Dead Man Walking Chapter 5 Summary

  • Mary Ann, Prejean's sister, was in the parking lot during the execution. She mentions that the SWAT team stiffened and readied their guns when she got out of the car. She felt this was odd and disturbingly like something in a police state.
  • Prejean gets back to her mother's house in Baton Rouge. She gets a call from Tom Dybdahl and starts to cry. She gets more phone calls, and cries more. Lots of phone calls; lots of crying.
  • Prejean calls the Warden and gets permission for Eddie to attend his brother's funeral.
  • The nuns have found clothes for Pat and arranged the funeral service.
  • Bishop Stanley Ott conducts the service.
  • The funeral is over, and Prejean goes back home. A UPS man delivers some parcels: Pat's last possessions, which he left to Prejean.
  • Prejean thinks about how the system is designed so that no one feels responsible for the execution.
  • Prejean decides to go and confront C. Paul Phelps, the head of Corrections—and a Catholic. She sees him and asks what has been accomplished by the execution, and he says nothing.
  • Phelps doesn't think that the death penalty is just or useful, but he feels he is just doing his job and following the law.
  • Prejean asks Phelps if it's a good idea to just give up your ethical convictions and let the state do your thinking for you.
  • Phelps says if he felt he couldn't do the job, he'd have to resign… which would be bad for inmates, because he does his job thoughtfully and compassionately.
  • Phelps says that he designed the execution process, and it had to be done so that the executioner would be anonymous. No one wants to be known as the executioner.
  • Prejean decides that now that Pat is dead, she is not, nope, never, going to be a death-row pen pal again.
  • Spoiler: don't believe her.
  • Prejean decides she'll continue to correspond with Eddie.
  • Prejean goes to Pat's mother's house. Pat's mother's name is Gladys.
  • Gladys and her daughter, Marie, are upset that the press says that they'd refused the body; it was Pat who wanted the nuns to bury him.
  • Gladys and Marie ask Prejean to write a letter to the paper.
  • Someone dismembered a cat on Gladys and Marie's front porch the morning of the execution.
  • Prejean goes back to Hope House, where she worked before as a nun. But people are still unhappy with her. She and the newspaper both get lots of letters saying how terrible she is for caring about a murderer.
  • Prejean doesn't want to respond in the press, but she feels bad about the Bourques and LeBlancs. She also starts to try to push for victim advocacy.
  • Prejean gets an Easter card from Pat, sent before he was executed. That's sort of sweet and sort of gruesome.
  • Prejean also gets a letter from an Episcopal Priest with a clipping about a homicide case similar to Pat's. She wonders if it's a copycat crime inspired by the news surrounding the execution.
  • Prejean talks for a bit about how it's clear that executions don't deter crimes. She uses statistics.
  • The New Orleans Catholic newspaper wants to interview her to get her side of the story about why she advocates against the death penalty.
  • Prejean's also working to try to train people to be spiritual advisors. She tells us some more about organizing to get Death Row inmates advisors and legal representation. She also argues that the death penalty is administered unjustly and is mostly used against the poor and the powerless.
  • After efforts to make the death penalty illegal in Louisiana fail, Prejean and others work to make a march to Baton Rouge to protest.
  • Prejean talks a bit about the fact that the death penalty is popular, but the popular appeal is relatively weak. If you give people other options or tell them it's administered unfairly, they stop supporting it.
  • Prejean decides she will start to work full time against the death penalty. She is not not not not going to become a spiritual advisor again, though.
  • And then Millard tells Prejean he has an inmate who could use her spiritual advice. And she says yes.
  • So much for those promises, Sister.
  • The inmate is named Robert Lee Willie.