Dead Man Walking Characters

Two PrejeansDead Man Walking is a memoir: it's a story in which the writer remembers stuff she did back in the past, before she wrote the book. So you could kind of say that Sister Helen Prejean, i...

One of the first things you learn about Patrick Sonnier is that "after his arrest, while in the parish jail, he had attempted suicide by slitting his wrists" (2.120). He did so, Prejean suggests, o...

If Pat is the sympathetic Death Row inmate in Dead Man Walking, Robert Lee Willie is the pretty much unsympathetic, good-grief-is-he-horrible Death Row inmate. Prejean sets us with Pat: in his case...

Vernon Harvey is his grief.Vernon's the stepfather of Robert Lee Willie's victim, Faith Hathaway, and her death basically defines the rest of his life. Whenever he speaks of her death—at the Pard...

Prejean mentions tons and tons and tons of people in passing. Some of these individuals are included in our "Shout-outs" section (remember, this is a non-fiction book, so all the people mentioned a...