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Excerpt from Don't Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty by Rachel King

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The people in this book belong to an exclusive organization. However, it is not one you would want to join. It is called Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, or MVFR, and its membership requirements are that someone in your family was murdered and that you oppose the death penalty. The people in this book reject the concept of retribution and believe that no one is beyond redemption. No matter how ugly the facts of the murder, they found something of redeeming value in the murderer. Even if you support the death penalty, you cannot help but be moved by these stories.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing this book was deciding which stories to tell. Every one of the dozens of people I interviewed had extraordinary experiences to share. In the end, I picked stories with the goal of making the most persuasive case against the death penalty. In that regard, the reader should be aware that this is not a random sampling of murder cases, because most of the stories related here involve murder by a stranger. In reality,murderers overwhelmingly kill people they know. According to Department of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 1999, only 14 percent of homicides were stranger homicides.1
Often, the family member's decision to oppose the death penalty has come at great personal cost. It seems that compassion for a killer threatens to disrupt the order of the adversarial system and the social paradigm of retribution andvengeance. Many families have shunned, or even disowned, members for publicly opposing the execution of the person who murdered their loved one. This happened to Maria Hines and Ron Carlson.
Sometimes the justice system shuns them: prosecutors, parole boards, and judges have silenced people who have tried to speak against the death penalty. SueZann Bosler was nearly thrown into jail for contempt of court when she tried to tell the jury she didn't want her father's killer to be executed. Gus and Audrey Lamm were forbidden to speak before the Nebraska Pardons Board because they opposed the execution of the man who killed their wife and mother.Maria Hines and Ron Carlson were ignored by corrections officials at the same time that their family members who supported the death penalty were embraced.
The stories in this book highlight both the fallibility and inequality of the criminal justice system. Gary Gauger tells about his experience of being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for killing his parents after a police investigation and trial that can only be described as a sham. Jennifer Bishop and her family endured months of humiliating investigation into their private lives when the FBI focused its investigation on Jennifer's sister Jeanne, making the bizarre assumption that Jennifer and Jeanne's sister and brother-in-law were killed when the Irish Republican Army retaliated against Jeanne. Fortunately, the true killer was ultimately found and convicted.
Of course, not all police investigations are corrupt or misguided. Some investigators are brilliant, talented, and compassionate people, as in the cases of Marietta Jaeger, SueZann Bosler, and Linda White.
One universal conclusion that all the MVFR members have reached is that the death penalty did not help them heal. In fact, it actually impedes healing. The last two chapters in the book tell the stories of Azim Khamisa and Linda White, who are both actively involved in the restorative justice movement because they believe that the criminal justice system does little to help heal and restore crime victims.
Our society has been struggling with the question of the death penalty for several decades. The issue came to prominence most recently in January of 2000, when Illinois governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions after nearly presiding over the execution of Anthony Porter, an innocent man.2 His innocence was brought to light not because of fancy legal maneuvers by sophisticated lawyers but because of the enterprising work of journalism students at Northwestern University who tracked down the real killer and obtained a videotaped confession from him.
Anthony Porter became the thirteenth innocent person to be exonerated in Illinois since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. That surpassed the total number of people executed in the state since 1976, twelve. These numbers were very troubling, even for ardent death penalty supporters-troubling enough, in fact, to make a pro-death penalty governor put a halt to executions. Unfortunately, the situation in Illinois is not unique. As of January 2002, ninety-nine innocent people have been released from death rows nation- wide, and the one hundredth exoneration is imminent.3 Some death penalty supporters cite the exoneration cases as proof that our justice system works. However, others are not so convinced. As of February 2000, 94 percent of Americans believed that an innocent person had been executed within the past five years.4
The story in Illinois sparked national debate, and the media started to cover the issue of the death penalty in more depth. The next month, Professor James Liebman and two colleagues at Columbia University issued a report documenting that two-thirds of all death penalty convictions or sentences since reinstatement of the death penalty had been overturned because of serious errors in the trial or sentencing of the case. The Liebman report, like the innocence cases, emphasized serious problems with the administration of justice in our country.5 The general public began questioning the wisdom of state-sanctioned killing, and by May 2001 public support had fallen to its lowest level in nearly two decades, 65 percent.6
Death penalty abolitionists rejoiced at this turn of events. Finally, the general public was learning what we already knew: the death penalty is an imperfect, inhumane punishment doled out not to those who commit the most serious offenses but to the most vulnerable in our society-the young, the mentally impaired, and the poor. There is a saying: "Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment." You don't find rich people on America's death rows.
While there are many reasons to oppose the death penalty, there are few to support it. The idea that the death penalty is a deterrent has been utterly discredited by criminologists. In 2000, the New York Times examined murder rates in the twelve states without the death penalty and the thirty-six states that reintroduced it before 1983. It found that murder rates had not declined any more in the states with capital punishment than in those without it. Ten of the twelve non-death penalty states had murder rates below the national average, while half the states with the death penalty had rates above the average. Most striking, during the past twenty years, the murder rate in states with the death penalty was 48 percent to 101 percent higher than in the states without it.7
Another assertion commonly cited to support the death penalty is that it saves money because killing people is cheaper than housing them in prison. This belief has been debunked in study after study. The following facts illustrate the financial costs to some of the states where the murders featured in this book took place.8
• The death penalty costs California (chapter 10) $90 million annually beyond the ordinary costs of the justice system; $78 million of that total is incurred at the trial level. Elimination of the death penalty would result in a net saving to the state of at least several tens of millions of dollars annually, and a net saving to local governments in the millions to tens of millions of dollars.
• Florida (chapter 6) spent an estimated $57 million on the death penalty from 1973 to 1988 to perform eighteen executions at an average of $3.2 million per execution. Enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above and beyond what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole.
• In Texas (chapters 3 and 9), an average death penalty case costs $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for forty years.
• In Indiana (chapter 4), three recent capital cases cost taxpayers a total of over $2 million, just for defense costs.
• A report from the Nebraska (chapter 8) Judiciary Committee determined that any savings from executing an inmate were outweighed by the legal costs, concluding that the current death penalty law does not serve the best interests of Nebraskans.
Although the death penalty debate in the aftermath of the Illinois moratorium appears to be new, in fact Americans have been ambivalent about the death penalty for decades. In 1965, more Americans opposed the death penalty (47 percent) than supported it (38 percent). Support for the death penalty was right around 50 percent in 1970, shortly before the Supreme Court struck it down in the case of Furman v. Georgia, ruling that administration of the death penalty was so inconsistent that it violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.9
But even the Court couldn't seem to make up its mind about the issue. Four years later, it reversed its decision, upholding a newly crafted Georgia statute in the case of Gregg v. Georgia.10 By the time of the Gregg decision in 1976, support for the death penalty had returned to 66 percent, and over the next two decades it steadily rose, reaching an all-time high of 80 percent in September 1994.