Prejean, author of the best-selling novel that inspired the film "Dead Man Walking," last Thursday told a sold-out audience in the Center for the Arts Mainstage that her involvement with the death penalty began in 1982 when she was asked to become a pen pal to a Louisiana inmate on death row.

The small, tidy nun, a native of Louisiana and a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, spun a warm and often humorous story for her audience of her relationship with the inmate who would have such a profound effect on her life.

Identified in the movie "Dead Man Walking" as Matthew Poncelet, Prejean noted in her lecture that after initially corresponding with the man, she was asked to serve as his spiritual advisor, and went to meet him, although she did not know the nature of the crime for which he was being punished.

"The first visit was really, really, really, really scary....My heart was beating and my fingertips were cold," she said. "I could hear him coming. I could hear his accent. He was Cajun and I could hear the French accent. And I could hear him walking" and hear the noise his leg chains made against the prison floor.

She was nervous at the prospect of spending two hours with this man, she said, but he entered the room, and "I looked into the eyes of a human being."

It was at that point that she began to learn everything she could about the death penalty, she added.

"Race plays a part in this country in everything," including which crimes are punished most severely. So does money, Prejean said.

"In our society, we don't have a good track record of caring as much about the murder of a young black kid as we do about a white suburban housewife."

While Poncelet never talked about the crime he had committed, Prejean said she wasn't going to be naive, either, and asked to see his background folder.

She was horrified, she said, to learn that he had been convicted of raping and murdering a teen-age girl and murdering her boyfriend.

"I felt such a wave of guilt-still do," after learning the nature of his crime, she said. "I'm putting a tremendous amount of energy into (this person) and look at what he did. If someone did that to my Momma or my sister or my niece, I knew I would feel all that loss, that rage, that pain," that the victims' families felt.

Her experience also prompted her to become involved with victims' families by starting a support group, Survive.

"A half-million people have had someone they know murdered in this country," she noted.

Even though her sense of pain and loss was "unspeakable," Prejean said she didn't believe the State of Louisiana should imitate the same crime by killing the perpetrator.

Poncelet was executed on April 5, 1984.

"Mine was the last face he saw."

The death penalty is not the answer to horrible crimes, according to Prejean.

"If we were some kind of perfect, god-like people, and who the victim was and who has money didn't matter, then maybe we could make a decision on the death penalty," she said.

But we all are mere mortals, and "You get all this stuff because we're human beings," Prejean added.

Society, she contended, can be safe without imitating the violence again by putting people to death for their crimes.

Prejean said the death penalty is a form of torture because the people on death row-and their families-die a thousand times before they are executed, she said.

They aren't the only ones who suffer, she added. All those involved with death-row inmates-prison guards, spiritual advisors, the executioner, the prison warden-bear the emotional burden of the death penalty.

"I know people do terrible crimes, but the flip side is, who deserves to kill them? Who deserves to carry it out? They're victims, too," she said.

She encouraged her audience to become more informed on the death penalty.

"Get more information, read, dig. The truth will set you free on this," Prejean said.