SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we are here to regularly present you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have paid for a consultation. And now for your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz of Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I'm telling it to you again, I tell you, all the time. I'm having so much trouble controlling my excitement about today's guests. We have Sister Helen Prejean, whose name goes without needing an introduction, and my third-time co-guest, Christopher Floor. Sister Helen Prejond has written such famous books as Dead Man Walking, and where she was portrayed by Susan Sarandon or Susan Sarendon, however you pronounce that. I first met her over 30 years ago. And what really drew me to Sister Helen was how she drew me into her sphere. I walked up to her after she gave a speech at an NA or a talk at an NACDL meeting, and I asked something along the lines of, how do I deal with people raising objections to ending the death penalty by saying, Does that mean also end war? And she literally took me by the forearm, drew me into her, and said, We can't be, or maybe it wasn't, that's not what she said, but something like that. We can't be letting there be distractions. With that, I'm going to start with Sister Helen. Please introduce yourself to everyone.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

Hey, look, glad to be with you. Uh, especially with something called beat the prosecution, because boy, it is so against poor people when they go into trial. So, Catholic nun, Sister St. Joseph, taught kids uh for about 25 years. I was not a mean nun. I didn't slap them with rulers and stuff. I like my kids. In fact, I still meet with two of my former students. One's a lawyer, one's a librarian. We still meet together. But then awakened to social justice, that the gospel of Jesus was more than just simply being kind to the people around me. Grew up in privilege, grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with African American servants. My daddy, a successful lawyer, had a servant's quarters behind our big two-story house. Only knew African American people in the Jim Crow days as our servants, never went to school, totally isolated, and then woke up. Woke up to social justice as an integral part of the gospel of Jesus. Moved then out of the suburbs into the inner city, and then my education began. I began to live with African American people as my peers and my teachers. And from then on I learned, wrote a letter then to a man on death row thinking I was only going to be writing letters. Jesus is sneaky. So, Chris, you've already learned this from the maris. If you learned about the gospel, sneaky, sneaky Jesus thought I was only going to be writing letters. And the guy, Pat Sonye, ends up being electrocuted to death two and a half years later. And I am with him, and I witnessed his killing. And it changed my life.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Well, we're going to go on and on here, but I don't want to ignore Chris. But before we do that, is your website sisterhelen.org.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

And uh you can easily donate money there, everyone. I'm going to be doing that today.

SPEAKER_03 3:57

Oh, yeah, you want to donate money there. You you want to go to work and you want to donate money there because we need all the help we can get.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Absolutely agreed. Well, it only took over about a year for me to get you onto the show. You had a uh a writing sabbatical, for instance. Well, with that, what were you writing and has it been published yet?

SPEAKER_03 4:15

And still writing it. I've been accompanying a man on death row in Louisiana for over 20 years. He's been on death row 33 years, and he's totally innocent. I'm writing a book about what the prosecution did to him in Louisiana. Be good to get into that a bit because it's so atrocious what happened there. But we want to hear from Chris. We will.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

We do want to hear from Chris. Chris, please introduce yourself for the third time on Beat the Prosecution.

SPEAKER_02 4:45

Well, it's a special honor to be here with Sister Alan and you, my friend. Um, so my name is Chris Floor. I am a criminal defense attorney that practices out of Maryland. I am a native New Yorker and did about eight years in the Legal Aid Society, which is their public defender's office. And uh now uh have a small practice with an associate uh right here in between Annapolis and Baltimore. And I'm really it's as John always starts off the podcast, which I listened to many of his, that he can't contain himself. This is definitely a tough one for me to contain myself. I said I'm gonna be too starstruck for sister. So um yeah, glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Well, you lifting your horn by giving everyone your website, Chris.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Uh uh floorlaw.com, flo-h-r l-a-w dot com.

SPEAKER_03 5:38

Because when he steps in the courtroom, he floors them. I could see it happening.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Uh Sister Helen, there's so much that people need to know about you. One thing that I want to know is um what keeps you going? You were born in 1939. I guess a lot of your fellow uh nuns would be retired fully retired by now. And what type of uh meditative or other personal practice do you use to keep going and not to let yourself be crushed and dealing against the death penalty and all other injustices?

SPEAKER_03 6:13

Well, I'm gonna tell you flat out, you know what my hope is. And you know, hope is a verb, it means you're doing something because if you're just standing on the side of the river and looking at all the devastation going on, you got nothing but despair. It's a verb because you're active and the life flows through you. My hope is the American people. I've been doing this for 30 years, plus going to talk to them, writing the books, working to get the film done out there to people. In fact, I was just getting ready for a podcast that we're gonna be doing, and the Ukrainian archbishop was gonna be on it, and the first thing he said was, I saw the movie, I read your book. I had no idea when I wrote that book of what a book could do. I just didn't know. Because I'm from Louisiana, we believe in talking to each other. I mean, a book was a passive thing, you know, had to sit on a bookshelf. And it's the people, it's the people. And Thurgood Marshall, we've been following his mandate. A lot of the American people say they believe in the death penalty. Bring them close, teach them about it, and they're not gonna support the death penalty. And I have found that to be absolutely true. They're separated from it. Even when I was with a man executed in Texas, there were people in Texas that did not even know Texas had the death penalty. People are separated, and there's this saying in Latin America what the eye doesn't see, the heart can't feel. But because I'm a witness, when I go to talk to a class, to talk to anybody, I bring them with me into the personal experience and as witness, tell them what I saw, tell them what I learned. And I think it's kind of been helpful that I didn't know what I was doing. You know, all while Tim Robbins was working on the screenplay, he kept saying the nun is in over her head. I was, and I think that helped with the book because there were books written on the death penalty. Dead Man Walking came out in '93 with 80% support of the American people up for the death penalty in 1993. And look what it is now. And that's because give people a chance to reflect, bring them close. And they get it. People, for the most part, have good hearts and don't want to have the government killing people for them.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Yes, Chris, you have questions.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Um, I have many, uh, but um I um I definitely was taken by the the line about what the eye doesn't see, the heart can't feel, and the importance of that in our work. I guess one place to start, sister, is you've been around a lot of cases, a lot of defense teams, and met a lot of lawyers. And John's podcast is directed towards helping those of us that do this work be better at it. So could you share some of the things that you've seen? What makes the difference between a good criminal defense lawyer and a not so good criminal defense lawyer?

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Oh, yeah. I mean, the I learned this. The Constitution is really just a bunch of words. If you don't have anybody by your side to actualize those words, you don't have those rights. They don't exist. So my dearest friends, and the people who inspire me the most are the lawyers getting in there with people and standing by their side and then doing what they can to preserve the dignity of their life. Sometimes they're the only ones. The clients see, the families have dropped away, prisons are far away. Defense lawyers to me are like the warriors, the the go-to people that make all the difference. It was one of the first things I learned when I took this first man I wrote the letters to on death row. I didn't realize the importance of the lawyer. I just thought kind of justice automatically worked. Here was the constitution, here was due process, you know. Uh, here was all the rights. Uh I thought it just worked. And then boy, they were getting ready to kill Pat Sonye, and I learned what real dedicated lawyers did. Uh, Millard Farmer, I don't know if y'all ever heard of him with team defense. You know him? Did you know him?

SPEAKER_02 10:40

The man that filed an ocean of motions. I knew as protege Rich Brennan, we were classmates. So yeah, I know Mr.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

Come on, Chris. Really?

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Oh, yeah. Okay, well, but didn't get to meet him.

SPEAKER_03 10:51

Yeah, well, what a guy, huh? I mean, he died recently, but um, I had never taken a case before, I just was a spiritual advisor. Just thought, well, I'll be with this guy no matter what happens. But but when we went for arguments before the Fifth Circuit, a notoriously lethal court, as you know, I could see that Pat's lawyer was sweating and he didn't know what he was doing. In fact, he even had one of the Fifth Circuit judges say to him, Well, Mr. So-and-so would have been helpful. So I came out of that courtroom not knowing much about the law at all, but I'd heard about this guy, Millard, Millard Farmer. Got his number, called him up, hit him like a fire hose. Mr. Farmer, Mr. Farmer, I don't know you. Look, I'm a Catholic nun. I got this man, I'm I'm in spiritual advisor. I think they're gonna kill him, Mr. Farmer. Can you help us? Can you help us? And there was a pause. And then I heard that Georgia gravelly voice, we're gonna help you. Sister, we're gonna help you. I had no idea what the hip was gonna be. I knew we needed it. He said, Mail me the transcripts. So I was supposed to have lunch with one of the sisters, so we spent that lunch period going in Xerox and the transcripts and sending them to this man, Mr. Former, who would drive all night from Atlanta and come with Kim Ellen Trunkel, who work with him, and a wonderful young man, too. I forget his name. And first thing they did was go to visit. Went with him. And on the way, and I do this in Dead Man Walking, it's a great time to be sharing with the reader what you're learning because they know I don't know anything coming into it. And that proved to be a gift for the book. The nun done know what she's doing, she's learned, so okay, we'll go along with her. And he began to teach me just what defense does, why defense is so important. So he said, What we're gonna do now? Look, I want you to know our man is really up against it. It's here in Louisiana, and boy, they're really cranking up the death penalty. This happened. I contacted him in 1983. Pat was to be executed in '84. And driving all night, boy, I saw that dedication, you know. And at one point I just said to him, Mr. Former, how'd you get so involved with this death penalty stuff? And he said, Well, I kind of came from a family with means, but I took a section of in law school called poverty law. And he saw the other side, he saw what people were experiencing, and that galvanized his heart. It galvanized him. And I remember that first visit with Pat. We went in to see him together, and he said, Now, Pat, we got a wagon right here. And we want to see how many rocks we can put in this wagon of what we can use in your appeal. First question Did you confess? Yes. And because he was scared. He was scared they were gonna pistol whip him. And then no rock in the wagon there. And then he was there when two teenagers were killed by his brother, but he confessed to it because he was scared. And just we left that visit with no rocks in the wagon. But boy, he was fighting. And he said, Every time I go to visit my clients on death row, when they look in my eyes, I see only one question. Am I gonna die, Mr. Farmer? Or are they gonna kill me? And he looks them right in the eye and he says, You are not gonna die. I don't know how we're gonna do this, but we're gonna fight to the end, and you are not gonna die. And even in the last hours when we were waiting on the execution of Pat Sony, he was at the governor's mansion there in Baton Rouge at a cocktail party, hovering in there with the guests to get to that governor eye to eye to say, do not kill this human being. God, he was a fighter. And I learned from him. And I learned there was plenty to learn. And I started learning for him and started fighting, and you never give up. You never, never, never give up.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

Sister Alan, for the people who don't know the story of Dead Man Walking, could you uh please tell everyone uh about that defining moment that um got you to uh be working against the death penalty and working on both uh sides, dealing with the people on death row and also dealing with the uh victims' families?

SPEAKER_03 15:45

Yeah, well, it it kind of was a process. First of all, I got involved with poor people, saw the struggle for justice of African Americans that I had been, because I was in the privileged class out in the suburbs, okay, with a good educational. And boy, when then it being immersed with people that didn't have health care, that had the police beating them up, that couldn't lived in public housing, couldn't get the plumbing fixed. I mean, it was like a whole other country with a whole other set of rules, and I could see the suffering, and it was in that soil that I got the invitation. Hey, Sister Helen, you want to write to somebody on death row. And this was 82. The Supreme Court had put the death penalty back in 76. I hadn't even noticed that, I didn't know that. And they were beginning to crank it up to kill again. I mean, Louisiana ended up killing eight people in eight and a half weeks in the 80s. I mean, we were doing it, and so anyway, I write this guy, and he writes back, and I just realized that he had nobody to visit him. I haven't met Miller yet or anybody. He had nobody to visit him. His mama couldn't even go on death row because she was so mentally broken by what had happened. Her two sons had been involved in the murder, killing these two innocent kids. It was horrible. She couldn't even go in a grocery store in town. Pat Sonyer's mother, Gladys Sonyer, lived in this little town, St. Martinville. And she'd overhear people saying there. She is that white trash woman. Her sons killed the Bork and the LeBlanc children. So she was like a little hermit. And she couldn't make her way, she could not make herself walk into that building on Death Row in Louisiana where they were gonna kill her boy. She couldn't do it. So I realized he's alone. He didn't even ask me to come. He was just doing these letters. And I don't know, it was that what is it in us as humans, that compassion that you feel, oh my God, it ain't gonna kill this guy. I didn't know how real it was. Uh, but I'll write him the letters, even if he doesn't write back. So I figured I pictured myself like a little lighthouse. I'll keep writing him the letters. Just pinging out there to him, just saying, look, praying for you, thinking of you. And then when I realized he wasn't ever gonna get anybody to visit him because his own mama couldn't come, I wrote him a letter. I just said, Look, I'll come see sometime. I pictured doing a little enron to go to the prison. I didn't know it was gonna consume my whole life. You don't know these things. When you put your boat in the current, I bet y'all can tell the stories too. You put your boat in the current, next thing you know, you're in these eddies. And I visited him and I and I take people through this journey in Deadman Walking. First time I go to the prison, how scared I am. Never, and this is not what nuns do. I mean, that visitor sign, when you go in a visitor room, you can be strip search and have dog sniffing and stuff. I went, I am out of my league. I don't know how I got here, but here I am. And then when the guards brought him in, and I looked at his face for the first time. It's the first time I'd ever been in the presence of somebody who had committed murder, and I thought his face was gonna look mean. He was a murderer, and I couldn't believe how human he was. We had two hours and the time flew by. I was listening to him, I was present to him, and I left there knowing. I I put my hand up on the wire cage that separated us, and I said, Pat, I'll be back. You can bank on it, and I knew the main thing I had to do was just be faithful. I think Mother Teresa said something like that. I know Gandhi did too. The main thing you may not be successful, but you gotta be faithful. And I knew I'd be coming back, and I did to see him through to the end.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

So that was a huge step. And what inspired you in addition to be helping out the uh the uh families of crime victims, of murder victims?

SPEAKER_03 20:03

Well, first I was making a big mistake. I made a big mistake with that at first. I didn't know what to do with them. I mean, some of one of the fathers, the girl, his daughter had been killed. He was having his own blooming press conference saying how he wanted to pull the switch on Pat Sonier and his brother Eddie. And so I thought, oh, I can't exactly show up at that door, just say, hi, can I help? I'm a spiritual advisor to the two people who killed your kids. So I stayed away from them. And boy, I had a good editor. I don't know if y'all ever heard of Jason Epstein at Random House. He was the managing editor. And he let me out wrote the whole first draft of Dead Man and Walking, then went up to New York, sat with him, we looked at it. And there are two big things he helped me with, or you never would have heard of this book. One was about, he said you wait far too long, talk about the crime, you're so into the human rights of this person, not being executed, nobody's gonna read your book, and you got the nun thing working against you because they're gonna say, Oh, yes, he's a nun, she believes in Jesus, forgiveness. They're not even gonna read your book. If you don't talk about those two teenage kids killed in cold blood in the first 10 pages of this book, nobody's gonna read your book. And then the other thing was about the victim's family, because I said, I had never done this before. I stayed away from them. They just seemed to be in such pain. I didn't know what I could do. And he looked me right in the eye and he just said, Well, it was cowardice, wasn't it? You were scared, weren't you? I said, Yeah. He said, So look when you write your book, don't just take people with you on the peaks of the waves where he did it great. That was a big mistake not to reach out to them in any kind of way. And so he really helped me with that. And then the story in Dead Man Walker, which the movie captured beautifully, it was only Right the week before Pat was executed, I met the victim's family at the pardon board hearing where they had come to speak for the execution. That's when I met them. It couldn't have been more polarized. Couldn't have been more polarized. And boom, we were walking outside. The girls' parents didn't even want to look at me. They were furious. They walked by in stony silence. But right behind them was Lloyd Leball, who's the hero of Dead Man Walking, this man. And he went right up to me and he just said, Sister Hella, all this time you've been visiting with those two murderers that killed our boy, and you didn't once come see us. Didn't you ever think that maybe we needed somebody to talk to?

SPEAKER_01 22:46

So he approached you first. He did it.

SPEAKER_03 22:50

He did it. And I was so wrong. And then he invited me to come pray with him. He's a good Catholic guy. And we pray in this little chapel. And he really is the one who brought me into what? Forgiveness. He said, most people think forgiveness is weak. It's like you're condoning it. But he said, That anger was building up in me. I was making my wife cry. I've always been a kind person and I was losing it. And he made me even look at the word to give before. Forgive doesn't mean condone. It just means give it over so that you don't lose your own life. And when he and see, we'd be praying in this little chapel together, then after a while, I got to be go to pray, then go for breakfast, and we're talking and talking and talking and talking together and forming a friendship and a trust. And I still remember the day where he just said, I'm losing it. I'm so angry all the time. I've always been a kind person. And then he put his hand out like that at one point, and he said, Uh-uh. But I'm not gonna let him kill me.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 24:04

He explained forgiveness.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

Right.

SPEAKER_03 24:09

So y'all know a little bit about this.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:14

Said Chris.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Yes. Oh, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 24:19

You got anything to share with me?

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Um I wanted to you to share with the audience that's listening uh the uh the quote from Saint Bonaventure that you had uh used in the past. And I think that's a good invitation for the kind of folks that are listening and the kind of folks that do this work.

SPEAKER_03 24:43

Yeah, and I bet you the reason you recognize that is because it's already in you, Mr. Chris. It's the quote from Bonaventure that says, Ask not for understanding, ask for the fire. See, the fire is the passion, and the fire is getting sealed in looking into the eyes of this human being that people are trying to kill, and you go that deep realization every human being is worth more than the worst thing they've ever done in their life. We can never be identified completely with inactions. All that's in there. So the fire is the passion. So, what led you to ask me about Bonaventure? Because you already got it, Chris. I'm gonna guess. Am I right?

SPEAKER_02 25:31

It's tough some days. And I want to follow up too on John's question that you know, here we are dealing with difficult cases, and you've now witnessed several human beings having their lives taken at the hands of the state, murdered right in front of you. And it's kind of hard to like comprehend when you walk out of there how you wouldn't just say, that's enough for me. Uh, I wrote the letters, I wrote the books, this is this is where I stop. And having had the benefit of listening to Brian Stevenson many times, who I know that you know. Uh it's just the thought of if you guys can do that, you know, what that young lawyer who's scared going into court tomorrow for that first misdemeanor trial. Uh, you know, is it a combination of things? Is there some habits you learn from other folks? But just the nitty-gritty of how do you be able to take care of yourself to be able to take care of others?

SPEAKER_03 26:34

Yeah. But you know, and that was something Miller when it was getting toward the end and it looked like they were going to kill Pat. And in fact, they did his saying to me, they killed him, but what you did with him, you stood for his dignity and you were there for him. And that will always be the most treasured thing that you can ever do for and with a human being. And he really upheld that, that the state had had their way with him and killed him, but that dignity, you know, that precious love and being there for him, presence, could never be taken away. And I found that that Bonaventure fire is that I carry them with me. I cannot walk away from it. Oh, well, that's too hard for me to do. Well, look what they're going through. Look what they're going through. You know how it's like you can't. And in fact, I gotta tell you, when you read the story, I did try to walk away after after uh Pat was killed. Sister Helen, I heard you taking another death row in me. Uh-uh. I said, You heard that wrong, Millard. I'm not going back there. Uh-uh. And he gave me about six months to heal. And he came over, knocked at my door, and sat down in my living room and said, Sister Helen, we have two other Louisiana cases, Robert Lee Willie and Willie Selstein. And we need you on our team. And I looked at that man's eyes and I went, Well, he's not saving himself from afar. He's going back. And I realized that it does help to be on a team with the lawyers, that that you're in there with them and you're all working on it together. And he was very much a team player. Like, you have any insight on the case, you're not a lawyer. Any insight, anything. We'd all meet together, you know. And it was his own courage and going back in the fire that really inspired me to come back. I said, okay, I'll take them one at a time. And that's what I've done ever since. So I've accompanied eight human beings now to execution. It's always part of a team. And I don't know if y'all have heard of Richard Glossop's case, but yeah. I mean, he may very well get a new trial. I mean, when he called me, he was just asking me to be with him when he was executed. I had no idea that he could possibly be saved and not die. But boy, you get in there and you fight every inch of the way and you never give up.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

That that team spirit uh that you mentioned is is so important for dealing with uh uh fighting the fear, fighting with the fire. Uh and let's get to prayer, you know. This idea of I believe fully in the First Amendment's uh uh separation of church and state and and non-establishment clauses, but that doesn't mean not to pray. I mean, I know the power of prayer. Uh over every meal, I say the uh I say the uh Jewish prayer over the bread and Namu my horenge kyo, the Odamoku, right back there. I don't know if you know my uh uh friend and peace teacher Junia Suda from Nipponzan Myohoji, but she did that calligraphy behind me, the peace prayer, Namu Mio Horenge kyo. And even from the religious standpoint, before I won a trial uh in court two years ago, my clients' family, very religious Christians, we all held hands and uh they they all prayed for me and my client. That really fired me up all the more. And uh, I don't know if you know about my uh work with uh uh Phil Berrigan and some of the other plow shares. I was with Ramsey Clark in 2000 fighting for them at their uh uh multi-day jury trial for having hammered on some warp police.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

Look at Mel Rodham and I knew Phil and I knew uh Dan uh visit him in New York, yeah. But prayer, what's prayer? You know, I used to think prayer before I got involved with poor people in the struggle for justice, asking God to take care of the stuff in the world. I mean, look at these suffering people, look at these problems. God, do something, do something. And then what I've learned is it's like God strikes the fire in our heart, and then we do it. And that fire keeps us going because we get tired, we get overwhelmed, we get confused, it's too much. And then you go to prayer, begin every day with prayer and meditation, the scripture stories. We're just feeding off all these great stories from the Hebrew Testament right now about Jonah. God tells him to go west and he runs east and go get on a boat to do the opposite, and he runs it all. I mean, it's just like following what is the will of God, and boy, we got a good Pope now. We got a good Pope in Leo following Francis' footsteps of go to the margins, go to where the people are, go with them, and they teach us. So it's not so much right now with Manuel Ortiz, who's my man that I'm writing about, who's been on death row for 33 years, his own faith. Our faith meets. It's not me pouring myself out and giving this poor wretch faith. I'll meet it in him that he could withstand 33 years and not lose his spirit, not lose his spirit, and there are many faces of God, like for him, he's from El Salvador, it's our Lady of Guadalupe, but Jewish or the Pope just spoke out uh for uh Ramadan, and this great lawyer friend I have who has represented people in Guantanamo, her client was waterboarded 180 times, and she's learned to take Ramadan and the teachings of the Quran very seriously because he does. And they have the group now in Guantanamo where there are maybe five or six of them in a special section where they can cook, you know, the food, they can do the fasting, they can meet for prayer. Prayer is that deepest well in us that keeps springing up, you know, for Christians. It's that the love of Christ was you even give your life for each other, that it's not self-serving, that it goes out to others. And uh that's that's what we strive for.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

I'm interested in knowing this then. Before the Catholic Church uh came out so resolutely against the death penalty, with at least the current Pope, and I guess maybe the previous Pope, how much uh pushback did you have uh at all, if at all, from the uh the church structure, and how much support did you have? And and at what point were you able to just take uh take your own route? I mean, did you really have any uh stop having some supervisor at some point for the most part?

SPEAKER_03 33:50

Yeah, well, it is in a way, as you unfold. A lot of our sisters weren't doing this, but I discovered it and and knew what I needed to do. So when you want to talk about the Catholic hierarchy, we had Archbishop in New Orleans, he was fought a death penalty. Here I was visiting this man on death row and beginning to be with people executed, and no Louisiana bishop could show up at any legislative hearing because you had the archbishop fought a death penalty because he had been a chaplain in the blooming military. So not much there, and I couldn't find much of a hearing in any Catholic parish, but kept plugging at it. Now you got to know that when the Catholic Church did finally change the Catholic official Catholic teaching in the catechism, happened in August 2018. Pope Francis is the one who did it. It was 1,500 years of dialogue. And I don't know if you heard Catholics talk about this synod process, synodal. Have you heard that word? You know what that means? It means the experience of the people rising up, sharing it together across lines, like and when you have that process, you might have a cardinal sit next to a teenager and they both get 10 minutes, and that's what happened with the death penalty. More more people like me kept going into death row, having these experiences of executions, and the experience of the people bubbles up within the church, and you share it, and that's how we finally changed, being against slavery. The church upheld slavery at one point, and the sticking point in the teaching was to uphold the right of the state to take life, and that had been from the time of Augustine in the fifth century when you had the Goths and Visigoths beating down the gates of Rome and it was chaos. And then Saint Augustine was the first to say the the violent evildoers can be coerced with the sword. In other words, you can use violence. That did not come from the gospel of Jesus, it came from historical situations where then the church said, but it was always, if you notice this, it was always about defending society. It was never this tit for tat. There's some crime so evil by their very nature, the only just punishment is to kill them. That's what the Supreme Court did in the great decision, but that wasn't the teaching of the church, it was self-defense, like Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century said it was like cutting off a gangrenous arm. It was always for to defend the people. But then prisons began, have a way to keep the people safe without imitating the crime. It's the only punishment where you actually imitate the crime to for the punishment, and it grows. And then that development, it's kind of like seeds growing, it's very gradual, and I participated in. I've had a chance to encounter two popes along the way. But it's always the encounter with the people. That very thing I told you is the source of my hope. It's people, the people are gonna get it. We just gotta get to the people, and that's what helped the church to finally change those words. No matter how grievous a crime, you can never entrust over to governments the right to take life. Because it's gonna be the government setting up the system. It's gonna be the government deciding the criteria who you can kill. This crazy thing from Greg. Two main fault lines in that decision. One fuzzy, impossible criteria, only the worst of the worst, not ordinary murders. Nobody knows what to say in hell that means. Can you tell me the difference between it? Worse of the worst, every taking of a human being, universe of a person out of life is the worst of the worst. And then the other thing, where they coupled it with such great discretionary power for prosecutors to seek death and not. So look at the deep south states, ex-slave states, and look at those prosecutors cutting notches on their belt when they run. Like, look at our lawyer, I mean, our governor right here in Louisiana. Jeff Landry campaigned on. We're gonna empty out death row. This is the mode we're in right now. Political violence. Look, we're about to go into Iran, for God's sake. I mean, not Iran, Syria. Anyway, but look at the violence. Look at the violence. I mean, you just hear the rhetoric. Oh, well, he ought to be executed. Oh, that's treasonous. We ought to execute them all. But the people are good, and we and we know the truth. And we get in there and we tell them, and we do it through story. You can't just go out there and give them a bunch of stats and statistics.

SPEAKER_01 39:00

I'm happy you talk about the people are good. And in Buddhism, we talk about uh uh the Buddha nature of people in Christianity. Is it talking about the Christ nature in people? Uh what's the phrase? Uh, and and that means that uh no matter how much we think uh we detest somebody, we can always find an overlap of interest and start planting the seeds in the other person to convince them.

SPEAKER_03 39:26

That's fantastic. That is so true, and it's so real, and it makes you a happy person when you live in that. Because when you're always demeaning other people and hating them and trying to hurt them, it doesn't make you very happy.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

No, Chris?

SPEAKER_02 39:46

Yeah, I I I would say that uh that as you're speaking about the the hate out there, that there's a lot of it, and some of us, including me, we struggle with uh being an optimist uh in a in a what I think is a very dark time for our country. Can you take what you've learned from the trenches of battling the death penalty and and get share your thoughts on how we might be able to turn a tide of polarization uh team member, you know, it's I'm on my team and my team says this. Uh I I I I'm struggling with it, I gotta tell you.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

Well, I mean, I mean, Chris, I mean, who's not? But there's a difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is oh yeah, it's all gonna turn out all right. Uh-uh. We don't know that's all gonna turn out. In fact, it's very dark right now. But boy, when when you I'm with, like I just spoke to this class of of young people in high school, and you can just see the light going on. Young people wanna be good people, they want to do the right thing. There, there's that it's waiting inside them, and you can just see when you bring them close, they respond, and that's what we gotta do. So I'm real glad that the graphic dead man walking is out because we're getting it out to young people across the country. It's very well done, it's really good. There was a great artist in Sweden, Catherine Njango Grunwell, who did the art in it, and it's just extremely well done. It takes them into the story, and you gotta have as a starting point the terrible crime and the outrage at the crime. That's gotta be the starting point because that's what makes people say, oh, but look at what they did, so they deserve to die, and they don't know anything in between or how it works. And so we gotta take them into that. But hope is different from optimism, Chris, don't you think? I mean, obviously, you're a hope worker. Hope on the rope.

SPEAKER_02 42:02

You give me stuff to think about.

SPEAKER_01 42:05

The name of this program is Beat the Prosecution. What recommendations do you have for criminal defense lawyers and criminal defendants beyond what you've already been talking about? Is know what you're doing, do it, work hard, care. Uh there's got to be more than that. Well, you already touched on it as well. You said that when you uh spoke with your publisher, he said, people just aren't gonna read this book. You you started out with the crime uh too late. Certainly, uh, when we uh talk to juries as lawyers in opening statement in in uh jury selection void here, we got to grab them immediately, uh telling them uh what this case is about and showing them that they can trust us and and uh uh and that we're not trying to hide the ball. What what suggestions do you have beyond all of that?

SPEAKER_03 42:56

Well, I mean, those are kind of generalities. It's you gotta do the mitigating circumstances in your client's life to tell the whole story. The one who tells the whole story is the one who wins the case. I tell the story in, I think it's in Death of Innocence, my second book, about Jeremy Gross. It was in Indiana, and here Bob Hill, who was his lawyer, visited his mama at least 15 or 20 times to get her to finally come and take the stand and say, I abused my child. Hard for mama to do. And he opened the trial. They had video of Jeremy Gross going in a convenience store. You see him shooting the guy behind the cash register who's being shot, going, Why, Jeremy, why? And then you see Jeremy going in that cash register, seeing him get the money, run out the store, and see that poor guy shot, crawling along the floor, trying to reach. Up for the payphone, and then that receiver dangling, and he dies in a pool of his own blood, and it's all on video. And so Bob Hill shows the video. He knows the prosecution's gonna show it. Beat the prosecution. Here you go. Because he said, We know he's guilty. He he is guilty. Look, we got it on the video. And then when he came to the time for sentencing, he just said, Now I want to tell you the story of Jeremy Gross before he entered the door of that convenience store. And he told his story. And how even for a brief and shining moment, the foster family had taken him for about six months. His grades went up. He was on the little league team, sat at family meals. You could see the kid responding. And the jury voted unanimously for him to live. Because he not only had to show him that he shouldn't die, but look at the potential in him. Every human being has this. You don't have to kill him.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

The potential, yes.

SPEAKER_03 45:08

Yeah. But that I got to meet that lawyer one time. I just went, wow, man. Because I mean, you know, to get a mother to publicly acknowledge that she had abused him.

unknown 45:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:23

And the state took him from that foster family. And with that guy who became like a father to him, he choked up when he went to, and he was the only one Jeremy ever looked at in the eye when he testified was his foster father. They had bonded. And then the state came and took Jeremy and gave him back to the abusive family. And then he went from one thing to another. He's on drugs and all that kind of stuff. And those terrible, what do they say? Hurt people, hurt people.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

You've talked about the sentencing aspect, Sister Helen. You've seen lawyers in the courtroom. Do you have any suggestions beyond what you said about how we're going to go ahead and win and therefore prevent the sentencing in the first place?

SPEAKER_03 46:05

Yeah. Well, y'all know about the Colorado method, right? No. You know about Dave Lamore. I mean, when you got that jury, and and about talking to them, I've talked to a lot of them who you they a juror never has to get essence, and they don't even have to give a reason why they're going to vote not to kill somebody. It can be what their grandmother said, what they read, and uh it could be anything, but you got to shore them up inside because it's real pressure when you get in there, especially if you're the only holdout. So to work with that jury during Voisir and to talk to them and talk about the jurors' rights that they have, and that they can make that decision that that person is going to live, or that they can always make a decision for compassion for a person, you know, because we just have these horrendous Louisiana's the worst. Life without parole senses just thrown at people all over the place, you know, and that people can change. And also talking to wardens. I think I've been through four or five wardens. I've been lasting such a long time in this business that these wardens, and I had one, John Whitley, who said to me one time, do you know who by and large makes our best trustees in this prison? You know, Angola, it's 18,000 acres. You know, it's a huge, terrible, hard prison. And he said, People who are the ones who make the best trustees are usually people who come from murder. They didn't know when they got up that morning they were gonna murder somebody. They murdered somebody. But then they get in the discipline of the prison, they read books. They'd be you know, they're they're away from that chaotic life. Prisons aren't perfect, God knows. But it's a at least you got three meals a day, and you have a roof over your head, you're not in this utter chaos if you're on drugs out on the street, gangs and stuff, you know. So people can change, and that's the element that's the heart of all deep spiritualities of Buddhism, of Christianity, Islam. Every one of the chapters in the Quran begins with the mercy of God. What's mercy about? That people can change.

SPEAKER_01 48:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 48:31

Chris sister, you talk about um uh alternatives to the death penalty in the organization that you're in and uh restorative justice, and you know that we do a lot of things in the court system just because we've always done them a certain way. So can you talk a little bit about what things you'd like to see, both in homicide cases and in non-homicide cases, to try to provide alternatives?

SPEAKER_03 48:59

Right. A penal system that's not whose whole purpose is not punishment of a human being, which often means demeaning of the person and stripping them of humanity instead of building it up. We just had this marvelous thing happen for a while, and this is the way justice happens. It crops up for a while and then it gets, but we had a district attorney, Jason Williams, that ran for office in New Orleans, and this is following, you know, in the footsteps of these terrible prosecutors in New Orleans that sent people for life sentences and death sentences. And he established a civil rights division in the prosecutor's office and had these great lawyers working in it and looking at the cases in Louisiana of excessive sentencing and taking the cases. And for a brief and shiny moment, the legislature in Louisiana had allowed that prosecutors could take a look at the case. You could go through the prosecutor again if you had some kind of evidence that the person in prison was changing or had a good record, and they used that and they got over 300 people out of prison for excessive sentencing. That excessive sentencing, and especially for nonviolent drug use, we need to have drug courts. And I I know that they're doing in the east more than they're doing it in the south here, but we're beginning to do that here. That people who it's a drug crime, and uh, and and so that's not violence. You gotta treat people, you have to help people to rebuild their lives and deal with the addiction. And what does prison do? It's a miracle if you can if you can really change your life in prison, you know? Yeah, so Mr. Helen Education, education, education.

SPEAKER_01 50:58

Yes when Paul Watson was interviewing with me, uh, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, he was talking how important it is to create media events and get the word out to the public. Now, to what extent was this just uh by uh happenstance versus planning that you were able to not only get out this book on the market, but then you have these stars, like I don't even know how to pronounce the name, Susan Sarandon and Shrek. Sorry Sarandon. Thank you, play playing these characters and and making it explode. And and and what was the pushback from Hollywood on this movie uh uh being produced?

SPEAKER_03 51:36

Well, first of all, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins are not Hollywood. They are not Hollywood. Okay, they are really good artists and actors, and they they could see Susan was the one who really was the midwife to make the movie happen because Tim Robbins was working on other projects and took her nine months to get him to read the book. She said, I know if I could get him to read the book, and so then finally he did. And he told me that it was the easiest screenplay he ever wrote. It's because that good editor helped me shape the story. Start with the crime. Here's the outrage, look at the poor victims, they deserve justice, and then take them step by step into the execution where you meet the humanity of the person who did the crime. So that by the time you get to Sean Penn's execution, you have seen that Matthew Ponsilett has changed and he's acknowledged what he's done. And that's it, that's the redemptive story to take people through. And all that, I didn't know all that was gonna happen. I just didn't even want to write the book at first because you couldn't talk to people. You know, Louisiana, we talked to people, right? And the book came out, and then when you put a book out there, you never know where it's gonna go. It has legs of its own, and it went right into the lap of Susan Saranda. And she was filming the client and uh Memphis and one of the John Grisham stories, and read the book, Stayed Up All Night. And she went, We need another kind of film that's not formulaic in this country about the death penalty. Because all the other movies were the big thing was is he guilty or not? And then he finds, yeah, he's guilty. Okay, justice is done, execution, end of film and end of reflection. She's she knew from the way I told the story, we got to really get more into the victims' families and what they're suffering and what really can answer their suffering. I mean, to have lost someone to murder, when you think of it, there's 17 years wait between a death sentence and the actual execution. They have 17 years to wait and then to be sat on the front row and told to watch as the state kills the one who kills. And see, when I'm talking with audiences and bringing them through it, I raise that question to them: how can that heal a human heart by watching another act of violence of the state killing the one who killed your loved one, and you get to watch that violence that's supposed to heal you and give you peace? Tell me, how does that do that?

unknown 54:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

Let's get back to how you deal with self-care after you see an execution. Is it just purely your your your your Christian uh uh education and experience, or is it more than that?

SPEAKER_03 54:31

It's purely. First, you have to use that advert purely. Of course, that's the heart of it. That's the heart of it. I mean, in the Christian tradition, you have that suffering of Christ, you have the suffering of his mother, you have suffering, and in the Buddhist tradition, too, that suffering is such a part of life. I've been brought into it, and I had a privileged share of being able to accompany somebody. I was not suffering like they were suffering. The injustice hadn't been done to me, I hadn't been through, but I was with them. And when you're with somebody like that, it's a mutual thing. And then to come back afterwards, first of all, and just to be thankful for the privilege of being able to be with somebody in such a precious time in their life, and then to do all I can with who I am to be there for them, to be faithful to them, and to see them through. And when it's over, when they have killed them, I know they have moved over into eternity now and they cannot suffer anymore. That is a huge thing. But I have to know that I fought every inch of the way to prevent that killing, just like Millard Former looking in their eyes and saying, You are not gonna die. I don't know how it's gonna happen, but you are not gonna die. And they know they have somebody fighting for them to the end, and that helps. And then when you read the gospels and you read about that suffering is part of life, and there's a lot of wisdom in Buddhism, of course, about that. And then how can I do my part to just help alleviate that suffering or to let people know they're not alone and what they're going through and to learn from them.

SPEAKER_01 56:29

Yeah. Chris.

SPEAKER_02 56:33

If I can ask, sister, if you can uh share with the audience what you said to uh Patrick Sonnier before you witnessed his death, what you told him to do in terms of looking at you and what you wanted him to see.

SPEAKER_03 56:47

Yeah, yeah, wow, it was so amazing, all of it. Because I was in such uh disbelief that this could be happening, you know. I never dreamed that they actually were gonna kill him. And it was just all very clear about what I needed to do and who I needed to be. And it was to walk with him. And the warden said, can can he said to the warden, can Sister Helen touch my shoulder? It was the first time I touched him and to put my hand on his shoulder, and then I chose words from Isaiah. Isaiah. I have called you by your name. If you go through the fire, you will not be burnt, because in electrocuition you really are burnt, because they're if through the sea you will not drown. And I walked right with him, and and you have the grace inside you at the time I did to be there for him. It was wasn't about me, it was for him. And then I just said to him, Look, Pat, when they do this, you look at me, look at my face, I'll be there for you. Because he had tried to save me. I mean, he had tried to say to me, Look, Cistel, and you can't be there at the end because it could scar you to see this. I mean, that was love for me. Who doesn't want somebody to be with them when they dying? You know, he was willing to let that go to protect me. And I said, No, Pat, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I know this. You're not gonna die without seeing one loving face to see. You look at me, and I was strong. I was right there, and he's looking at me from that chair, and the last thing they did was put this mask over his face to protect the witnesses, Lord, to protect the witnesses, like they need protection, right? And he had seen my face, and the last words we exchanged. Now I've noticed this with most of the people I have accompanied, the last words are directed to me because I'm there with them and they they say I love you. They want their last words to be love. It's directed toward me because I'm there, and I'm reaching out toward him. You look at the film and then I walk and you see Susan's ran, and she got it, and I was reaching out toward him there and just saying, I love you. And and then they pull the switch.

SPEAKER_01 59:10

The hour has already passed, and if I had that happen, I would speak to you for hours more, but that that time may come. Sister Helen, what, if anything else, would you like to tell everyone that you haven't already said?

SPEAKER_03 59:27

No, for people to learn about the death penalty, learn about it. If you still have it in your state, we got to change it. It crystallizes torture and it crystallizes trying to solve social problems through violence. It's the only punishment where we ever imitate the crime to determine the punishment. And we're better than this. And so learn about it. Read books, read stuff, talk to people, help them in states that still have the death penalty. Because you have these plucky little groups, like I keep hearing from this group in Florida. They keep killing people in Florida with this DeSantis guy to try to show how tough he is on crime. So get in there, get in there in some way, find out about death row inmates, or even write to people in prison. Visit prison. Get out of that, you know, the zone that we can live in where we live out of our privilege. We're privileged. Get in there. You won't be disappointed.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:31

Agreed. And everybody, before you go to sleep tonight, please visit sisterhelen.org and donate to her organization. She and the people with her are doing vital work. I am catatonically happy and delighted that Sister Helen and Chris Floor have joined today. That's sisterhelen.org and floorlaw.com. This is John Katz. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. Stand by both of you and thank you immensely.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:04

Thank you for listening to this week's episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up against police investigations and prosecutions. Nothing discussed on our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or to individuals who have paid for a consultation. We welcome you contacting us via email at info at beatheprosecution.com by calling our office at 703 383 1100 or texting us at 571 406 7268.