The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow · Pineapple Street Studios and Audacy

Introducing "70 Over 70"

May 20, 2021·43 min·3 clips

Sister Helen describes the death-row prisoner Brandon Bernard sleeping soundly the night before his federal execution — fully conscious, fully present, and at peace.

Max Linsky opens with a handoff. As executive producer of Catch and Kill, he uses the feed to introduce 70 Over 70, the Pineapple Street Studios show he is hosting. The premise has a nice reversal built in: instead of another status list that makes everyone feel behind, Linsky wants seventy conversations with people over seventy about what life feels like now. Not a nostalgia tour. More like a check-in on what people have learned, what still confuses them, and how they look at whatever comes next. Then Sister Helen Prejean enters, and the tone drops into something heavier. Her conversation turns to death row, mortality, and the campaign she has carried against the death penalty in America. The memory starts small. She writes to Patrick Sonier as a first-time prison pen pal, tells him she will visit, and gets back an excited reply with visitor forms. The commitment grows before she fully grasps it. When he asks her to be his spiritual advisor, she does not yet understand that it will place her near the death house before he dies. That gap matters. Prejean says that if she had known the whole weight of the role in advance, she might not have been able to take the first step. Linsky lets that sit, then asks whether seeing the person she would have to become might have stopped her. Her answer resists that kind of distance. She separates anxious imagination from direct witness. Once she is inside the system and sees its moral failure up close, the mission stays alive. The conversation keeps returning to that same hard point: someone standing inside the system and saying what they see.

As heard by us

A grounded interview that gives the show's premise real weight.

This episode leans into the show's older-and-wiser premise without overplaying it. Max Linsky sets up the conversation clearly, then turns to Sister Helen Prejean, whose work against the death penalty gives the interview real weight.

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Why you'd press play

You want Sister Helen Prejean, hard-won perspective, and a new series worth following.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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