Sister Helen Prejean, the outspoken death penalty opponent and author of "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States," will speak at Buffalo State College on September 14, 2001.

Her talk, "Dead Man Walking: The Journey," will take place at 7 p.m. in the college's Rockwell Hall Auditorium and will be followed by a book signing.

Nominated for a 1993 Pulitzer Prize, "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States" made the 1994 American Library Associates Notable Book List and was on the New York Times Best Seller List for 31 weeks. It has also made the International Best Seller List and has been translated into 10 languages.

In 1996, the book was developed into a major motion picture starring Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen and Sean Penn as a death row inmate. The film garnered four Academy Award nominations and won Sarandon a Best Actress Award.

A tireless crusader against the death penalty, Sister Helen issued a statement on the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Pendleton native put to death for his role in masterminding and carrying out the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people and injured 500 others.

When his death sentence was carried out by lethal injection on June 11, McVeigh became the first federal prisoner to be executed in 38 years.

Born in Baton Rouge, La., in 1938, Sister Helen joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille in 1957. She received a bachelor of arts in English and education from St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans and earned her master's degree in religious education from St. Paul's University in Ottawa, Canada. She has been the religious education director at St. Francis Cabrini Parish in New Orleans, the formation director for her religious community and has taught junior and senior high school students.

Sister Helen began her prison ministry in 1981, when she dedicated her life to the poor of New Orleans. While living in the St. Thomas housing project there, she became pen pals with Patrick Sonnier, sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana's Angola State prison for killing two teenagers.

Upon Sonnier's request, Sister Helen visited him as his spiritual advisor, experiences that she later based her best-selling book on

Fifteen years after beginning her crusade, the Roman Catholic nun has witnessed five executions in Louisiana, and today educates the public about the death penalty by lecturing, organizing and writing. As the founder of "Survive," a New Orleans victim's advocacy group, she continues to counsel not only inmates on death row, but the families of murder victims, as well.

In her statement on the McVeigh execution, she cites polls that show most Americans - seven out of 10 - find the death penalty so troublesome they want to see a moratorium on executions, and terms it a "societal act of despair, where all we know to do is to blindly imitate the behavior of the most violent among us."

Although Sister Prejean's talk is free and open to the public, tickets are required and may be obtained by calling Buffalo State College's Performing Arts Center at (716) 878-3032. Copies of "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States" (Random House 1993, Vintage 1994) will be available at the event for a minimum donation of $13 to Moratorium 2000, an organization dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty in the United States.