In her first visit to Hawai'i, Sister Helen Prejean, the nun whose story was told in "Dead Man Walking," the movie based upon her book, promises to walk listeners through a death-penalty case. Her aim: To bring to life the toll that this kind of death takes.

These days, Prejean, who as a New Orleans-based religious person also has her hands full in the aftermath of Katrina, is angered by what she called "the passive, nonreflective" attitude of authorities there. The founder of the Moratorium Campaign, a group that seeks to halt the death penalty, and Survive, which offers counseling and support to families of murder victims, she's also published "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions."

In her rapid-fire, silken Southern accent, she answered five questions:

Q. I don't think many people in Hawai'i know about your work with the poor of New Orleans. How has Katrina and its aftermath affected your work?

A. People were drowning in poverty already. How do you have an evacuation plan for a city in the 21st century and don't include 150,000 people who don't have cars? Affordable housing started getting cut in the '70s. Poverty's risen 17 percent under George W. Bush. Rollo May, a profound psychologist and a wise man, said the opposite of love is not hate, it's to ignore. We have tremendous struggles. They're gentrifying the city; rents have gone up at least 50 percent. There are 280,000 people out of New Orleans, 220,000 are black. I can see the connections with all these issues.

Q. Hawai'i abolished its death penalty, but there are a few pending cases where federal agents are considering it. ...

A. I heard about the deputy killed. We're dealing with that in Minnesota and other states that don't have the death penalty, and in comes the federal government who says we're going to do it anyway.

What amazes me about this case? The Supreme Court has given as a guideline that it's to be administered for the "worst of worst" murders. There's supposed to be a discernment process here. People don't know "worst of worst" — how do you distinguish "ordinary" from "worst of the worst"? Because any time a human being is killed by violence, the universe is lost. We lose our footing in trying to even deal with this criterion.

In this case, because interstate commerce was involved, it made it a federal offense? So worst of the worst means there's interstate commerce. Imagine having that as a criteria that the federal government uses to determine whether or not you're going to kill a human being for their crimes. It comes out of that mentality that we're going to control social problems through violence. It's Iraq, in larger print. Violence is the way you solve social problems.

Q. Has there been a move afoot to increase requests for the death penalty in states that have it?

A. The opposite's happening. It started in 2001, triggered by DNA evidence. DNA is not the silver bullet to deal with guilt or innocence, but it exposed that we had a faulty court system. As the public has grown in recognition of (that), the desire for the death penalty has dwindled.

What's it's also shown us is the regional disparity of practice: Southern states that practiced slavery account for over 80 percent of executions. Legal questions and how it's administered is putting the death penalty on hold in 15 states.

Q. "Dead Man Walking" was a pretty wide pulpit. How has it changed what you do?

A. There were 1.3 billion people watching the night of the Academy Awards in 1996; it just gave the movie over to the world. What it gave over to the world was discourse and reflection on the death penalty. This precipitated me onto the public front.

I say when you're a nun and you're famous, you get more work. All these invitations, "Will you come speak here?" That's my mission. I'm also a Southerner and a storyteller. I found a way I can do this — to take people through the journey because everybody struggled through the outrage we feel when an innocent person's been killed, like this deputy. How do we navigate our way to own the outrage we feel, then to take a look into our deeper values as a society and then to look at the moral costliness of what it means to set ourselves up as the arbiters of truth and falsehood, that we will decide who lives and who dies?

Q. I'm guessing you were probably the only nun on the red carpet that year. Did anyone ask you, "Who are you wearing?"

A. Oh! I had to deal with that clothing question. All the media interviews before were, "What does a nun wear to Academy Awards?" It was so silly and funny. Finally I just told them, "I'm going to wear a little black top and a skirt." And then that went out over The Associated Press.