MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG
Mo. Digital News
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Mo. Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG
Mo. Digital News
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Mo. Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
JEFFERSON CITY - A bulky, silver cross necklace hung on a simple, slender chain draped around her neck. Her hair was a toussle of black and gray. A thin, conservative black cardigan covered the top of her small frame.
The death penalty is wrong, she said, over and over again, shaking her fist.
As a nun, she's comforted some of the most hardened criminals in Louisiana, murderers who were later put to death. She's cried with the families of victims murdered by those that criminals.
Sister Helen Prejean, played by Susan Sarandon in the 1995 award-winning film, "Dead Man Walking," came to the Capitol Tuesday to speak out against executing convicted criminals.
Unrestrained, hard-hearted vengeance and a belief that the death penalty deters crime gives the penalty a false sense of validity, Prejean said. It's nothing more than a "political symbol" for being tough on crime, she said.
"Executing the people who killed loved ones," Prejean said, "It's not going to bring them peace, it's not going to bring them healing, it's not going to bring them closure."
Prejean, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four years in a row, said the death penalty is too easy a payback for crime offenders. It is an animal-like act of revenge that does not heal wounds, she said.
"It's not serving us, it's not worthy of us," Prejean said. "I don't need this thing to help me heal."
She was flanked by death penalty opponents, many of whom were wearing green "The death penalty...We can live without it!" buttons. Several recounted gruesome, tearful tales of murdered relatives and shattered lives.
Prejean and others represented Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, a group finishing up a weeklong statewide tour protesting the 47 people Missouri has killed since 1989.
One prisoner has already died this year. Despite protests, Stanley Lingar was executed in February, while the state Supreme Court granted last-minute clemency March 6 to Antonio Richardson whom death-penalty opponents argue is retarded.
Missouri's next execution is only three weeks away. Mose Young, a St. Louis man, was convicted of killing three people in a pawnshop in 1983, and he is set to die.
Death penalty opponents cry Young had a laughably inadequate defense and Young was at the mercy of his own inept lawyer.
"There are stories that will knock your socks off," Prejean said.
Penalty opponents at the Capitol included the father of one of the victims of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Bud Welch, who lost his 23-year-old daught Julie Marie in the blast, said he was so traumatized by her death that he drank heavily for nearly a year afterward.
Yet still, after much thought, he said, he opposed the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh, scheduled to die by lethal injection May 16 in a Terre Haute, Ind., prison.
"I was so full of anger and rage," Welch said. "I didn't want a trial, I wanted them fried."
"But when we take him out of that cage to be put to death," Welch said, "we are only continuing that cycle."