Death penalty punishes survivors like me: Column

The day after the massacre of nine parishioners at the Emmanuel A.M.E. Baptist Church in Charleston, S.C., a judge sentenced a man to life in prison for killing my sister.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said the Justice Department would seek the death penalty against Dylann Roof, the young self-avowed white supremacist accused in the June 17, 2015 killings. His lawyers say he is willing to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison without parole, but the Justice Department says it’s seeking Roof’s execution because of his expressed hatred of African-Americans and his lack of remorse. That has prompted Roof’s legal defense team to challenge the constitutionality of the death penalty, calling it unreliable, excessive and undermined by lengthy delays.

To me, the death penalty also is something else — a sad reminder of how our justice system typically offers punishment instead of healing for the survivors of violent crime. The prosecution did not seek the death penalty in my sister’s case, but I would have opposed it had they done so.

As in South Carolina, a victim’s rights law in California granted me the opportunity to speak publicly at his sentencing hearing. After a trial that spanned three months, I was too weary and heartbroken to deliver my statement in person. But I did write a letter that was read to the defendant in open court.

Unlike those family members in Charleston, I did not forgive my sister’s killer. To the contrary, I castigated him for strangling my sister so viciously that the bones in her neck broke. For dumping her body down a ravine like a sack of trash. In my letter, I recounted the pain and trauma that the murder had visited upon our family. I asked the judge to impose a long sentence in prison on the defendant, a man with a history of violent crimes.

For a growing number of victims of violence, the thought of honoring our loved ones by killing another human being is not only counter-intuitive, but abhorrent. Perhaps more than others, I understand acutely that an execution would just visit pain on another family.

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Moreover, the death penalty typically brings the opposite of what survivors of crime most need: accountability, healing and closure. To me, accountability means an acceptance of responsibility for the crime and its impact on others. Healing requires some answers to why our loved ones were hurt, and letting go of some of the rage we’ve felt in losing them. Closure requires an end to a justice process that brings some reasonable assurance that no one else will be harmed at the same hands.

Roof has already tried to accept responsibility through a guilty plea to a life sentence. But a capital prosecution will undo all that: in order to save his life, his lawyers will be forced to deny their client’s guilt at trial and try to mitigate his culpability during sentencing.

A death sentence also denies Roof’s victims answers as to why this senseless violence occurred. One day, I would like to ask my sister’s killer, “Who and what hurt you, as a child? Do you ever think about my sister? Do you ever think about her daughter, my niece?’ As much as I want answers to those questions, I also want him to come to a place of insight and understanding about his crime. It might someday make it possible for us to hear the words, “I’m sorry.” It would give me some reassurance that he won’t hurt someone else in prison.

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Roof is a young man. He may not feel remorse for his crime now nor have the maturity to yet understand what brought him to a place of rage and violence. But one day he might. The death penalty exempts him and other offenders from confronting the human impact of their crimes.

Far from bringing closure, family members of his victims will have to suffer through not one but two trials, because South Carolina and the federal government are bringing duplicative charges. And because a death sentence by law requires review by an appellate court, the family members of the Charleston victims will have to face years — most likely decades — of appeals and accompanying news stories that will reopen old wounds.

The death penalty also keeps us stuck in an angry stage of grief. The death penalty requires all of us, victims and spectators alike, to actively summon feelings of hatred and contempt in order to justify the murder of another human being. I have felt all of those things at various times towards my sister’s killer. But I know one thing for certain: They aren’t emotions I want to hang on to. I’m old enough to understand that hate is a cancerous emotion that hurts me more than it hurts him.

While not all murder victim family members feel this way, many of us do. For all these reasons, I say to prosecutors who seek the death penalty:  Not in my name.

Tanya Coke, a former defense attorney and distinguished lecturer at John Jay College, is senior program officer for criminal justice at the Ford Foundation.

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