The Wall Street Journal-20080125-Death Isn-t That Quick A Resolution for Survivors
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Death Isn't That Quick A Resolution for Survivors
I can sympathize with R. Ted Cruz's concern for the feelings of the relatives of a murder victim ("Cross Country: Texas and the Death Penalty," op-ed, Jan. 19). But the death penalty does not give all that much comfort, and certainly does not give closure. Consider a state with no death penalty. The convicted murderer gets a life sentence with no parole. The relatives at least get closure. There can be appeals, but unless the convict is proven innocent later on, he still serves his sentence, and he is serving it while the appeals go on.
Now turn to a murderer who is sentenced to death. The relatives may feel vindicated at first. The culprit is going to be executed. But when? There will be several appeals which will take years. The guilty secret is that most people on death row don't get executed. Some die of natural causes. Some get their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Some (and this has to be good news) are proven to have been wrongly convicted. For those who are finally executed, the family has to wait years and years hoping against hope that the second shoe will drop. They all have to wait for closure, and for a lot of them it never comes.
Some may argue that this doesn't have to be the case. At one time the process went much faster. However, those days are gone forever. There is too much opposition to the death penalty. They may not be able to eliminate capital punishment, but they can certainly prevent it from working efficiently. And they do.
Peter B. Denison
Somerset, Mass.
