Desiring the Death Penalty or Desiring the Most Severe Punishment?

In the book collection Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-Based Perspectives on the Death Penalty, Margaret Vandiver’s essay takes a look at several possibilities for future research. Her essay inspired me to do a series in which we quote some of her suggestions and then offer a couple of additional thoughts and comments.

Here’s the first excerpt from Margaret Vandiver:

“It is natural for families to feel that the most severe punishment best reflects the enormity of the crime against their relative and the depth of their sorrow and pain. Any sentence lighter than the maximum provided by law runs the risk of seeming to indicate that the criminal justice system, or society in general, did not properly value the victim’s life or comprehend the magnitude of the family’s loss.

“This raises the question of whether LWOP would be a more satisfactory punishment if it were the harshest punishment available. In other words, does the death penalty intrinsically offer something no other sentence can, or is it desired by many families simply as the most severe of the available options? A study contrasting the reactions of families to LWOP sentences in death penalty and non-death penalty jurisdictions could be a start to answering this question.”

When I first read this, I immediately thought of occasions on which I’ve heard victims' family members express exactly this feeling: that one wants the sense of the offender’s having gotten the maximum available penalty, not necessarily death per se. In his page in MVFHR’s Gallery of Victims’ Stories, Bill Pelke says:

“As long as the death penalty was an option, I felt that if they didn’t give it to Paula Cooper, they were telling my family that my grandmother wasn’t as important as a victim whose murderer did get the death penalty. I think that families want the maximum penalty allowed by law for the person who killed their loved one, and most are satisfied if that is life without parole or at least long prison sentence.”

Along similar lines, Joy Ehlenfeldt said in our most recent newsletter:

“Ultimately I am still against the death penalty, but I struggle with the feeling that Juan Luna should have received the most severe sentence available. I found myself thinking, if brutally killing seven people doesn’t warrant the death penalty, then what does? My conflicting feelings make me think that the availability of the death penalty as a legal option in a case may add to the internal struggles, anxiety, and confusion that the victims' families are already experiencing, because when you know that the jury has a choice between two sentences and they choose life without parole, it can feel like they have chosen the lesser sentence, and that feels like he is getting a reprieve from having to accept responsibility and pay the consequences of his intentional and brutal actions.”