The Death of Innocents

I attended a dramatic reading of Sister Helen Prejean's book The Death of Innocents last night. She tells the story of two wrongfully executed men. There are many reasons to abolish capital punishment - killing innocent people is a strong one, and the State has done just that, she points out, more than 130 times in the past few decades. I had seen Sister Helen speak before at Georgetown after Dead Man Walking, her book about spiritually advising a (guilty) man on death row, had been made into a film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. She spoke of the sneakiness of God and said that he leads you through door after door and if you knew what that far door opened to--in her case, death row--you would have never gone through. When she kneeled next to me for this picture, I reminded her of that story and she said, "You know a little about the sneakiness of God, don't you?" Yep.