Thirty-five years ago, when Sister Helen Prejean was in the death house at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola waiting to witness the execution by electrocution of Elmo Patrick Sonnier, the guard in charge asked her, "What's a nundoing in a place like this?"
"Dead Man Walking," her harrowing 1993 book about her experiences on death row, was one answer. In it, she writes of how she became a pen pal and spiritual adviser to Mr. Sonnier, who had been convicted, with his brother, of killing a teenage couple parked on a lover's lane after raping the girl.
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