Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
Capital Consequences is a sequel, of sorts, to my first book, Don’t Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Out against the Death Penalty, published by Rutgers in 2003. Both books are the end result of a project that began in 1996, when I first started photographing and interviewing family members of murder victims and family members of people on death row. I had been living in Alaska and working on a campaign opposing legislation to reinstate capital punishment. Alaska had not had a death penalty since it became a state in 1949, but in 1994 the powerful Senate majority leader introduced a bill to bring it back, and he had the votes to pass it.
As part of our opposition campaign, we invited a woman named Marietta Jaeger to tour Alaska sharing her experience as a family member of a murder victim. Marietta’s seven-year-old daughter, Susie, had been kidnapped, sexually abused, tortured, and murdered by a serial killer in Montana, yet in spite of, or perhaps because of, this tragedy, Marietta had come to oppose the death penalty. Marietta shared her personal story with many Alaskans, including legislators, who later told us that hearing her story convinced them to oppose the measure.
Marietta was a member of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), an organization of people who have had family members murdered or family members killed by state execution and oppose the death penalty. It was from Marietta that we realized the power of murder victims’ family members as advocates against state killing. Barbara Hood, a friend and colleague actively involved in the opposition campaign, suggested that we put together a publication of photographs and quotes of MVFR members, and in 1996 I began photographing and interviewing them. Over the next several years I interviewed nearly one hundred families.
One of the people I met in my travels was a woman named Katherine Norgard whose son, John, was on death row in Arizona. She asked me if I would be interested in writing an article with her about death row family members, and together we wrote “What About Our Families? Using the Impact on Death Row Family Members as a Mitigating Factor in Death Penalty Sentencing Hearings,” published in the summer 1999 issue of the Florida State University Law Review. [1]
After several years of collecting stories of murder victims’ family members and death row family members, I felt compelled to share the information with a larger audience and embarked on the idea of writing a book advocating against capital punishment using the stories and experiences of people most intimately affected by it. When I first submitted a book proposal to Rutgers, it included publishing the stories of both the murder victims and death row family members together. Although Rutgers was interested in the proposal, the editor suggested that it would be better to publish the stories of the two groups separately. He wanted to start with the stories of murder victims, believing people who supported the death penalty would be more open to reading about the death penalty from the perspective of those one would expect to support it.
One would think that the experience of writing the two books would be comparable; they were similar in length, style, and content. If anything, the second book should have been easier to write, since I had already developed a formula of combining narrative and first-person voice and conducted most of the interviews. As it turned out, though, the second book has been fraught with frustrations that I did not experience with the first one.
With less than two weeks before the book was due at the publisher, three of my ten families had not given me final authorizations to publish their stories and were considering dropping out of the project. Another participant had already threatened to pull out but changed her mind. These four chapters accounted for 40 percent of the book.
Ultimately, only one family pulled out of the project; however, that was still extremely upsetting. I had spent dozens of hours interviewing family members and the defense attorney and dozens more researching the story by reading trial transcripts, newspaper articles, personal letters, journal entries, and mental health histories, just to name a few. The chapter of the family that decided to pull out of the project was the best written and most powerful of the book. I am disappointed that I spent so much time on something that will not be published and that readers will not learn of this family’s experiences.
On the other hand, one man who initially was not willing to be in the book changed his mind, he told me, because of the fact that I was willing to spend hours working with him, listening to his concerns and rewriting until he felt comfortable. His participation has been a gift.
This reluctance to participate was in sharp contrast to the experience of writing Don’t Kill in Our Names, where no one pulled out or threatened to pull out of the project. I was not making last-minute phone calls pestering people to send me their authorizations, nor did I stay up nights worrying that someone would change his or her mind.
When I am able to step back and look at the situation from the death row family’s perspective, I understand why they were so distrustful. Society spent years preparing to kill their loved one. Part of preparing for the execution is a ritual process of dehumanization. The story of the crime is repeatedly told—either in court or in the media—from the perspective of the murdered person and is rarely evenhanded. The murderer is painted as a killer worthy of death. Other aspects of his life, the times when he was kind, generous, and loving, are overlooked. The participants worried that I would paint a similar pictures of their loved one’s life, and even though I assured them that they would be able to review anything before it went to publication, it was hard for them to trust me.
In implementing the death penalty, society not only overlooks the positive aspects of the condemned person’s life, we disregard the impact that the execution will have on the people that love him. We ignore the fact that he has a mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, and others who will be permanently harmed by the execution. When I think of all these families have been through, I understand their wariness and am grateful they were willing to participate in this project.
With both books, the most difficult decision was choosing the stories to include. Everyone I interviewed had a compelling story, each worthy of its own book. With Don’t Kill in Our Names, I chose stories that made the best case against the death penalty. Focusing on the strongest arguments against the death penalty—racial and economic bias, incompetent counsel, wrongful convictions, prosecutorial misconduct, and the issue of executing juveniles and mentally retarded people—I chose stories that illustrated these problems. Before each section, I wrote a brief introduction on the subject explaining how the stories illustrated the problem. Thus I used the emotional stories of victims’ family members to make a rational argument against the death penalty.
Capital Consequences, however, did not lend itself so easily to this format. My first criterion was to pick stories told from the perspective of different family members. In most families, one person became the primary spokesperson for the family. Sometimes that person was the defendant’s wife, sometimes his mother, sometimes a sibling, sometimes a child, and in two cases a cousin. I didn’t want each story to be told by the wife of a defendant or the parent of a defendant, because I wanted the reader to see how the death penalty affects the entire family.
The next consideration was selecting stories that were at different stages in the legal process and had different outcomes. Not everyone who is sentenced to death is actually executed. Sometimes the sentence is commuted, and sometimes the person is exonerated. Last, I wanted stories from different regions lest the reader get the mistaken impression that the problems illustrated in these chapters only occur in some parts of the country.
Although not chosen for this reason, the stories in Capital Consequences point out many of the flaws in the justice system. Innocent people were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death; race and class were factors; defense attorneys made mistakes; prosecutors withheld evidence from defendants and brought charges against innocent people; people who were mentally ill at the time of the crime were executed despite the fact that they had no understanding of their crime; juveniles, who otherwise had no legal rights, were sentenced to death.
Indeed, it would be hard to read this book and conclude that we have a fair criminal justice system. As noted capital litigator Steven Bright has written, capital punishment is not for the worst crime but for those who have the worst lawyer. [2] Death rows in the United States are not populated by wealthy and powerful people. They are filled with the most vulnerable—poor people, people of color, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, and youth. And, more often than most people realize, the system gets the wrong person. As of January 2004, 112 innocent people have been released from death rows during the previous three decades. [3] No one is sure how many innocent people have been executed.