I first met Sister Helen Prejean in 1982 or ’83. She was visiting the Sonnier brothers at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Patrick Sonnier, the older of the brothers, was on death row awaiting his eventual execution in the state’s electric chair. Eddie Sonnier was serving a life sentence. The two brothers had been convicted for the brutal murder of a teenage couple in St. Martin Parish in 1977.

            I was co-editor of The Angolite, the award-winning newsmagazine at the prison, and was also president of the local prison Jaycees chapter. The latter position allowed me access in the prison’s expansive “visiting room” to operate the Jaycees’ “coke and sandwich concession.” I met this demure, conservative little “nun” while she was visiting Eddie Sonnier, and as a matter of training, I was always extremely deferential to her. She, of course, had heard of the “award-winning Angolite” and its too celebrated “prison journalists.” That made for casual conversation.

            All this was long before Sister Prejean’s phenomenal book Dead Man Walking and the Oscar winning movie of the same name; long before she gained international fame as “the death penalty nun” who would tirelessly advocate for an abolition of the death penalty, crusade for the “wrongfully convicted” on death row, and counsel the victims of violent crime who had unspeakable horrors inflicted upon their lives by some of the very people Sister Prejean was trying to save.

            Sister Prejean was also an advocate for my release from the Louisiana prison system, and at one point during the very worst time in that prison experience when I was in maximum security lockdown at the Hunt Correctional Center in 2004, she sent me cards and letters that helped keep me from going insane because of the particular injustice being done to me at the time. And upon my release from prison she would write the “Forward” in the book Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death Row Survivor” co-authored by my wife (Jodie) and I.

            Finally, last evening at the University of Houston (which is located in the city’s “downtown”) I was able to meet and embrace this wonderful human being who has inspired my life with hope and courage. And as I listened to Sister Helen enthrall the large turnout at the university’s auditorium with so much passion and insight into the subject in which, as she said, she has descended, the death penalty, my eyes filled with tears and the cup of my heart truly “runneth over.” I realized that we have both come full circle in life: me, from death row and a life sentence, and her from the scared little nun who dared embrace the humanity of the worst killers on death row; now together in the free world sharing a warm human embrace.

            I have been asked many times about how I survived 40 years of imprisonment. I saw the reason speaking to that crowd. People like Sister Helen who believed in me during the darkest days of my life, who embraced my humanity, who forgave me of my sins, and who inspired me to become an honorable, decent human being. They are the reason I survived.

            I will never forget Sister Helen Prejean. She is a precious “hero” to me and Jodie. Several years before I was released in 2006 Jodie encountered Sister Helen at an anti-death penalty convention in Chicago. The last thing Sister Helen told Jodie: “Don’t ever leave Billy Wayne.” Of course, Jodie never has – but it was the love behind Sister Helen’s instruction that made her our hero.

            God bless all those with the courage of a Sister Helen willing to embrace all of humanity.