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This story is based on the eyewitness account described by Sister Prejean . A sister of St. Joseph of Medaille gets asked to become a spiritual adviser for death-row inmates. Sister Prejean is caught between torn families of victims and the murderer’s execution. . Throughout her journey she sees the many ways that economics, race, and geography play a big role in the death penalty. Sister’s Prejean of St. Joseph of Medaille was teaching high school dropouts in the New Orleans projects when her friend , Chava Colon from the Prison Coalition asks her to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate. She had come to St. Thomas to serve the poor, and assumed that someone occupying a cell on Louisiana’s death row would fit that category. In 1977, at a lecture by John Vodicka, one of the founders of the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons (where her friend Chava works), she learned that the death penalty in the United States had mostly been applied in Southern states – mostly toward those who kill whites. She is handed a piece of paper with the name and address of the inmate: Elmo Patrick Sonnier, number 95281, Death Row, Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Sister Prejean was surprised when she found out her new pen pal is a white man, a Cajun from St. Martinville. She had assumed he would be black. They write to eachother and finally on Sept. 15, 1982 they meet. Sister Prejean had set a strategy that she would use with her first Death Row relationship.
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