Do Opinions Change?

Two more research ideas from Margaret Vandiver:

Stability of Opinion Over Time

Accounts by survivors indicate that some of those who oppose the death penalty for their family member’s murderer come to that position after an initial period of desiring execution. After the first shock, rage, and turmoil of the period immediately following the murder, people may reassess their opinion and decide against supporting the execution of the offender. (The opposite may also be true, but I have not seen any accounts of relatives who initially wanted a life sentence deciding later that they preferred death.)

Researchers should try to assess the stability of families’ feelings about the proper sentence for the offender in their relatives’ cases. Is it common for families who initially want the death sentence to change their minds over time? Does the opposite occur? If families want a death sentence, but the offender receives LWOP, do they continue to regret his not receiving death?

The Aftermath of Execution

Little is known about how offenders’ executions actually affect families of victims. Media interviews with victims’ family members immediately before and after executions provide a glimpse of their initial reactions to the execution. These interviews present the feelings of selected family members at moments of intense emotional strain, and should not be used as a basis to reach broad conclusions about the effects of executions.

Among the questions researchers need to explore in this area are the following: Does the emotional condition of survivors improve after the execution? If so, is this improvement due to the execution or due to the end of the survivors’ involvement with the criminal justice system? Does any improvement in condition continue over the long term? Do survivors who supported the execution react differently than those who opposed it or were ambivalent? Is there a difference in response between those who did and those who did not witness the execution?


These are all really good questions, and it seems to me that it is useful to raise the questions even as we wait for full-scale research to be conducted in response to them. Simply by raising this series of questions, Vandiver reminds readers that a victim’s family member’s position on the death penalty is a complicated issue, influenced by many factors (as we also saw in yesterday’s post and will see in future posts in this series).

As Vandiver suggests, following up with victim’s family members in the aftermath of an execution would be quite valuable and interesting. Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie Marie was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, has remarked publicly on several occasions that other Oklahoma City family members have said, of Timothy McVeigh’s execution, “It didn’t do for me what I thought it would.” Research into that feeling and experience among victims’ family members would be well worth pursuing.

Bud Welch is also an example of Vandiver’s earlier point that some survivors oppose the death penalty after an initial period of supporting it. In his page in our Gallery of Victims’ Stories, Bud says, “When the President and the Attorney General announced that they would seek the death penalty for the perpetrators, that sounded wonderful to me, because here I had been crushed, I had been hurt, and that was the big fix. It took several months, but I came to realize that McVeigh’s execution wouldn’t help me.”

Bill Pelke has also written extensively about his initial support for the execution of the teenage girl convicted of murdering his grandmother, and his subsequent change of heart. And as we recently described here, Robert Curley once led the fight to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts and now testifies against it.