A Collapse in the Heart and Soul

Probably the worst charge leveled at family members of murder victims who oppose the death penalty is that they must not have loved their family member all that much, or be all that devastated by the murder, if they don't want to see the killer executed. I challenge these critics to pay real attention to the voices of victims' family members who oppose the death penalty, to hear how they talk about their experience and their feelings.

Here's one vivid example. Antoinette Bosco's son and daughter-in-law were murdered in their Montana home in 1993. In the introduction to her book Choosing Mercy: A Mother of Murder Victims Pleads to End the Death Penalty, Antoinette Bosco writes:

I got the news of the brutal murders on August 19, and that day I learned a new definition of torment. I had had to accept much death in recent years -- my father, my sister-in-law, my son Peter. Death from almost any cause, even from accident, can somehow be dealt with rationally. But if the death is caused by murder, there is a collapse in the heart and soul that cannot be described.

For murder is the entrance of the worst imaginable evil into your home, into all the safe places of your life, forever shattering any illusion you might ahve had that good can protect you from evil. Evil becomes all too real to you and never again can you even for an instant question its power. My beloved son and his beautiful wife were dead at the hand of someone I could only believe to be, at that moment, an agent of Satan.

I found myself screaming, sometimes aloud, sometimes with silent cries tearing at my insides. I tormented myself, wanting to know who was the faceless monster that had brought such permanent unrelenting pain into my family. I wanted to kill him with my own hands. I wanted him dead.

But that feeling also tormented me, for I had always been opposed to the death penalty. I felt now I was being tested on whether my values were permanent, or primarily based on human feelings and expediency. With God's help, I was able to grasp the truth again, that unnatural death at the hands of another is always wrong, except in a case of clear self-defense. The state is no more justified in taking a life than is an individual. And so armed, I found myself speaking out on a national platform, pleading against the death penalty for anyone.