Sister Helen Prejean, death penalty abolitionist and author of the book "Dead Man Walking," will deliver a talk and participate in a book signing beginning at 7:30 p.m. today in 101 DeBartolo Hall.

Sponsored by the Notre Dame Vocation Initiative, the event is free and open to the public.

A native of Baton Rouge, La., Prejean has lived and worked in Louisiana all her life. She joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille in 1957, when she was 18, and traces her involvement in the issue of capital punishment to her religious community's formal pledge, made public in 1980, to "stand on the side of the poor."

In 1981, Prejean moved with a small group of other sisters to the St. Thomas housing project in New Orleans, where she began teaching high school dropouts. The following year, at the request of a friend, she began a correspondence with Elmo Patrick Sonnier, a 27-year-old death row resident convicted in the brutal murder of a teenage couple. As the date for Sonnier's execution approached, she became his close friend and spiritual counselor, eventually witnessing his electrocution. Since then she has accompanied other men to the electric chair as a counselor and witnessed their deaths.

Prejean related her experiences with Sonnier in "Dead Man Walking," a book that was turned into an Academy Award-winning motion picture in 1996 and made her an internationally prominent opponent of capital punishment.

Notre Dame conferred its highest honor, the Laetare Medal, on Prejean in 1996, and in recent years she has been a finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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