By Thea Jarvis

Helen Prejean backed into full-time advocacy for death row inmates almost 12 years ago. The Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille was teaching high school dropouts in the New Orleans projects when a friend asked if she'd be pen pal to a prisoner in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.

Accepting a slip of paper with death row inmate Elmo Patrick Sonnier's name on it was like receiving "a passport into an eerie land," Sister Prejean writes in Dead Man Walking, her self-described "eyewitness account of the death penalty in the United States."

What she learned of the U.S. criminal justice system after her initial contact with Pat Sonnier now fills her heart and mind and the nearly 300 pages of Dead Man Walking, released this past summer to generous reviews from publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and America.

In Atlanta for a Sept. 21 reception in her honor at the Carter Center, Sister Prejean spent a full day at Marist School presenting her case against capital punishment simply and directly, just has she does in her book.

"The moral bedrock of our society has to be that nobody is permitted to kill," including the government, she told students gathered in chapel at the Dunwoody campus.

Getting to know Pat Sonnier, visiting him, counseling him and eventually being present for his execution of April 5, 1984, convinced Sister Prejean that heaping state-condoned murder on violence already perpetrated by a criminal dehumanizes society and equates to public torture.

"We don't have to keep doing this," she assured her young audience at Marist, relating her personal journey and the carefully documented realities she has learned along the way.

The death penalty is acutely selective, said Sister Prejean, explaining how economics, race and geography play a part.

"Only one percent of people who commit murder are selected for the death penalty. Always it's poor people." And while the death row population is split almost evenly along racial lines, "When white people are killed, the death penalty is pursued vigorously." Deaths of African-Americans do not result in similar calls for execution.

Statistics show capital punishment to be more costly than life imprisonment and most frequently meted out in the states of Louisiana, Texas, Florida and Georgia. Despite expenditures that spiral into the millions to try, house, and execute one death row inmate, "It's always been a Southern thing," Sister Prejean observed.

The Baton Rouge native doesn't sugar-coat her message. Relaxed and comfortable with an audience -- she has made numerous television appearances and is scheduled to be featured in an upcoming Barbara Walters special -- Sister Prejean relates the sometimes grisly facts about capital punishment in straightforward style. Some may question her stand on this hotly debated topic, but most seem to appreciate her honesty and sincerity.

"Thanks for coming, Sister," a Marist student calls from her locker as the nun walks the halls in search of a post-lecture Coke. "It was really interesting."

Later, in a quiet office off the busy Marist corridor, Sister Prejean, now in her early 50s, tells how her life has changed in the decade since she began corresponding with Pat Sonnier. A former teacher who likens directing seventh- and eighth- graders to "being in a room full of Alka-Seltzers," she was also a parish religious education coordinator and a director of novices before she embraced full-time ministry with the poor and powerless.

"I call it the upward mobility of the Gospel," she joked.

Working with people on death row and families of their victims has "made me a lot more humble," said Sister Prejean, now a board member of the National Coalition for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. Growing up in a loving, stable family, she was protected by a "cushion" of resources. Her father was an attorney, her mother a nurse. Money education and travel had always been available.

Without such advantages, "Would I have been pregnant at 17?" she asks, adding she is "more real about myself" because of her contact with the criminal justice system.

Watching the death penalty carried out "fires me, impassions me to work on this," she said. "When people get close to this issue, they change."

The Catholic Church could do more to protest capital punishment, Sister Prejean believes, but feels death penalty opponents must "activate and mobilize the church the way we do anything else."

Although she views lobbying for the abolition of the death penalty as "part of the teaching mission of the church," Sister Prejean acknowledges that convincing people is often a slow process.

"It took me awhile to get into it," she said wryly, "so I tend to be patient."

Dead Man Walking chronicles Sister Prejean's journey of change and the people she has met along the way. It reflects long hours of research as well as sessions of deep soul-searching.

"It is written as a compelling story and drama," Sister Prejean said of the book, which took two and a half years to complete. "It is personally written and covers every angle. It deals with the anguish of the inmate(s) and the victims' families. It exposes the system."

Moreover, it addresses "the American public's ambivalence on the issue of the death penalty," she said, a co-existing abhorrence of violence and a need to pursue justice.

Sister Prejean has her own explanation of the high marks Dead Man Walking is currently receiving and the book's smooth passage into the complex world of modern publishing.

"It's as if God wants this book," wants a change in the way capital punishment is approached, she said. "You have only to stand by and I will fight for you," she believes God is telling her.