Recently a U.S. district judge has held hearings to determine if California's three-drug lethal injection cocktail in use at San Quentin violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

That procedure, believes this country's foremost advocate against the death penalty, is just another way to humanize and "mask" death.

"There is no way to stop the mental anguish of a conscious, imaginative people who anticipate dying and die a thousand times before they die," stressed Sister Helen Prejean, in a Sept. 30 workshop held at St. Joseph Center in Orange. "So we're going to keep having this discussion until we get the 'perfect' way. It all boils down to 'We're a very humane country, and we just have to fine tune it a little bit.'"

The author of the best-selling book "Dead Man Walking" asserted that the second drug used in the execution procedure, pancuronium bromide, is a paralytic agent used to keep the few witnesses from seeing the dying person jerking and twisting in pain.

"I don't know if you can find a way to not cause pain," she said. "Mental anguish is real. We signed a U.N. convention against torture, and mental torture is as real as physical torture."

California is "very ambivalent" about the death penalty, Sister Prejean observed. The state has more than 600 individuals currently on death row, with the average time being 20 years before they're executed. Politicians get points for favoring it, and the governor backs it.

"But you don't really do it, so you 'disappear' people --- put them in a death row cell and leave them there," she said. "A lot of them begin to die from natural causes or some commit suicide. Or some just say, 'I'm giving up the appeal. I want it over.'

"But you never see these people. They're in San Quentin, and it's hard to get into San Quentin. It's hard to get into any prison. We can't see their suffering. And seeing their suffering and being with them is essential. Because otherwise we can't feel the compassion. We can't go: 'This is wrong, and I've got to do something about it.'"

Life-turning event
Sister Prejean's life-turning point occurred April 5, 1984, after witnessing the execution of Patrick Sonnier, who she'd been advising spiritually for two years, in the electric chair at Louisiana's Angola State Prison.

She went out in the middle of the night to throw up, remembering how in John's Gospel Judas went out after betraying Jesus. Then she had another disturbing thought --- people were never going to see what she had seen in the death chamber.

That's when the Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille realized she had to tell the killer's story.

"It was so simple; it was so clear," she told some 100 people at the workshop. "I didn't know what I was going to do. I was an English major, but I was reading Gerard Manly Hopkins and poems. I didn't know I was going to write a book."

The hardest part, however, wasn't putting her journey with Sonnier down on paper, the hardest part was going to the families of the two teenagers who had been shot in the head after a football game while parked in a local lovers' lane. She knew their parents wouldn't welcome any person who had shown compassion to one of their children's murderers.

"I stayed away from them, and it was a terrible, terrible sin to stay away from them," she said, shaking her head. "To withhold my love from them because I thought they wouldn't want it."

The parents of one of the victims did rebuff her. But, to her great surprise, the father of the other victim asked her to pray with him; they wound up saying the rosary together before the Blessed Sacrament in a chapel at 4 a.m.

"I'm not the hero of 'Dead Man Walking,'" she said. "He's the hero of 'Dead Man Walking.'"

The book was number one on the New York Times' best seller list for 31 weeks and was nominated for a 1993 Pulitzer Prize. In 1996, the book was made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen and Sean Penn as the death row inmate. Sarandon won a Best Actress Oscar; writer-director Tim Robbins earned a Humanitas Prize.

Sister Prejean has continued "accompanying" individuals on their death row journey. Her second book, "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions," published in 2004, tells the story of two men --- Dobie Gillis Williams, an African American with an IQ of 65, and Joseph Roger O'Dell --- who she believes were innocent and convicted of murder on flimsy evidence.

After having been profiled on numerous television shows and in multiple print articles, Sister Prejean's message against the death penalty has only gotten stronger.

"We don't believe that redemption's possible," she declared. "We cut off the possibility of redemption: 'We have to kill you. You are so inhuman, so unlike us that we've got to kill you.'"

It is not only the procedure itself that is abhorrent, said Sister Prejean. A grossly disproportionate number of current death row inmates, she pointed out, are poor and African American; more than 80 percent of the nation's executions take place in 10 southern states that once practiced slavery.

"It all has to do with controlling people of color," she said, citing past injustices of slavery, violence against Native Americans and the poor treatment of agricultural workers. "We have to overcome it."