Few Americans have spent more time confronting the machinery of execution than Sister Helen Prejean — and she is now directing some of her sharpest criticism at President Donald Trump, accusing him of violent rhetoric, governing through fear and seeking to expand the use of the death penalty.
The 87-year-old Catholic nun, one of the best-known US campaigners against capital punishment, said she was especially troubled by Mr Trump’s move during his first term in office to lift a 17-year moratorium on federal executions.
Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week, she said: “Within those six months [at the end of his presidency] he had them all killed – 13 of them. His decision alone. And he has set a tone in the country, because he’s always calling for people to be executed.”
Sr Helen said she has now witnessed eight executions, and added that she knew some of the 13 people who were executed under Donald Trump’s orders.
“You can’t get around it that the death penalty is torture, which is an extreme mental and physical assault on someone rendered defenceless”, she said.
In the United States last year, 47 inmates were executed — the highest total in 16 years — with Florida responsible for 40% of those deaths.
Sr Helen also argued that the death penalty cannot be separated from America’s racial history.
“If you look at the pattern in the United States, the states that have done over 70% of the executions are the ex slave states. Because racism is so baked into the death penalty. It makes a huge difference on who’s killed. And overwhelmingly it’s about white victims.”
She said the focus of her campaign’s “work” was public education about what she called the system’s built-in failures — and persuading voters to stop electing prosecutors or governors who support executions.
Turning to execution methods, Sr Helen condemned Alabama’s new approach, in which inmates are suffocated with nitrogen, calling it brutal and violent. She said prison authorities try to “mask” the cruelty by presenting the process as though they are simply “putting people to sleep.”
Sr Helen said Pope Leo and his predecessor Pope Francis articulated the abolitionist message
She said the Catholic Church took “1,500 years of dialogue” before it no longer accepted that the state had the right to take a person’s life. She added that Pope Francis, and now Pope Leo, had “made a difference” by forcefully articulating the abolitionist message.
“Now we got a Pope that has a great microphone for the world.”
Asked how she viewed US Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth’s request in March that Pentagon staff pray for “overwhelming violence” against Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ”, Sr Helen said: “It’s such a perversion of the gospel of Jesus.”
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon in March
She also offered a message for Irish people travelling to the United States, saying they served as “diplomats and ambassadors for peace.”
“Ireland, I think, is a gleaming beam of light in the world, in what you have done in abolishing the death penalty and then educating your citizens. There’s a sense of peace in this country. I love coming to Ireland.”
Sr Helen first drew world-wide attention through her bestselling book ‘Dead Man Walking’, which recounted her experience witnessing two executions. The book later became a 1995 film, with Susan Sarandon winning an Oscar for ‘Best Actress in a leading role’.
Sr Helen was in Dublin this week to receive an honorary doctorate of laws from Trinity College Dublin.
