All writing is tailored. It is tailored to an audience, whether that audience consists of a single member—the author—or a multitude.
When Sister Helen Prejean wrote Dead Man Walking, her audience was “the American public”, a grand but decidedly slippery-to-enumerate grouping.
Sister Helen wrote Dead Man Walking as a distress signal to the American conscience: Look! Look at what we’re doing to our own people. Look at what we allow to be hidden in plain sight. Look at what that says about us. Look deeply, don’t look away, and refuse to let it remain hidden.
The task that Helen set for her book was ambitious. A first-time author, a nun from the Deep South, taking on the American conscience?
She did so, and she succeeded. Dead Man Walking proved to be instrumental in bringing a key human rights issue out into the open. It changed minds and it helped put the death penalty into decline.
But it didn’t end it.
A practice in decline
When Dead Man Walking was published in 1993, 34 states practiced the death penalty and between them they executed 38 people.
Three decades on, capital punishment is still on the books in 27 states, as well as federally. Twenty-four people died in those states’ death chambers last year.
Those might sound like modest declines, but there are several key indicators of where the death penalty is headed:
- Only five states performed executions in 2023, and Florida and Texas accounted for 60% of those executions.
- For the first time since Gallup started asking the question in 2000, more Americans believe the death penalty is applied unfairly than fairly.
- When Dead Man Walking was published, public support for the death penalty in the US was 80% (in Sister Helen’s home state of Louisiana, over 90%). Since then, public support has been in steady decline.
- Last year, for the first time since executions were recommenced in 1977, executions outnumbered new death sentences. This is a continuation of a trend which shows juries are increasingly more reluctant to impose death.
While there are many factors involved in these trends, Helen’s book has played an undeniably important role.
And yet, despite the hopeful trends, the push to execute more often is also a constant undercurrent. In Louisiana, the new governor is gung ho to get the death chamber active and churning through the people sitting on the Row. Some states that have done away with the death penalty are facing moves to resume it. And the Supreme Court’s severe rightward lurch has led to a series of decisions crafted to smooth the path to more executions.
The task ahead
Enter Graphic Dead Man Walking. Its task is to accelerate the decline of the death penalty.
As with the original book, the audience is the American public, but with the added focus of younger generations.
There are two main reasons for this focus:
- Most people under 45 have neither read the book, nor seen the movie, nor heard the opera. They have no clue how the phrase “dead man walking” came into common parlance.
- Change hasn’t stalled, but it faces stiffening opposition, especially in the courts. Young people are young voters and young voices. They are the ones who will shape the future—witness what’s happening on campuses right now.
AUDIENCE
In trying to reach this new audience effectively, we have a flying start because of the foundation laid by Sister Helen over the decades.
Her permanent book tour has brought the journey of Dead Man Walking before a sizeable number of people. She has given thousands of in-person talks and Zooms; been interviewed on radio and television, both at home and internationally; developed a social media following of a quarter of a million people; and become the go-to voice for the media whenever an execution occurs or the issue of capital punishment arises.
To give you an idea of Helen’s influence and visibility, this month she has two major events. The first is an interview with Zoe Gelber on the BBC World Service’s Outlook, which reaches 81.4 million.
She’s also been invited to talk live with Jason and Travis Kelce on their podcast, New Heights, which has a regular audience of almost two and a half million and which had over 54 million views last year.
(For those out of touch with the cultural zeitgeist, Jason and Travis are footballers who play in the NFL on different teams. Travis also happens to be the boyfriend of Taylor Swift—and if you don’t know who she is, just ask the next person you see.)
What, you ask, will a couple of hulking footballers and a diminutive nun have to talk about? Passion, relationships and resilience for starters. And this won’t be the first time Helen has talked with footballers. In 2014 at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, she gave a pep talk to the school’s football team before they hit the field.
This is what you call AUDIENCE.
In the year and a bit leading up to the publication of the graphic version of Dead Man Walking, our job, in conjunction with Random House, will be to prime that audience.
