Two Lives

We're pleased that 18 pages from MVFHR's Gallery of Victims' Stories are on exhibit in the theatre lobby where the play The Two Lives of Napoleon Beazley is running in New York City through March 16th. Do try to see it if you're in the area.

Napoleon Beazley, who was executed in 2002, was one of the last juvenile offenders executed in the United States before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such executions unconstitutional. His family's story contributed to MVFHR's report Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind.

The Gallery pages on display at the theatre include family members of murder victims and family members of people who have been executed. Here's the introduction that accompanies the exhibit:

Victims and the Death Penalty

Does the death penalty help victims’ families? Does it provide justice and closure to those who have suffered an irreparable loss?

The photographs and statements in this exhibit are taken from the Gallery of Victims’ Stories produced by Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR), a national organization of family members of murder victims and family members of the executed who oppose the death penalty in all cases.

Challenging common assumptions about what victims’ families want and need, the stories in this gallery invite us to consider that not all who have suffered the devastation of a family member’s murder support the death penalty. These families, and others like them across the country and the world, reject the idea that another killing will bring relief or healing.

The death penalty, instead, creates a new set of victims: the families that each execution leaves behind. The stories in this gallery also invite us to consider the agony of these families, who are not guilty of any crime but who suffer in the aftermath of the state’s taking the life of their loved one.

Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights works to give both of these groups a voice in the death penalty debate though education, policy, and advocacy work, and through the “No Silence, No Shame: Organizing Families of the Executed” project.