‘Dead Man Walking’ nun brings message of hope and activism to DePaul University

The tulips, Sister Helen Prejean jokes, bloom for her birthday.

The nun and death penalty abolitionist turned 87 last week, and every April she returns to DePaul University, where she donated her personal archives in 2011: nearly 45 years of journals, letters, speeches and notes from her work to end capital punishment.

That work brought her back to campus Friday for an event marking the 15th anniversary of Illinois abolishing the death penalty. In previous years, she has also gone inside alongside students, including for a book club at Cook County Jail.

"When you bring students inside to actually meet real prisoners, they meet human beings," Prejean told WBEZ. "Where human beings encounter real human beings, we both change."

For DePaul and other colleges that see social justice as part of their educational mission, that kind of engagement — sending faculty and students inside prison walls while also bringing people who are incarcerated into academic conversations — is central to how they educate students. DePaul, for instance, also runs a class inside Cook County Jail that brings together incarcerated and traditional students.

Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, who signed the legislation abolishing execution in Illinois, also spoke at the event, which fell on the same day the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was expanding its use of the federal death penalty. While in office, Quinn also commuted the sentences of 15 people still on Illinois’ death row, building on a moratorium and mass commutation initiated by Republican Gov. George Ryan nearly a decade earlier. About half of U.S. states still sentence people to death.

The event also featured a recorded video message from Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born pontiff whose parents earned graduate degrees from DePaul. Prejean spent years lobbying the Vatican to take a public stance against capital punishment. In 2018, Pope Francis made the church's opposition to the death penalty official. Pope Leo's message echoed that position, stating that "the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed."

For Prejean, the work has always been about getting people close enough to see what they otherwise wouldn't.

"I'm a storyteller more than a lecturer, and I take them close," she said. "Most people say, 'Oh, I didn't know it was like that. We can be safe without the execution.'" Her 1993 memoir Dead Man Walking — now also out as a graphic novel — has taken her story to young people across the country, she said.

At DePaul, that means events like this one, where students sit alongside faculty, administrators, advocates, and people who spent time on death row.

Renaldo Hudson spent 13 years of his 37 years of incarceration on Illinois’ death row before Ryan commuted his sentence life without parole. Two decades later, he came home after Gov. JB Pritzker granted him clemency in 2020. At the event, he warmly greeted Prejean, with whom he has built a relationship over years of speaking events and advocacy work.

Hudson said the event was exactly the kind of space universities should be creating. "At the end of the day, they're the people that are going to be making decisions in 10, 20 years," he said of the undergraduates in the room. "It's crucially important that they be informed about these real human rights violations and uplifting the humanity of people."

Watching students engage — leaning in, asking questions, stepping into the conversation with confidence — was one of his biggest takeaways.

"Where else can you sit down with Sister Helen and a governor and a bishop?" he said. "For me, that's the true reason for universities — to have moments like that where you can put theory to application."

The event was part of DePaul's Dialogue Collaborative, an initiative that brings together faculty, staff and students in structured conversation. Organizers are deliberate about mixing the tables — a first-year student sits alongside the university president.

Prejean said that's exactly why she keeps coming back.

"What are we educating students for?" she said. "When you go meet people on the margins, it puts you in touch with how privileged you are, and it challenges you to look and see how society is set up. And it gives you motivation to have a full soul life."

As for how she keeps going after more than four decades of this work, Prejean was characteristically direct: "Hope is a verb," she said. "You got to practice hope. You got to do something. You got to be active in it."

Charlotte West is a reporter covering the intersection of higher education and criminal justice for Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. Sign up for her newsletter, College Inside. WBEZ's Erin Allen and Charlotte West contributed reporting.