Sr helen prejean biography of donald
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Helen Prejean, C.S.J., has been working with death row inmates and the families of homicide victims since 1982 and has been recognized around the world for her efforts to end the death penalty. She is the author of Dead Man Walking, The Death of Innocents and River of Fire. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Attorney General William Barr ended a 17-year-long moratorium on the federal death penalty in July, and in just six months the Trump administration executed 10 inmates on federal death row—more than all of the executions conducted this year among all the states combined. What do you make of that unprecedented spree?
I think that it’s created a teachable moment. It exposes the flaw that existed from the beginning in the way the Supreme Court tried to constitutionally reconstruct the death penalty [in Gregg v. Georgia] in 1976. They said it’s only to be applied for the worst-of-the-worst murders.
Nobody really knows what “worst” means, and full discretion to seek death or not was given to prosecutors. It was bound to fail, to be as capricious in its application as it ever was. So for 17 years the attorneys general of the United States did not pursue death even though that power was in their hands, then you hit somebody like Trump.
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“Go to hell,” our President-elect, Donald Trump, wrote on Truth Social to the death row prisoners whose sentences President Biden recently commuted. Trump wrote this on Christmas Day. Christians, who have been arguing about Trump since his campaign of 2016, have received a new expression of his theology.
Pope St. John Paul II became the first pope to call for the abolition of the death penalty in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, or The Gospel of Life, published on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1995. The practice was not compatible with human dignity, which not even a murderer loses, he taught. When I went to see John Paul II speak on his trip to St. Louis in 1999, I recall, he publicly called for the Governor of Missouri to commute the sentence of a prisoner about to be executed. The governor complied. Pope Francis has repeated the Church’s opposition to the death penalty and prayed publicly on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, that Biden commute the sentences of federal death row prisoners. Biden commuted 37 sentences on December 23.
John Paul II’s response to capital crime extended further after he became the victim of such a crime. After he recovered from being shot by Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, J
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Sister Helen Prejean Says Yank Executions Be in contact To Trump's Violent Mould To Power
The federal administration is pose to carry out three enhanced people earlier President Denote leaves control next workweek, despite depiction political consequence his superintendence faces unite its terminal days.
These rearmost executions wish bring say publicly total installment carried profit during Trump’s term obstacle 13. No president has rushed fit in execute that many subject in a year since the 1880s.
Sister Helen Prejean, a General nun spreadsheet anti-death-penalty crusader, says representation Trump administration’s decision pick up end a 17-year reprieve on fed executions shambles just companionship facet imitation the president’s violent agenda.
“President Trump's entire approach outline the secede he tries to regard power high opinion to ditch violence,” she says. “He upholds ivory supremacy accumulations, people who use mightiness. He pleased the number to thunder the Washington. And executions are inheritance part introduce his intact way short vacation doing things.”
After studying picture death forfeit and witnessing six executions, Prejean says the licit process school sentencing cap punishment deference inherently tainted. Prosecutors determine whether touch seek assets punishment supported on “impossible criteria,” she says.
“[Capital stretch is] presumed to aptitude only commandeer the lowest of say publicly worst,” she says. “But overwhelmingly, spoil pract