PENALTY

in prison for the rest of his life because they consider that a greater
punishment, others, so that over time he can come to grips with
and take responsibility for his horrendous crime. I have witnessed
this tragic scene many times: victims’ families in the public spotlight,
laying bare their pain, reliving their unspeakable trauma – all because
their testimony is a necessary part of prosecution’s decision to seek a
sentence of death.
Descending now into the complexity of the legal machinery of death
- if Mr. Tsarnaev’s fate had been left to a Massachusetts’s jury, no
death penalty would have been sought. That’s because, since the late
60s, Massachusetts has not had the death penalty. But in this case the
federal government, designating the bombings as a “terrorist” attack,
trumped state law and sought the death penalty. Consequently, during
the trial traumatized victims’ families have had to recount and re-live
“THERE’S NOTHING HONOURABLE IN KILLING
FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS WHO ARE DEFENCELESS.”
—Sister Helen Prejean
their horror over and over: once during the guilt phase, again during
the sentencing phase, and now again, at the formal sentencing. If
government prosecutors had chosen, they could have accepted the
defendant’s admission of guilt and apology and sentenced him to life
imprisonment, where he would have disappeared behind prison walls,
and victims’ families would seldom if ever hear his name again. But
now on the news they will hear his name again and again as the years
of appeals drag on, which capital cases inevitably bring in their wake.
In an effort to avoid this very situation, after Mr. Tsarnaev was found
guilty, the Richard family, whose young son, Martin, was killed in the
bombing, made a public plea on the front page of the Boston Globe
begging prosecutors, not to seek the death penalty. To no avail.
My state, Louisiana, was the first state to offer victims’ families the
option to witness the execution of the perpetrator convicted of killing
their loved one. The rationale was straightforward: who better
than these families deserve to be official witnesses for the state? In my
book, Dead Man Walking, I tell of one such victim’s family, the Harveys,
for whom the execution of Robert Lee Willie, the killer of their
daughter could not happen quickly enough. A week before Willie’s
execution in the electric chair, Vernon Harvey held his own press
conference, urging the authorities to “bring it on” and he wished he
could be the one to “pull the switch.” What I’ll always remember (as
spiritual advisor to the condemned, I was also present at the execution)
is that immediately after the execution, members of the media
asked Mr. Harvey if witnessing the execution had satisfied him, and
he said, “Anybody got any whiskey? Anybody want to dance? We
killed that SOB tonight, and I got to watch him die! Then he added:
“But you know what? The SOB died too quick. I hope he burns
in hell.” And as he said this he jerked his thumb downward over and
over. As I heard him that night, I remember thinking to myself that
this poor, distraught man could have watched his daughter’s murderer
die a thousand times, and it would never be enough. And now that
the object of his hatred was dead, where could all that pent-up rage
of his go? My image of him that night is of a very thirsty man who
had just drunk a long drink of salt water.
I’ve been studying the death penalty in the U.S. for a very long time.
I keep learning about it, and one of the key things I’ve learned about
its application is that very few death sentences are actually handed
down, and then, how exceptionally few murder victims’ families ever
get to witness the execution of their loved one’s killer. And then it
is almost exclusively reserved for those who kill people of European
descent, almost never those who murder people of color. Evidently
their lives, their deaths don’t seem to matter in the same way, no outrage
is felt at their passing, and, often enough no serious investigation
of their murders is pursued.
When we do abolish the death penalty in the U.S. and we are now on
our way toward that day as public support plummets and executions
become more and more rare, a significant part of our enlightenment,
I believe, will be the recognition that wounded, grieving families,
after long years of waiting, can never be healed by watching as the
government kills the perpetrator. If anything, witnessing such violence
only serves to re-traumatize them. Such was the testimony of
many murder victims’ families to the legislature in New Jersey as the
state set about to repeal the death penalty in 2007, the first state to
legislatively do so in the modern era. “Don’t kill for me” they said.
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