There Is No Closure

Jeanne D’Arc makes a very thoughtful point about the prevailing fallacy that the families of victims are somehow cleansed of their pain by the execution of the killer (or so they think) of a loved one.

It occurred to me in reading this article, how much the short attention span of the press does to feed this beast. When perpetrators of ghastly crimes are tried, we almost always hear the victims’ families calls for vengeance. After an execution, family members are trotted out to announce they are happy with the result. And if there is “closure” for anyone at that moment, it seems to be the press — because that’s where the story ends. The only problem is that the victims’ families are still left with the pain, and for all the talk of “caring about the victims,” once they’ve achieved their purpose of helping the prosecutor get his conviction and sentence, and helping the press wrap up a neat story of “justice,” nobody’s terribly interested in them anymore. It would mess up our story if we knew that relief was ephemeral. As everyone, deep down, knows it must be. As Bud Welch says, “God didn’t make normal human beings to feel good out of watching another human being take his last breath.”

It is simply cruel to hold out the false hope that killing the killer will take away the pain. Sadly, I think that these families of the victims are victimized themselves by a rather ruthless prosecutorial ethos that seeks to leverage their rage and feelings of impotence against the obvious logic of accepting the loss and learning to live with it.

It is certainly understandable and even commendable that they use the loved ones as the living face of the consequences of the act during a trial. They represent society and the loved ones represent the human loss. But, using them afterward as poster children for the machinery of the death penalty as if they are the true beneficiaries is cynical and self-serving. By stoking the need for vengeance, they keep the wound open and festering purely for public relations purposes. The families are so caught up in an illogical belief in the emotional catharsis of execution that they remain in a state of suspended animation for years at a time.

Were the death penalty abolished in favor of life without parole, the families’ involvement with the legal system would end on the day of sentencing. And they would be able to begin the painful but necessary process of moving on with their lives. That day always comes eventually and the death penalty system only delays the reckoning.