Dead Man Walking Rhetorical Analysis

In her book Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean had the purpose of showing why it is necessary for people to take action to fix injustice regarding several systems in American society, with her central focus ultimately being the death penalty. She achieved this by using logos, pathos, and ethos to make a well rounded appeal as to why these systems are flawed and why it is one’s responsibility to fix them.
Prejean uses logos to open her readers’ eyes to the flaws with the criminal justice system through statistics. She speaks of the many obstacles placed in front of the people she is visiting in St. Thomas. Someone born in St. Thomas is significantly less likely to succeed than someone born elsewhere, as can be inferred by that fact that “residents bring home an average yearly income of $10,890, where half the adult population has not completed high school, …show more content…
Prejean ponders “how law abiding would I be” (10) if she was in the same situation and the children she visits, compelling her readers to do the same thing - to question their ethics and morals. Is one inherently better than these people because they stay within the law? Or are they living in an entirely different reality which does not require the law to be broken? She also examines the explicit racism of the first half of the 20th century, more specifically about how her parents treated people of color. While they were not especially cruel, they did participate in the systems of discrimination, as “in my early childhood a black couple lived in the ‘servants quarters’”(6). Though she did not perpetuate these systems with bad will, Prejean believes that it is her responsibility to understand the problems that now exist because of them. Through these anecdotes, the readers will be led to realize their own prejudices and examine what they are doing to affect change in these unjust