Honoring the Family's Wishes

We were interested to see this article in the June 20th Pennsylvania Daily Item:

Killer spared death sentence; gets life in prison
District attorney honors family's wishes

Moments after learning that he would serve a life sentence in prison rather than possibly face the death penalty, Richard C. Curran on Friday showed emotion for the first time in court this week when a letter written by his eldest daughter was read in Northumberland County Court.
“You deserve to go to jail,” 10-year-old Caitlyn Curran wrote.
She and her family are depressed because of his actions on Aug. 24, 2005, she wrote.
“You’ve disgraced yourself by killing my mom.”
Curran wiped tears from his eyes with a handkerchief upon hearing his daughter’s words, read by her maternal grandmother, Bonnie Smith of Mount Carmel.
It was Smith — mother of Tina Curran, whom Curran shot to death in Shamokin — who Friday asked Northumberland County District Attorney Anthony Rosini to spare her son-in-law from the death penalty in favor of life in prison without parole.
Tearfully reading her own letter from the witness stand, Smith said to Curran: “I hope you spend the rest of your life sitting in a cell, haunted not only by the crime you have committed, but also by the distress you have caused your children.”
Following Smith’s statements, Rosini asked her whether everyone in the family was in agreement over Curran’s spending his life in prison. Yes, she said.
Hearing that, Rosini said he’d no longer would be pursuing the aggravating circumstances on which he would have based his argument in seeking the death penalty.
It would have been impossible to convince the 12 jurors who Thursday found Curran guilty of first-degree murder to give the death penalty when the family was unanimously against it, Rosini said. ...

The issue of the death penalty's effect on families, and particularly children, who are related to both the victim and the offender has long been of great interest to us at MVFHR; we recently blogged about it here.

Our members who have lived through the murder of one parent and then, many years later, the execution of the other parent, say that the second killing only compounded the original trauma. Often, they were in favor of their convicted parent's death sentence at the start and only gradually came to change their minds. But at that point, getting a death sentence commuted to life without parole is much, much harder, even when the grown children plead desperately for it.

At least in this Pennsylvania case, the children will not have to go through that additional agony.