Sr. Helen Statement after Terrorist Attacks Sister Helen Prejean, csj
September 17, 2001

I’m on a U.S. Airways plane — half-filled — on my way back to New Orleans after a week of can­celled speak­ing engage­ments. I’ve seen American flags every­where — in shops, on peo­ple’s suit­cas­es, on the lapels of pilots and flight atten­dants. Everybody’s been glued to the T.V. look­ing in dis­be­lief at the sight of our own planes crash­ing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Everybody’s swap­ping sto­ries of the hor­rors: a cou­ple, hold­ing hands, jump­ing to their deaths from 80 sto­ries up; the man on one of the high jacked planes call­ing his wife on his cell phone, ​“We took a vote, we’re going to over­pow­er them, good­bye, I love you.”

We’re all in shock. Some say the entire nation is expe­ri­enc­ing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We’re gath­er­ing to mourn our dead and to try to fig­ure out how to respond to the ter­ri­ble evil per­pe­trat­ed on us. We’re deeply puz­zled that there could be peo­ple in the world who hate us so much. We’ve learned how vul­ner­a­ble we are and that all the defense sys­tems in the world can’t pro­tect us against such a ter­ror­ist attack. Nor do we know who the ter­ror­ists are — cer­tain­ly Osama bin Laden, who is rumored to dwell in Afghanistan, and his cohorts are prime sus­pects — but who else? What oth­er ter­ror­ists are out there ready to take bin Laden’s place should we ​“ter­mi­nate” him? The ques­tion is loom­ing large: what do we do for pro­tec­tion when our usu­al mil­i­tary tac­tics do not suf­fice? No doubt, we have enough fire­pow­er to bomb a lot of cities and a lot of peo­ple. We could, as some are sug­gest­ing, ​“bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age.” But we are hear­ing des­per­ate pleas from the peo­ple of Afghanistan, ​“Please, don’t kill us. We don’t sup­port the hor­ren­dous Taliban that has tak­en over and ter­ror­izes our lives.” It’s going to take us some time to sort all this out. We’re all fright­ened and vul­ner­a­ble, which can cause us to seek easy scapegoats.

Our imme­di­ate spir­i­tu­al task, it seems, is to mourn the vic­tims and to com­fort those who have suf­fered unspeak­able loss. John White, a friend of mine in New York knew 30 peo­ple who were killed in the World Trade Center. Other friends of mine in New York are spend­ing their days vis­it­ing and pray­ing with those who lost loved ones in the tragedy, includ­ing fire­fight­ers and police offi­cers and their fam­i­lies. Our deep­est and more dif­fi­cult task is to reflect on why this tragedy hap­pened to us and how we can pre­vent it from ever hap­pen­ing again. That’s the hard part. Because when we’ve been hurt and are afraid, we tend to strike out at oth­ers from the sur­face of our souls where prej­u­dice lies, not from the depths, where compassion lies.

At The Moratorium Campaign we are meet­ing to realign and to redou­ble our efforts to edu­cate the pub­lic about the death penal­ty in light of the September 11 assault. I seri­ous­ly ques­tion whether the death penal­ty, which acts out the mil­i­tary par­a­digm of ​“search out and destroy,” will serve us well against ter­ror­ists any more than it has served us well against those who com­mit vio­lent crimes. During the 25 years the death penal­ty has been reac­ti­vat­ed in this coun­try, sup­pos­ed­ly to deter crime, we have dis­cov­ered that the state killing peo­ple does­n’t deter any­thing — even the police chiefs across the coun­try know this. I believe that giv­ing state gov­ern­ments this kind of pow­er to kill our own cit­i­zens is drag­ging us all down moral­ly. The appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty is abysmal. Almost always poor peo­ple or the men­tal­ly ill are cho­sen for the gal­lows, and the whole busi­ness of state killing is rid­dled with racist selec­tion from start to fin­ish. Plus, there is such ram­pant injus­tice in its prac­tice that now many ordi­nary cit­i­zens know about and are trou­bled by the large num­ber of inno­cent peo­ple — almost 100 at this date — who have been sent to death row and some almost killed before they could prove their inno­cence. This past sum­mer, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor remarked that she is trou­bled by the large num­ber of inno­cent peo­ple who have been con­vict­ed at tri­als and lat­er freed from death row. She wor­ried out loud that the sheer ​“lot­tery” of such num­bers almost assures that some inno­cent per­sons have already been executed.

The life-chang­ing tragedy of September 11 only rein­forces my con­vic­tion that it’s time for our coun­try to go beyond the mil­i­tary par­a­digm of ​“search and destroy” as a way to deal with prob­lems of vio­lence in our soci­ety. It’s time for a new par­a­digm, and The Moratorium Campaign on the death penal­ty is need­ed more than ever to help build that new par­a­digm. In respond­ing to ter­ror­ist acts the new par­a­digm calls us to reflect deep­er than sim­ply label­ing the per­pe­tra­tors fanat­ics or evil incar­nate and blind­ly try­ing to destroy them. Such a response is opaque and blind and can only fuel more vio­lence. We have to draw on our spir­i­tu­al wis­dom and go deep enough in our reflec­tion to dis­cov­er and build a road of peace­ful rela­tion­ships with the Arabic and oth­er devel­op­ing nations of the world.

What are the root caus­es of vio­lence in our coun­try, and is the use of vio­lence by gov­ern­ment pow­ers ‑the exe­cu­tion of crim­i­nals — the only solu­tion we know to con­tain and pre­vent that vio­lence? The Catholic bish­ops of this coun­try have giv­en us a good spir­i­tu­al mot­to: ​“If we want peace we must work for jus­tice.” That’s a new par­a­digm worth think­ing about and pray­ing about. The old mil­i­tary par­a­digm of search­ing out and destroy­ing ene­mies has had its day. It is time to begin build­ing the new par­a­digm, no small part of which is the elim­i­na­tion of the death penal­ty in our society.