Activist nun in new fight

It’s nearly 5 p.m. and the setting sun has thickened the high winter haze over the Embarcadero into a chilly pre-dusk gloom. Alcatraz, the prison-turned-tourist stop, floats out in the white-chopped bay, and to the north, hidden behind the Tiburon Peninsula, sits San Quentin, where 41 hours earlier the state of California executed a 61-year-old triple-murderer named Donald Beardslee.

It’s a good day to talk about death. And vengeance.

Sister Helen Prejean is huddled against the cold, her slight build and thin Louisiana blood no match for the raw wind. She ducks into the Cafe de Stijl near Pier 17 for a latte, an incongruous bit of indulgence. A New Orleans-style cafe au lait you could understand. The way Prejean talks, a straight cup of no-nonsense black coffee is what you’d expect. But latte it is.

If death row has a patron saint, it would be Prejean, 65, whose experiences counseling the condemned transformed her into the nation’s leading activist against capital punishment. Her 1993 bestseller, “Dead Man Walking,” reinvigorated the anti-death penalty movement by putting a human face on the process, aided by Susan Sarandon’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Prejean in the 1995 movie. A critically acclaimed “Dead Man Walking” opera had its premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2000, and now a play written by Sarandon’s companion, Tim Robbins, who directed the movie, is being readied for the college circuit.

It turns out Prejean was just warming up. Her new book, “The Death of Innocents,” picks up the next element of the debate: If it’s wrong for a state to execute its citizens, as Prejean argued in “Dead Man Walking,” then it is even more of a moral transgression for the state to execute the innocent.

Prejean hopes the new book will be yet another spark -- this time prodding society to take a close look at the reliability of a judicial process whose finality is supreme and that varies by geography.

“We need to be angry,” Prejean says. “Don’t think that the death penalty is a peripheral moral issue about what to do with a few very bad criminals. It hits all the wounds that are present in our American life. There’s racism in it. The assault of the poor that are made to bear the burden. And it has in it a penchant, especially as we can see in this current president, to try to solve social problems

Despite the passion of activists like Prejean, what’s striking about the debate over the death penalty is how little of it there has been, particularly in California, which has the biggest death row in the nation. For those immersed in the debate, the issue is of paramount importance. For most everybody else, it is part of the background. More than 60% of Californians tell poll takers they support the death penalty, yet there is little demand for the pace of executions to pick up.

The day after Beardslee was executed, the San Francisco Chronicle printed three letters from readers about the death penalty, two for it and one against. The same page carried six letters debating Sen. Barbara Boxer’s tough exchange with Secretary of State-designee Condoleezza Rice during Rice’s Senate confirmation hearing.

Part of the reason for the disengagement: California tends not to kill its condemned, which helps keep the topic off the front burner. Beardslee’s execution just after midnight last Wednesday was the first in the state in three years. He was only the 11th death row inmate to be executed since California reinstated the death penalty in 1978.

In December, California Chief Justice Ronald George described the state’s death penalty system as “dysfunctional,” with the condemned waiting as long as four years for the court to appoint a lawyer even to begin the appeal process -- a delay he attributed to a lack of capital-case defense lawyers and state funds to pay them. “The leading cause of death on death row,” he said at the time, “is old age.”

“In something like the 95% range there is no doubt about their guilt,” says Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, which advocates for speedier executions. “The claims they make that delay the cases for years are that their defense attorney didn’t do enough at sentencing or that the jury instruction 20 years ago wasn’t aggressive enough. There’s nothing over questions about whether they did the crime.”

Rushford, who says his group is contemplating seeking an initiative to shorten the appeals process, blames the state Legislature. “The lawmakers have not been aggressive enough on this because the state Legislature simply does not represent the California voters,” Rushford says.

On the other side of the battle line, San Francisco-based Death Penalty Focus project director Stefanie Faucher also blames Sacramento for lack of action -- in banning the death penalty. “We have a governor and a legislature that have not yet been willing to engage in that dialogue,” she says.

It’s not an easy dialogue to have. On the surface, the answer seems black and white: A murderer should or should not die for his crime. But on both sides of the issue, the details can become prickly. For conservatives skeptical of the government’s ability to run programs effectively, why is there a presumption that it can get the death penalty right? For liberals concerned with inhumane treatment of the guilty, how do you redress the aggrieved relatives of the victims?

Only 38 states impose the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Twelve Southern states -- Prejean thinks it significant that they are all former slave states -- account for four out of five executions, with minorities most often being executed. “Let’s just acknowledge that we don’t know how to design a system, in practice, that can do this -- first of all, to apply it evenly,” Prejean says. “And secondly, that you’re not going to have innocents going in with the guilty.”

“The Death of Innocents” focuses on Virginia and Louisiana cases in which Prejean served as spiritual advisor to two men she believes were wrongfully condemned. Both executions, she argues, illustrate the stakes in death penalty cases -- and the consequences of a court system she believes picks process over justice and prosecutors for whom winning can be more important than the truth.

Prejean cites 117 condemned men she says have been freed in recent years after their guilt was thrown into question by DNA testing, recanted testimonies or revelations of dirty cops and ambitious prosecutors rigging evidence. Two years ago, outgoing Republican Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted all of that state’s 167 death sentences due to concerns over their guilt, a salvo in what he said was “shaping up to be one of the great civil rights struggles of our time.” Concerns about similar possible wrongful convictions led the California Senate in August to order a two-year review of the criminal justice system and recommend safeguards.

Still, the issue remains off the list of pressing national topics -- even though it is one of the most direct life-and-death policies society faces.

“Think of people’s busy lives -- people are not personally involved in the criminal justice system,” Prejean says. “Now, the minute somebody does have an experience with it, they waken very, very quickly. But if they don’t have personal experience with it, it passes them by.”

A mark of the lack of energy: Prejean spends an hour on KGO talk radio here Thursday afternoon. Local broadcaster and host Pete Wilson mostly agrees with Prejean, and only one caller argues for the death penalty -- politely.

The subject has consumed Prejean’s life, and her order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, has freed her to pursue it. Prejean has taken a vow of poverty and hands over all her royalties to the order, which sends some of it to anti-death penalty groups. The current book tour is just another part of her life on the road -- more than 150 speaking engagements a year.

Thursday night, the back room of A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books is jammed with a multiethnic and multigenerational crowd of about 125 people, drawn by both the issue and the celebrity. Prejean speaks for about 45 minutes, a roller-coaster delivery of outrage, humor and pointed comments about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a fellow Catholic whom Prejean takes to task in her book over his public comments reconciling his religious beliefs with his legal decisions.

But, mostly, Prejean agitates, hoping to spur debate and action from the crowd of sympathetic listeners. She introduces the head of Death Penalty Focus, who came with a stack of pamphlets -- including details on how to get involved -- that were quickly placed on the book-signing table. Prejean continued talking about the need for political engagement, for letters to be written and politicians visited, for enlisting young people to the cause.

“Don’t doubt that change can happen,” Prejean says, leaning emphatically on the light-wood podium. “What will paralyze us and keep us in our beds on a Monday morning ... is if we feel the powers arrayed against us are so large and so big that we are powerless to change anything. That’s why we need community. Lone Rangers don’t do well in social justice.... We need the strength of others.”

Down the filled rows of folding chairs, heads begin to nod. A few faces crease in knowing smiles. Yes, they agree silently -- an easy sale here in a city of political activists. A few minutes later, Prejean ends her talk to enthusiastic applause and moves to the small table to start signing books for a snake-line of readers. Prejean greets each person warmly, an ebullience of spirit that has not ebbed more than 12 hours into her workday. She asks for first names to personalize inscriptions, graciously accepts praise and cracks wise when it’s called for.

At her elbow, the stack of pamphlets, the ones telling how to sign up for the fight, remains largely untouched.