“The death penalty is about us”: Sister Helen Prejean on humanizing death row prisoners

For over three decades, author and activist Sister Helen Prejean has accompanied prisoners on death row and advocated against the death penalty across the U.S. Her story is portrayed in the award-winning film adaption of her first book “Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States” about accompanying prisoners facing the death penalty, which she has always been driven to do out of her belief that “everybody is worth more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” Prejean spoke with us about meeting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the convicted Boston Marathon bomber, five times over the course of 2015 and testifying on his behalf. "All of the words I could get before the jury were, ‘he is a human being and he felt sorrow for what he did.’ I showed why I could say that … because I had met him.”

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