Dead Man Walking Family Quotes

Pat worries about his own mother, and then (a few paragraphs on) expresses sympathy for the parents of the kids he helped kill. His mother and their mothers are linked: they're all losing children by violence. Pat is sympathetic in part because he seems genuinely grieved for what he did and can mentally put himself and his own mother in the place of those who he killed. Robert Lee Willie seems less capable of doing this.

Family ties and family grief are an important argument for the death penalty throughout the novel. LeBlanc, as a father, is the one who knows most clearly what Pat has done. Rehabilitation can't bring back LeBlanc's son.

Pat is trying to take care of his brother, Eddie, who is in prison for life (or close to it). Eddie's a murderer, too, of course—but he and his brother still love each other. Their families make them human—even though the family ties, in their case, were part of what led them, or encouraged them, to help each other commit murder.

Journalists want to think Pat and Prejean had a romantic relationship, because journalists are awful. Prejean says no, he was in prison, you idiot, and we couldn't even touch each other; what is your damage? Or, okay, she doesn't say that, because she's a nun, and nuns are patient even with fools. What she does say instead is that she and Pat were like brother and sister, and that this relation of brother to sister is similar to the love Jesus said people should have for one another. Family love is compared to the love of Jesus—and that's the case throughout the book, where the compassion and pain families feel towards their loved ones is given a strong moral value.

Eddie calls Prejean "Sis" because she's a nun; people call her "Sister Helen." But he also calls her "Sis" because she's family. Part of Prejean's religious calling is to love everyone as a brother or sister—but in this case, it also means being a sibling in this particular family. That also means that with Pat's execution, she's lost a brother. Maybe that's part of why she identifies so strongly with the Harveys and their loss later on.

Talking to the Harveys about Faith's death freaks Prejean out, understandably enough. It makes her worry about her own loved ones. Family becomes not a source of comfort but a source of fear and potential pain. The book encourages you to love, but it also shows how loving makes you terribly vulnerable.

Robert's mother helped him try to escape after his crime; then, when the police caught her, they used threats against her to get him to confess. The police and law enforcement don't, in general, come off very well in this book, but this has to be about the low point. Harassing a mother because she helped her son seems like a pretty awful thing to do—and, of course, even after Robert confessed, they still put his mom in jail. Did they really think she was some sort of horrible threat to society, or what? It's hard to see why they would do that for any reason other than to just be jerks.

Prejean is remembering her relationship with her own father and contrasting it with Robert's relationship with his: Robert's dad was in prison during most of Robert's childhood. There's some suggestion that Robert's lack of guidance as a kid might have led him to this pass. It seems a little simplistic to say he became a hideous murderer because he had daddy issues, so the book never quite says that, though it hints.

Again, Robert seems somewhat desperate for a family. Is that an excuse for aligning yourself with violent racist white supremacists, though? He has criminally bad judgment (literally).

This is a cute scene with Robert's family, shortly before he goes off to be executed. He's teasing his brother about being scared to sleep out in a tent in the yard. Todd clearly cares about his stepbrother, so executing Robert hurts Todd, too—and Todd hasn't done anything wrong. You can't kill somebody without harming his or her family—which is something you wish Robert himself had thought about before he committed that murder.