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Roman Catholic nun Helen Prejean has been on a mission to end the death penalty for three decades.
A young Prejean, right, and her sister Mary Ann with their father. She grew up, she says, in a privileged home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, oblivious to the racism and poverty around her.
In her youth, Prejean jokes, a Catholic woman had two choices: get married or become a nun. She picked the latter and joined the Congregation of St. Joseph in 1957.
Prejean on the set with Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins during the filming of "Dead Man Walking."
Prejean visits Dobie Gillis Williams on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1996. Williams, who had an IQ of 65 and was convicted by an all-white jury, was executed in 1999. Prejean says he was innocent.
Prejean's sister Mary Ann and brother Louie accompanied her to Notre Dame University when she won the 1996 Laetare Medal, awarded for outstanding service to the Catholic church and society.
Prejean speaks to the media after Lori Urs, right, married Joseph O'Dell just hours before his execution in Virginia in 1997. Prejean believes O'Dell was innocent, too.
Prejean visited Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in 1998 for murders. Tucker said she got sexual gratification from the killings but later became a Christian. Prejean thought the clemency board ought to have considered the change in Tucker.
Prejean wrote her second book, "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions" in Montana. In it, she challenges Justice Antonin Scalia's support for the death penalty and questions his Catholic faith.
Prejean, right, talks with James Allridge's attorney Jim Marcus after the execution of his client in 2004. Allridge had asked for clemency based on apparent rehabilitation and a quest for redemption. Prejean believes Texas should have looked at those factors because its capital statute emphasizes, as it did in Allridge's death sentence, the "future dangerousness" of the convicted.
Prejean was by Gov. Jon Corzine's side in 2007 as he signed a bill to repeal the death penalty in New Jersey, the first state to abolish executions through legislation since it was reinstated in 1976.
Prejean speaks to an audience at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012. Even at 75, she's on the road many days a year speaking to audiences about why she believes the death penalty is wrong.
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- Sister Helen Prejean ministers to prisoners on death row
- She dedicated her life to ending death penalty after witnessing an execution 30 years ago
- She gained fame with her book "Dead Man Walking" that became a movie in 1995
- She says the entire death penalty system is botched
New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Sister Helen Prejean blasts the air-conditioner in her champagne-colored Toyota Corolla, the back bumper held up with duct tape. It's clear why friends insist on driving when they are with her. She could rival NASCAR's Danica Patrick on the gas pedal. Age -- she turned 75 this year -- hasn't slowed her down.
She was weaving all over Interstate 10 when police stopped her one time. Turned out she was reading while driving. The officer let her go when he discovered who she was: "I'll go straight to hell if I ticket a nun," he said.
He made her promise she would never do that again.
Thesedays, she depends on iPhone's Siri for driving directions and making phone calls. She also likes to play Plants vs. Zombies (not while in motion, of course) even though the violent nature of the game goes against her Christian principles.
"It's OK," she says. "The zombies are already dead."
On this day in late July, Prejean is nearing Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola, for the post office that serves it. She's been here so many times the warden no longer subjects her to the protocol for visitors.
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She drives down State Highway 66, through the guarded gates, past lush green Cypress trees and fields brimming with flowers, okra and collards to Camp F, where the prison constructed a $9 million brick building to lock up the condemned.
Built on a former slave plantation surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River, Angola is the nation's largest maximum-security facility. It houses more than 6,000 inmates and encompasses a chunk of fertile Southern farmland almost the size of Manhattan.
Prejean is here to see Manuel Ortiz, convicted in 1992 of the murders of his wife, Tracie Williams, and her friend Cheryl Mallory. He's been on death row for more than two decades; Prejean began visiting him 13 years ago.
Ortiz maintains he was framed in a murder-for-hire scheme. Prejean believes his claim of innocence. But that is almost beside the point.
Prejean, who gained fame as a death penalty abolitionist after the movie "Dead Man Walking" hit theaters in 1995, is not always concerned with a convicted murderer's guilt or innocence. It's easy to forgive the innocent. It's the guilty, she says, who test our morality.
She ministers to the worst of humanity because she believes in the restoration of life and that every human being deserves to be treated with dignity.
That is what Jesus preached. She likes to say that Christ was more radical than Karl Marx in his embrace of the lowest rungs of society.
Three decades ago, Prejean embarked on a mission to end the death penalty based on her Catholic faith and belief in human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, she says, forbids torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.
Ministering to death row inmates and learning the intricacies of American criminal justice, Prejean arrived at another steadfast belief: the process is broken.
Outside the entrance to death row, there's a porch with three dark wooden rocking chairs. The warden, she thinks, could have had a career in decorating the way the place is all fixed up.
A prison staffer leads her into one of the booths reserved for lawyers who come to meet with their clients. She sits on one side of the thick glass with a phone in her hand.
Ortiz walks in on the other side with leg irons, handcuffs and a chain around his waist. He always feels cold when he comes out of his 6-foot by 10-foot cell on death row. It's not air-conditioned and has louvered windows. A federal lawsuit filed by three inmates claims the heat index has reached 172 degrees.
The first thing Prejean does is order food for Ortiz from prison concessions; otherwise he will have to eat the normal slop that is served in the cells and never contains anything fresh.
"It's part of the attitude here. You committed a crime so you must always suffer," Prejean says.
Helen Prejean visits Manuel Ortiz on Louisiana's death row. She believes he is innocent.
She knows Ortiz does not have the money to buy anything. And food is important to her. It is the most basic necessity of life; it should be celebrated when shared with family and friends, she says.
Ortiz wants a catfish Po' Boy, a roast beef Po' Boy, five bags of potato chips, two Cokes and two Sprites. He also orders four strawberry and two cinnamon Danishes for breakfast the next morning and two hamburgers for lunch because Prejean has some money left.
She orders a grilled cheese for herself. She and Ortiz pray together.
"You are a son of God," she tells death row inmates. "Christ is with you. What is being done to you is wrong. I will be there for you."
Prejean finds Ortiz in high spirits on this day. With her help, he recently changed lawyers because he felt he wasn't being heard. He is desperate to prove his innocence and filed for FBI documents pertaining to his case through the Freedom of Information Act.
Ortiz dreams about the day he might walk out of Angola. He dreams of taking Prejean to one of the volcanic lakes in his native El Salvador. He wants to teach her to scuba dive.
They talk about everything from Marco Polo to Julius Oppenheimer's invention of the atom bomb. The science was so sweet; the end result, ghastly.
In the last hour of their visit, Ortiz narrates the plot lines to movies he's seen recently: "Band of Angels" with Clark Gable and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."
"I feel like I've seen the movies now," Prejean says.
It's as though they were sitting on a couch in someone's family room, sipping a cocktail -- Prejean loves her single malt Scotch -- and munching on popcorn.
She lets Ortiz carry on because it gives him dignity.
Equal justice under the law
Two troubled and recent executions in Arizona and Oklahoma, Prejean hopes, will trigger more opposition to carrying out the death penalty in the United States, the only country in the Western hemisphere that still puts the convicted to death.
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A 2013 Gallup Poll found that 60% of Americans still support capital punishment, though that number is the lowest it has been since 1972, when the Supreme Court constitutionally banned it.
Executions are shrouded in secrecy, masked, sanitized, Prejean says. She remains convinced that if people could see the brutality of killing a human being, they might reconsider their support for the death penalty.
Execution is torture, she believes. And so is the time waiting for it. Death row inmates, she says, "die a thousand times before they physically die."
The July 23 execution by injection of Joseph Wood in Arizona took nearly two hours. Witnesses reported that Wood snorted and gasped for air throughout the process. The April 29 execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma turned into a grisly show as he convulsed and writhed on the gurney and finally died of a heart attack.
Both men committed chilling crimes. Wood shot his former partner, Debbie Dietz, and her father, Gene, at their body shop in Tucson. Lockett shot 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman and then watched accomplices bury her alive.
Early Wednesday morning, Missouri became the first state to carry out an execution since the "botched" lethal injections. The state put to death Michael Worthington for the 1995 rape and murder of college student Melinda Griffin.
Death penalty supporters accuse Prejean of having empathy for undeserving, cold-blooded killers. The crimes justify the punishment, they say.
But even advocates of capital punishment, like R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, have said it's one thing to support death as punishment and quite another to explain it, fix it and sustain it with justice.
Prejean wants Americans to understand that it's not just the act of killing that was botched in the cases of Wood and Lockett. She believes the entire death penalty system is botched -- from the moment an arrest takes place to the trial, conviction, appeals and execution.
"It is random, arbitrary and capricious and disproportionately meted out to minorities and poor people," she says. "Race plays such a huge role."
If you kill a person of color, Prejean says, you are not likely to be condemned.
In 76% of cases in which death is the punishment, the victims were white, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Almost 42% of death row inmates are black even though African-Americans make up about 12% of the U.S. population.
She directs much of her wrath at the Supreme Court, which, she says, has given absolute power to the states without demanding transparency. Trying out new drug cocktails for lethal injections, she says, amounts to medical experimentation on human beings to see what it takes to kill a person.
The court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972 on some of the grounds Prejean talks about. But it was reinstated in 1976 with Gregg v. Georgia. The court held that a punishment of death was not