Dead Man Walking Guilt and Blame Quotes

The big, big mistake Prejean makes in the first half of the book is that she doesn't reach out to the victims' families as soon as she starts working with Pat. She feels guilty about this throughout the book. It's worth pointing out, though, that this is the first time she's been a spiritual advisor; why didn't the organization that asked her to be a pen pal give her some guidance? Guilt: there's always enough of it to go around.

Prejean isn't sure why she feels guilty about the victims, but then she realizes it's because she's aligned herself with the killer. Guilt here is a tool. All those self-help books that tell you to forget guilt and fly and be free? Yeah, that's not where Prejean is coming form. For her, as a Catholic, guilt's a way to examine herself, to figure out what she's done wrong and how to fix it.

Pat is very remorseful about his crime—which makes him sympathetic. Robert is way less so, which makes it harder to feel sorry for his fate. It's easier to feel guilty about hurting someone who feels guilty about the harm they've done.

Prejean is wishing that she'd said this to Eddie. Again, she kind of doesn't know what she's doing. She only learns later how important it is for the victims' families to have the killer apologize and acknowledge his guilt. So she ends up feeling guilty about not having Pat acknowledge that he feels guilty. Guilt: once it starts, it just keeps on going.

Prejean feels bad here because she didn't fight for Pat's right to be at his own Pardon Board hearing. Basically, it's a bureaucratic slip-up—but even bureaucratic slip-ups start to look like a huge moral deal when someone is about to be executed.

Prejean is arguing that everyone is responsible for executions done by the government in the name of the people. She figures that if people took personal responsibility for the execution, executions wouldn't happen. It's a very Catholic view: we need more personal responsibility to make the world better.

Robert can't feel guilty about what he did because he's too worried about himself. That seems reasonable—though also maybe like an excuse. We mean, he killed and raped an 18-year-old. Surely most people would feel bad about that eventually?

Some time after Robert's execution, Marsellus goes to jail for corruption and taking bribes. In that context, his argument that he isn't personally responsible seems like an excuse more than anything else. He knows he's doing wrong and that he's failing his own conscience. That knowledge, and Marsellus's later regret, doesn't help Robert, though.

Prejean is imagining what Major Coody, the person in charge of the executions, would have said if he could have talked publicly about capital punishment. Coody finds the work of setting up and orchestrating capital punishment personally painful: it makes him feel guilty. Prejean feels that this visceral guilt is a sign that something is wrong with execution. If the people who do it can sense it's immoral, then it's immoral. It's not just that no one should be executed; it's also that no one should be forced to execute a fellow human being.

At the very end of the book, you find out that Lloyd LeBlanc did not really want to execute Pat Sonnier, who had killed his son David. Lloyd LeBlanc's feelings of guilt about the execution make him in some ways the moral center of the book: he wants to extend mercy to someone who has injured him. That kind of forgiving is the essence of Christianity, for Prejean, and it comes out of both faith and guilt.