- Prejean imagines Faith's death again and talks about how terrible she feels.
- This starts to get a little repetitive, but the point is that Prejean cares about the victims, too, and not just about the people going to Death Row. She wants to make sure that's clear, both for the victims' sake and so that folks can't just dismiss her as callous and awful.
- Prejean says that it makes sense that the Harveys want retribution. She argues that just punishment is necessary in society, but that capital punishment is excessive; punishment, in her view, needs to be tempered with mercy.
- Prejean advocates for long-term imprisonment for murder; for what she calls true life sentences.
- It's worth asking whether everyone would rather have actual life in prison instead of a death sentence. Is it clear everyone would? Is death crueler than life in prison? Prejean doesn't really think about these questions, though other prison reform and justice advocates sometimes have.
- Anyway, after talking to the Harveys, Prejean is a mess; she wants to talk to her mom to make sure everyone in her family is safe.
- Prejean is not too keen on Robert Lee Willie right at the moment. She wants to get him to take responsibility for his crimes.
- Prejean confronts Robert, and he says that he wasn't the one who killed Faith; it was Joe Vaccaro who stabbed her.
- Robert doesn't feel especially guilty about what he did, in part because he's angry at Vernon Harvey for wanting to see him dead.
- Robert supports the death penalty for child molesters, though… which seems somewhat contradictory, given that the girl he killed and helped rape was only eighteen herself.
- Robert says he's been close to death once, when he slept with another man's wife and the guy tried to shoot him.
- Robert reminisces about the woman, who seems to have been the love of his (admittedly fairly miserable) life.
- Prejean says she wants him to admit to his guilt in Faith's death and apologize to the Harveys.
- Robert tells Prejean he trusts her… but kind of ruins the moments by using a bunch of racial epithets to talk about how he doesn't like black people or Latinos.
- Prejean encourages Robert to read his Bible, presumably on the grounds that if anyone needs to read a Bible, he does.
- Robert's involved in a class-action suit to try to get conditions in the jail improved.
- Bill Quigley, Prejean's friend, is working on the case.
- Robert is doing good work on the lawsuit; being drug-free is good for him… as you'd imagine it would be.
- On the other hand, Prejean is looking through documents and sees that Robert was a total horrible jerk in court, sneering at the people he injured and raped.
- Joe Vaccaro has been inconsistent about whether he's the one who did the actual murder.
- Robert has a long list of juvenile offenses; he's been in and out of jail forever.
- One of the big failures in Robert's case was that he did not get a change of venue. Pre-trial publicity was so great that it seems unlikely he could have got a fair jury anywhere near where the murder took place.
- Several juries also heard Vaccaro say during his trial that Robert Willie had been the murderer; they were in the audience at Vaccaro's trial, and then they went down and ended up at the jury on Robert's.
- None of that mattered, though; the courts didn't care.
- Oops, here's the title: Prejean says that San Quentin guards would yell "Dead Man Walking" when a Death Row inmate came out of his cell.