants the process to go quickly so he and the Tactical Unit—the team responsible for the physical details of killing Dobie—can get it over with as soon as possible. Dobie, it is turning out, is proving difficult in several ways. There had been the last-minute stays of execution in June and November, which meant that the Tac team, Mrs. Knippers’s family members, the executioner, the support staff, the medical staff, and the ambulance crew that removes the body—all these people had to come back and go through it again, which is hard on everybody. Plus, Dobie rejected the offer to eat his final meal with Warden Cain as two other executed prisoners had done. That must have felt like a slap in the face, because the warden felt he was doing his best to show Christian fellowship to these men before they died.

The meal with the other condemned men—Antonio James and John Brown—had gone well, with clean white tablecloths and the menu and guests selected by the prisoner—lawyer friends and spiritual advisers—along with the guests the warden himself invited—a couple of friendly guards and Chaney Joseph, the governor’s attorney (who formulated the state’s current death penalty statute and stands ready to block any legal attempt to halt an execution). At these final meals they had all held hands and prayed and sung hymns and eaten and even laughed, and one of these scenes was captured on ABC’s Primetime Live when a story was done about Antonio James. In the Primetime piece, there at the head of the table was Warden Cain, like a father figure, providing the abundance of the last meal—boiled crawfish—making everything as nice and friendly as he could, even though when the meal was done the inevitable protocol would have to be followed and, as warden, he would be obliged to do his job. In the chamber, he’d nod to the executioner to begin injecting the lethal fluids into the arm of the man whose hand he was holding and with whom he was praying.

The warden is fond of quoting the Bible, and the verse he quotes to justify state executions is Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, which states that civil authority is “the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” Yes, this distasteful task laid on his shoulders is backed up by God’s word, which he tries hard to follow because he takes very seriously the eternal salvation of every man in this prison entrusted to his care. Warden Cain would do anything to avoid carrying out the death penalty, but it goes with the territory of being warden, and he likes being warden and is only a few years from retirement. So he goes along reluctantly and tries to be as nice to the condemned and their families as he can.

He could do what Donald Cabana, the former warden of Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi, did. Warden Cabana quit his job because his conscience wouldn’t allow him to participate in executions. In his book, Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner, he tells of presiding over the execution of two men in the gas chamber at Parchman. The second one, that of Connie Ray Evans, really got to Cabana because he liked the man, and they talked often and long. He tried truthfully to answer Connie Ray’s questions about how best to deal with the gas when it came, telling him to breathe deep, that it would be over faster that way.2 Then, after watching the dying man gasp for breath and twitch and strain against the straps in the chair, Warden Cabana quit the job, and today he gives lectures against the death penalty to anyone who will listen.

Warden Cain could choose to do that. He has confided to one of Dobie’s defense attorneys that he draws the line when it comes to women. Louisiana has one woman on death row, Antoinette Frank, and the warden says, no, he just couldn’t execute a woman, that he’ll quit before he does that. I wonder if he realizes that he’s the first trigger of the machinery of death—he nods and a man dies. The death certificate states the true nature of the deed: “Cause of death: homicide.” Maybe there’s a qualifying word, “legal,” but it’s homicide all the same.

When Dobie turned down the warden’s invitation to share his last meal, he said, “I ain’t going to eat with those people. It’s not like, you know, real fellowship. When they finish eating they’re going to help kill me.” He is the first one up for execution who’s turned down the warden’s invitation, and I’ve heard through the prison grapevine that the men on the Row respect him for it.

We’re all sitting around a table with Dobie in the death house visiting room: Jean Walker, Dobie’s childhood sweetheart; his mama; his aunt Royce; his brother Patrick; his four-year-old nephew, Antonio; two lawyer friends, Carol Kolinchak and Paula Montonye; and me. Dobie’s mama has her Bible open and puts her hand on it, saying, “No, not this time, either, they’re not going to kill you, Dobie, because in Jesus’s name I’ve claimed the victory, oh yes, in faith I claim the victory because God’s in charge, not man, God is the lord of life and death, and in Him is the victory, and you must believe, Dobie, you must trust, as the psalm says, Oh, God, you are my rock. Do you believe, Dobie, are you trusting God to bring you through this? Do you have faith?”

Her words are strong and urgent, and they shore her up against this dark and dreadful process. She is trying to infuse the spiritual strength she feels into her son, who says softly, “Yeah, Mama, I believe.”

“Say it like you mean it, Dobie, say it with conviction.”

“Yeah, Mama, I believe, I do.”

Dobie sits close to Jean, now back in his life after twenty or so years. She’s declared herself “strong in the Lord” and has her husband’s approval for these visits. She wants Dobie to be “strong in the Lord,” too. She heard about Dobie’s pending execution and reappeared in his life a few weeks before his June death date some eight months ago, and he can’t stop touching her. During earlier visits in the death row visiting room—not now—he was like a playful teenage boy, sitting close to her, pinching her arms, thumping her head, teasing her, coaxing, telling her how cute her smile and her eyes were. When his mama had enough of it and told him to leave her alone, he smiled and said, “I just like to pick at her.” His mama would open the Bible, read a passage, and press him for the meaning. Sometimes she would read lengthy passages and Dobie would say, “Not so long, Mama. Pick a short one. I just want to visit.”

My faith doesn’t give me the same assurance Dobie’s mama feels that he won’t be killed tonight. I’m praying that God will give him the strength and the courage he needs to overcome fear. Dobie’s been telling me how the fear eats at him. He was glad when Jean brought him a black baseball cap with the words of Isaiah, “Fear Not,” embroidered in white letters on the front. Prison rules forbid prisoners to wear hats with any sort of logo, but the guards let the “Fear Not” hat slide. Dobie’s worn it for three solid weeks except in the shower, and he wanted badly to wear the hat here in the death house, but the guards took it away when he was brought in at 9:30 this morning. “Man,” he says, stretching out the last part of the word, “mannnn, they won’t even let me have my hat.” It’s one more disappointment, but he tucks it somewhere inside, because after fourteen years of living in the “waiting to die” place, he’s used to holding himself in check and not wishing too hard for anything.

Dobie is sitting at the end of the table with his back to the window, through which you can see one of the two guards with automatic weapons guarding the front door. With the lagoon outside and the flowers in pots near the front entrance, you’d never know this is a building where people are put to death. And when you’re inside, all you see is a room with tables and chairs, two vending machines, and at the far end a white metal door. Behind this door, always kept locked, is the black cushioned gurney and the witness room with two rows of plastic chairs. Everything is neat and painted fresh and clean, the gray floor tiles polished and gleaming. The warden has had two large murals painted on the walls of this room, one of Elijah being taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot and the other of Daniel in the lion’s den, the lions with yellow, glinting eyes and Daniel looking upward toward an opening from which heavenly light pours. In the scripture stories, both men escaped death. Elijah was taken up to heaven alive in the chariot, and Daniel, through God’s power, persuaded the lions not to eat him. I sense in the murals an effort to make this a holy place, a place that’s not really so bad, because here you get to go to God.

This is a place where everything is run by protocol. Each step of the execution process has been carefully chiseled out. “Here’s what we do if he goes peacefully. Here’s what we do if he fights us. Okay, now, when we get in the room, I strap the legs, and you, the chest, and you, the right arm.” Everybody knows his part in the ritual. The Tac team has practiced over and over, so when it comes to the real thing they can do what they have to do. Plus, they’re bolstered by the law, by general popular support for the death penalty, and by the knowledge that all the courts in the land and the U.S. Congress say it’s constitutional to do the deed they’ll be doing tonight. Sometimes even the prison chaplains give their blessing to the act, backing it up, of course, with a quote from the Bible.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Sister Helen 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." To date, well over one hundred wrongfully convicted persons have been freed from death row. If constitutional protections - due process, assistance of counsel, and equal justice under law - are truly being respected, how is it possible that these people were convicted in the first place? And how can we accept a system so rife with error?

FROM THE CRITICS

Adam Liptak - The New York Times

The Death of Innocents comes alive when the author discusses her time with Williams and O'Dell. Her prose is, as in ''Dead Man Walking,'' luminous, undecorated, angry and very moving. Her description of the comfort she offered to these men in their final hours and the torment they endured in anticipating their ends tests our conception of human decency.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman - The Washington Post

In her attack on the death penalty in practice, Prejean convincingly recounts appalling injustices. These include prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, reliance on untrustworthy jailhouse informants, unreasonable procedural rules, arbitrariness in sentencing, racial bias, politicized pardons boards and a public defender system frequently so inept that, as residents of her housing project put it, "Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment."

Kirkus Reviews