Analyse af 'Dead Man Walking' og retten til at dø

Dead man walking and Terminally ill woman seeks right to die.

The story ´Dead man walking´ is about a Roman Catholic nun, Helen Prejean. She has dedicated her life to work with the small people in the society.

Here she meets a guy named Matthew Poncelet. He is on the death row, because he raped a 17 year old girl and afterwards killing her and her boyfriend. This is a awful experience for Helen, but although Poncelet is very tough and cynical, which makes it extremely difficult to get sympathy for him, even though he claims to be innocent.

Despite this, Sister Helen chooses to support the sentence of death only because she feels that every man has a right to get help. Slowly they get confidential with each other. Behind Matthew’s cynical mask there is a scared and frightened man. Sister Helen the begins a struggle against the authorities and the media to get Matthew pardoned.

But the death sentence is maintained, and after hours of desperate waiting for one last chance, Helen follows Matthew the few last steps of the cell to the death chamber.

The article ´Terminally ill woman seeks right to die´ is about a woman, Kelly Taylor 30 years old, who starts a landmark court battle to force the doctors to let her die. She want the doctors to give her so much morphine that she could and probably will die of it. Mrs. Taylor suffers from a heart and lung condition called Eisenmenger’s syndrome. She also has a spinal condition called Klippel-Feil syndrome.