- Chava Colon asks Prejean to become a pen pal with a Death Row inmate.
- Prejean says okay, since this project seems to go along with her work in the New Orleans housing project of St. Thomas, where there is a lot of poverty and death.
- Prejean knows that the death penalty is mostly applied to those who kill whites, and she also knows that most people on Death Row are poor.
- Colon says that pen pal she has in mind for Prejean, Elmo Patrick Sonnier, probably won't write. But Prejean takes his address anyway.
- Sonnier is on Death Row at Angola for rape and murder.
- Sonnier and his younger brother, Eddie, killed a teenaged couple, David LeBlanc and Loretta Bourque. Bourque was also raped.
- Sonnier is a Cajun from St. Martinsville, which Prejean knows as a very hospitable and friendly place.
- There's a brief flashback as Prejean remembers coming to the St. Thomas project in 1981. She was afraid and worried back then.
- Prejean remembers writing in her journal about hearing noises late on her first night. She also heard gunshots, which are not the thing you want to hear when you're spending your first night in your new home.
- Prejean came to St. Thomas as part of the movement after 1971 within the Catholic Church to emphasize social justice. Her religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, have decided to work with the poor.
- Prejean herself had been reluctant about this change of direction, but she was convinced by a lecture given by Sister Marie Augusta Neal, in which Neal explained that Jesus had spoken to the poor and had insisted on the importance of working with the poor.
- Prejean says she had a loving childhood in a religious household. She prayed for the poor, but she thought little about poverty or racism.
- Still, Prejean says she was drawn to black people and their music. We have to admit that she's stereotyping here, even if she means well.
- Prejean recounts a memory of seeing a black girl pushed off a bus.
- Prejean says that her own family wasn't mean to black people, but she notes that sometimes systems can oppress people without anyone having to decide to be mean at any particular time. She says she's learning about systems of oppression in St. Thomas. For instance, young mothers with kids are often faced with losing their welfare benefits if they get a job. So do you get a job and have slightly more money, or do you stay on welfare and have health care?
- Bad choices here; bad choices there; bad choices all around.
- Prejean points out that selling drugs is a quick way to get needed cash for people who don't have much at all.
- Police don't treat people in St. Thomas well. This comes as a shock to Prejean.
- On top of that, President Ronald Reagan is cutting a lot of social services, which makes the situation even worse for people in St. Thomas.
- Prejean is inspired by the folks in St. Thomas who still do good and work hard despite the huge odds against them. She wonders what she would have been like if she'd been poor.
- This book doesn't wait around for the spiritual insight; it gets started on it right away.
- Prejean sits down to write her first letter to Sonnier. She sends him a picture of herself on horseback. She wonders what he's like, and then she thinks what her mother would do if she were killed. She images herself in the place of the Bourques and LeBlancs, the families of the teenagers Sonnier killed.
- Prejean flashes forward a bit to when Lloyd LeBlanc—the father of David—and the Bourques are angry and hurt because she did not reach out to them while she was advising and advocating for Sonnier. She feels guilty and awful about that.
- Prejean gets a letter back from Angola saying that some of her pictures were the wrong size and had to be returned. Yay bureaucracy.
- Prejean then gets a letter from Sonnier.
- Sonnier says that at first he thought her letter was from Helen, his ex. Also, he says he doesn't like nuns; he went to Catholic school, where they rapped his knuckles with rulers.
- Obviously, the knuckle rapping did not turn him good, he says. More knuckle rapping or no knuckle rapping maybe would have worked better. Nothing could have worked worse, though, the way things turned out.
- Sonnier says he liked the picture of Prejean on a pony.
- Sonnier and Prejean start writing regularly.
- Prejean learns that life on Death Row is restrictive and unpleasant. Not a surprise, but there it is.
- Sonnier sends a photo of himself eventually, but he and Prejean don't talk about the murders he committed—so she decides to go read up on his crime in the files.
- Chava meets Prejean and tells her that Sonnier has an attorney who has offered to take his case.
- Sonnier trusts the attorney. That's a bad move.
- Prejean reads up on Sonnier and finds out that he committed horrible, horrible crimes (one "horrible" doesn't quite cover it).
- Besides the double murder, he and his brother Eddie also kidnapped other couples, raping the girls on lovers' lane. The Sonniers would pretend to be security guards.
- The Sonniers made LeBlanc and Bourque lie face down on the grass, and then they shot them both in the head.
- That much is clearish, but the rest of the case is confused. The big issue is that the brothers gave contradictory testimony about who actually fired the shots.
- Prejean thinks about how miserable the LeBlancs and Bourques must be. Quite miserable, she decides.
- Prejean gets another letter from Pat and notices he doesn't talk about dying.
- Prejean talks a little about the history of death by electrocution, including some cases when the electrocution didn't work at first and the convict had to be electrocuted multiple times.
- Gruesome details are provided.
- Prejean talks more about how she opposes the death penalty.
- Still, Prejean feels guilty for befriending the killer, given the pain of the victims and their families. She's not sure what she'd think if her own loved ones were killed, but she knows she wouldn't want her own killer executed.
- Prejean cites Albert Camus's "Reflections on the Guillotine"; she mentions this text throughout the book. Whenever there's a pause, there's a brief plug for Albert Camus. Watch for it.
- Sonnier doesn't ask anything from her, which she finds very human. She asks if she can come see him.
- Cliffhanger!
- Spoiler alert (sort of): there's not a whole lot of suspense in this book. The people who are going to get executed get executed. It's not a split-second escape kind of narrative.