Do Not Murder In My Name: The Rush to Federal Executions

Now, in the waning days of 2020, the criminal in the White House has pushed through a string of murders. I realize I have used inflammatory language, but nothing less conveys the intensity of my outrage and revulsion. Simply put, someone who initiates and demands the ending of a human life is a criminal. The deliberate, calculated, cold-blooded taking of a human life is murder. 

From the BBC: 

As President Donald Trump's days in the White House wane, his administration is racing through a string of federal executions.

Five executions are scheduled before President-elect Joe Biden's 20 January inauguration - breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions amid a presidential transition.

And if all five take place, Mr Trump will be the country's most prolific execution president in more than a century, overseeing the executions of 13 death row inmates since July of this year.

The five executions began this week, starting with convicted killer 40-year-old Brandon Bernard who was put to death at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The execution of 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois will take place on the evening of 11 December.

I am the family member of a murder victim, and I speak from personal experience of the impulse to revenge the taking of my mother's life. I also know that this is a natural expression of grief, and that with healing, it passes. To me it is essential that those left behind be given the support and time to process that loss and to re-engage with their lives. To focus on killing someone else freezes us in retaliation mode. 

Over the years, I have spoken out against the death penalty, telling my story to groups as diverse as city councils, law students, death penalty abolition activists, and state legislators. In 2012, I was invited to participate in an international conference put on by Murder Victim Families For Human Rights. Then I met others like me, who had lost a single family member to violence, those whose loved ones had been executed or were on death row, and those who experienced both. Every single person who had experienced both was Black. There is no escaping the racial injustice in the way the death penalty is applied (or the way crimes are investigated and prosecuted). Yet the most moving part of that weekend was listening with an open heart to mothers weeping for their executed sons -- and realizing their grief and loss was no less than mine. 

If you, who are reading this, take away nothing else, remember this: every person who is put to death is or has been loved by someone, and is grieved by someone, and missed like an aching hole in the heart by someone.

In 2019, I penned a blog for Death Penalty Focus, called "When we focus on revenge instead of healing, we never heal." You can read it below.

In 1986, my 70-year-old mother was asleep in her own bed when a teenaged neighbor broke into her home, raped her, and then beat her to near death and left her face down in a partially filled bathtub. It was a spectacularly brutal, banner headline crime, called by the District Attorney one of the most heinous in the history of the county.

Even in light of what happened, I am opposed to capital punishment, and I’d like to tell you why. I want to emphasize that I do not speak for anyone else. We all have different experiences, different histories, different internal and external resources. If there is one thing I’d like you to take away from my story, it is that not all the families of murder victims want the perpetrators to be executed.

I believe that capital punishment harms the survivors by interfering with the natural recovery process. In other words, when we focus on revenge instead of healing, we never heal. 

A number of years ago, when I was being interviewed about my mother’s death, the interviewer said to me, “You seem like such a sweet person. Most of us just aren’t that spiritual.” What she meant was, “How could you not want revenge?” What I thought was, You have no idea how angry I was and how much I wanted to hurt the man who did this.

The rage I felt and that I’ve heard expressed by other murder survivors is so overwhelming, it’s hard to find words to describe it. You feel as if your skin is going to crack open and out will pour enough molten hatred to incinerate the entire world. For years after my mother’s murder, I obsessed over exactly how I would kill the perpetrator with my bare hands and how much I wanted him to suffer for every moment of terror and pain he’d caused her. The images were so vivid, I couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming.

Adrenaline-fueled anger enables us to get through those early days and weeks. It sharpens our senses and focuses our thoughts. Our hearts pump faster. Biologically, we are primed to do whatever is necessary to meet the threat. We don’t feel our own injuries, either of body or of mind or spirit. All our resources are devoted to our immediate survival. In some circumstances, this lasts only a short period of time. I know people who have lost loved ones to murder, but in that same incident, the murderer was also killed. At the other extreme are instances where the perpetrator is never discovered and the survivors must cope with the nightmare of walking down the street, suspecting every passer-by or wondering if the murderer has taken another life. I know people in that situation, too.

Anger and the craving for revenge are normal reactions when someone you love has been viciously attacked, their dignity as well as their lives stripped from them. At the same time, these feelings fuel the illusion that retribution erases pain, and popular media constantly reinforce this illusion.

We human beings aren’t meant to stay in this hyper-alert, super-reactive, primed-for-battle state indefinitely. Mental health suffers as well as physical health. Most of all, we lose our selves. When we re-organize our thoughts and our lives around the goal of retaliation, we have nothing left over for the difficult work of healing. Even the process of grieving becomes distorted. We become focused on one single goal: making the perpetrator suffer.

This is what happens when someone – the District Attorney, for example – says to us when we are at our most vulnerable, when we’re in so much pain we can’t think straight: “When the person who did this is dead, you will have closure. It will all be over. You will feel better and get your life back again.”

Please understand: This is a cruel lie. We can never go back to the way things were before the murder. But the death of another human being cannot ease our agony. All such a promise does is keep us locked — incarcerated — in a permanent state of bitterness and hatred.

So what’s the alternative? On hearing my story, many people ask me, “How did you survive?” But I don’t think survival is the question. Although numb with shock and drenched in grief, we get up in the morning. We brush our teeth. We go back to work. I had two daughters to care for, one almost seven and the other three months old; their needs couldn’t wait. We take on the trappings of an ordinary life, carrying on in the blind faith that our insides will someday match the artificial normality of our outsides. In other words, we do what seems best to us in order to survive.

I was fortunate enough – and desperate enough – to seek out skilled professional care with a therapist experienced in treating PTSD. Because the kid who killed my mother was an alcoholic/addict, I attended Alanon meetings for over 20 years to work on those issues.

We can never go back to who we were before the murder, but we can go forward, re-engaging with positive, meaningful aspects of life, fully experiencing our feelings, and understanding what we have lost and what can never be replaced, but what can be created. By acknowledging and experiencing our painful emotions, we allow fresh air and sunlight into our wounds. That’s how healing takes place. The more we stop looking to an external event — the execution of the murderer — to somehow make us feel better or to “achieve closure,” and instead concentrate on taking care of ourselves — our health, our hearts, our families, our spirits — the better we will fare.

Almost every family member of a murder victim has lost not only a loved one but our belief in the decency of our fellow humans and our sense of safety in the world. Over the years, I found comfort, understanding, and strength in sharing my story with others who have endured similar losses. In listening with an open heart with families of those who have been executed, I recognize their loss because it is the same as my own. I can tell you unequivocally that I never, ever want anyone to suffer as I have. The life of their loved one has been taken not in a moment of anger or passion but with cold, deliberate malice on the part of the government. I refuse to allow my personal tragedy to be used as justification for deliberate, state-sanctioned murder.

“No killing in my name.”