Dead Man Walking

You will never see a rich person come before this Board, its not because the rich never commit terrible crimes, but because the expert legal council they can afford to hire, know how to "play the system"." During the Pardon Board hearing for Robert Lee Willie, Prejean asked the members of the board "Will you dare to condemn the unfairness inherent in the judicial system which metes out on brand of justice for the rich and one for the poor? How can one morally justify upholding verdicts of death knowing that such social injustices are apparent?.
             Once in contact with Pat, one thing struck Prejean as surprising and it wasn't his poor upbringing it was his race-he was white. "That's a surprise, I assumed he would be black", she writes . Racial divide was still in issue in 1980's Louisiana as Prejean very well knew. Living and working in St. Thomas, a New Orleans housing project for poor black residents, she was center to it all, she describes it "like living in another country:" The fear of violence, drugs and guns, law breakers and murder were not new to Prejean what became chilling were the racial inequalities within the law. Her friendship with Millard opened her eyes to a world where not all races are treated equal, he told her of case after case, where black men were tried before all white juries and that within Louisiana every juvenile that been executed had been a black, who's victim was white and who had been tried by an all white jury and moreover, that every man who had been executed for rape (in Louisiana) had been black. When a black defendants are on trial, prosecutors will try to eliminate all black jury potentials, as they are least likely to impose the death sentence. Had Patrick Sonnier been involved in killing two black teenagers, Millard argues, he would have never been sentenced to death. He later explains that, prosecutors, judges and juries (most of whom are all white) are more outraged when whites are murdered than when blacks are, thus, the likely hood of imposing a stiffer sentence for white victims is higher then in those cases where the victims are black.