Horrific and Unacceptable Suffering

Former South African Archbishop and Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu published a column in the British newspaper The Guardian a couple of days ago, urging support for a global moratorium on executions. It's interesting that he includes this comment about the effects of the death penalty on families of the executed:

And I have witnessed the victims of the death penalty the authorities never speak of - the families of those put to death. I remember the parents of Napoleon Beazley, a young African-American man put to death in Texas after a trial tainted by racism. Their pain was evident as the killing of their son by the state to which they paid taxes approached. I can only imagine the unbearable emotional pain they went through as they said their final goodbye to their son on the day of his execution.

It is often asked by those favouring the death penalty: "What if your child was murdered?" And it is a natural question. Rage is a common reaction to the homicide of a loved one, and a wish for revenge is understandable. But what if the person condemned to death was your son? No one raises a child to be a murderer, yet many parents suffer the grief of knowing their child is to be killed. In 1988, the parents of those on death row in South Africa wrote to the president, saying: "To be a mother or father and watch your child going through this living hell is a torment more painful than anyone can imagine." We must not put these children to death. It is to inflict horrific and unacceptable suffering upon them, and their mothers and fathers.

Napoleon Beazley, by the way, was executed in Texas in 2002. He and Christopher Simmons, of Missouri, had both committed murders when they were 17 and had -- according to a New York Times article -- "filed identical claims before federal and state courts, arguing that executing an inmate who was younger than 18 at the time of his crime violates the Eighth Amendment's provision against cruel and unusual punishment." On May 29, 2002, the MIssouri Supreme Court issued a stay of Simmons' execution, and in 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Roper v. Simmons made it unconstitutional to execute people for crimes they committed as juveniles.

This was a landmark ruling, but it came too late for many, including Napoleon Beazley and his family. Napoleon was executed on May 28, 2002, just one day before Christopher Simmons received his stay: another example of how arbitrary the death penalty can be. Archbishop Tutu wrote a letter opposing Napoleon's execution at the time; it's good to see that he is now calling for an awareness of the suffering that executions inflict on the families left behind.