It contains 1,420 calories, 107g of fat and requires almost two hours of running to burn off the energy it provides.It has apparently gone down a treat with the chain’s customers.”Sales results for this politically incorrect burger have been encouraging,” Andrew Pudzer, chief executive of Hardee’s parent company CKE Restaurants, told Wall Street analysts last month. He cited the burger’s “audacity” as a reason for the chain’s 5.8 per cent December sales increase Others have been quick to follow. They deserve full human dignity and the compassion of Christ.”It is on the way back from the bail-bonds office that we lose the way and have to break into a run. Somehow we are back in our seats when a mystery witness takes the stand, an answer perhaps to the nun’s prayers. The woman testifies that her husband, the chief witness in the original trial, confessed on his death bed to the murders. It feels like made-for-TV court drama, but there are gasps from the public gallery.Manuel looks around and searches for Sister Helen’s face She smiles and gives him a thumbs-up.

“Poor Manuel,” Sister Helen whispers to me, “he knows that this day could decide whether he lives or dies.”She knows that even explosive testimony doesn’t always buy you your life back once the door to America’s machinery of death has closed behind you.As I leave her, Sister Helen is speeding off back to New Orleans to meet Sean Penn and Jude Law They, and Kate Winslet, are in town shooting a new movie. For Sister Helen, the hope must be that life does not imitate art too closely. Sean Penn played the prisoner in the orange suit in Dead Man Walking. And he died strapped to the black padded gurney, his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross.’The Death of Innocents’ by Sister Helen Prejean is published by Random House Available from Amazon for £12.22.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the burger bar, an onslaught of super-sized monsters has returned to wreck all diet plans and stretch all waistlines. They are defenceless, and then we kill them.”It is difficult for liberal Europeans to understand the scale of her task in changing attitudes in the red states of America. Conservative websites are filled with references to “frying” convicts and accusing “prissy” campaigners like Sister Helen of “glorifying” murderers Her answer is uncompromising. “What did Jesus say? ‘The least of these.’ People considered monsters, throwaways.

“We have so much Christianity-lite in this country, and George Bush is the embodiment of that. People are abysmally ignorant about the Bible and about the gospel of Jesus because all they hear is this stuff they get at the pulpit.”If those she accuses of “manipulating God” are to be found running the government and filling the ranks of America’s Christian right, then she is one of the few outspoken voices on the Christian left. She rejects the label, but in her version of Christianity, everyone has an inviolable human dignity. “When you are walking with someone to their death, even when they have done terrible crimes, and they are saying ’sister, please hold on to my life’, there is no dignity in this It is cruel and unnecessary It involves torture.

Sister Helen, still in full flight about religion, right-wing politics and how America is barely a functioning democracy, pauses only to shout thanks to the bail-bonds man with the unlikely suggestion: “I’ll know where to come if I ever need a bail bond”.She tells me how Christianity in America has been hijacked to support a right-wing ideology which fights crime with retribution instead of rehabilitation. “British people may say ‘we are so beyond this’, but you watch what your courts are doing.”The court breaks for lunch and I join the nuns as they rush out to queue at a branch of Subway for tuna wraps and Coca-Cola Sister Helen talks non-stop the entire way there. Outside on the pavement, it is hot and noisy, but this nun is as practical as she is spiritual; one moment she is quoting the prophet Isaiah in her big, resonant voice, the next she’s pushing on the nearest door, which happens to be a bail-bonds office, and asking for a quiet corner in which to sit.The receptionist looks puzzled at first, but as soon as her boss recognises the nun, we are sitting around the kitchen at the back of the office, eating our sandwiches. The guard watching Jerry Springer on television in the corner as the prisoner and the nun have their conversation and a last bowl of chocolate ice-cream.