Dead Man Walking

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to capital punishment.

Shortly before the publication of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States in 1993, a Gallup poll found 76% of Americans supported capital punishment for a convicted murderer. Thirty years later, another Gallup Poll found that half of Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (although a small subset of that number still supported it under certain circumstances). Dead Man Walking and its film adaptation are important works that helped bring the case against capital punishment into the public consciousness. Her book, however, only marked the beginning of Prejean’s work, and, what is more, the prison-abolition movement extends far beyond any of its prominent spokespeople.

The period immediately following the publication of Dead Man Walking was not encouraging for abolitionists. In 1994, with public support reaching 80% (Prejean believes it was closer to 90% in her native Louisiana; see her 2019 memoir River of Fire), President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (its chief Senate sponsor was Joe Biden), which vastly expanded the scope of capital crimes under federal law. In 2001, Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the bombing of the Alfred P.