Reliving the Death

In the extensive coverage of Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster’s recent commutation, for which many of our colleagues worked incredibly hard, Michael Kroll’s essay “Reliving the Death” is the first we’ve seen that looks at the benefits of the commutation from a victim perspective. Michael is editor of The Beat Within and founding director of the Death Penalty Information Center. From his essay:


“I will mourn my son till I die, but I’m not forced any more to relive his death.” These are the words of a mother grieving for her son, Michael LaHood Jr., murdered in a Texas robbery in 1996 after one of the co-defendants had his death sentence commuted to life in prison.

Her son’s killer, Mauriceo Brown, was executed for the crime in 2006, but co-defendant, Kenneth Foster, Jr., who did not directly participate in the robbery/murder was also sentenced to death for the same crime under a controversial Texas statute called the “law of parties” under which anyone involved in any way in a capital crime is subject to the penalty of death. Foster, who was 19 years old at the time of the crime, was scheduled to be lethally injected on August 30, but received that rarest of interventions at the eleventh hour – a commutation to life in prison by Governor Rick Perry following international protests and a near-unanimous recommendation for clemency by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

While world-wide attention has understandably been focused on what would have been the 403rd execution in Texas in the modern era — by far the country’s most prolific killer of killers (and non-killers like Mr. Foster) — few will recognize the profoundly anti-death penalty significance of Mrs. LaHood’s lament, “I will mourn my son till I die, but I’m not forced any more to relive his death.”

Reliving that death is one of the unintended consequences of the death penalty. At each stage, the wound is reopened and probed by the media (“How do you feel?”) and the prosecutor, who has an interest in keeping the brutal facts before the voters who put him/her in office. (And, can any murder be described as anything other than brutal?) While prosecutors never tire of promoting the death penalty as a means to bring about “closure,” that is a concept that no mother, destroyed by the murder of a child, can truly embrace. In truth, there is no real closure for the kind of wound that murder creates. 

But, though the hole left behind will never be fully closed, the death penalty makes any healing that much more difficult by forcing families of the dead to focus on the brutality of their loss at every legal turning point. And, because the U.S. Supreme Court has rightly declared that, as punishment, “Death is different,” it requires far more legal turning points than any other criminal penalty, including years of state appeals followed by years of federal appeals.

Read the full article here.