Changing One's Mind

Another valuable feature of our latest newsletter is the section "Changing One's Mind About the Death Penalty," which focuses on victims' families who initially supported the death penalty and then gradually came to change their minds. Here's an excerpt from the interview with Bob Curley; I encourage you to check out the whole feature:

I knew that if we did get the death penalty reinstated in Massachusetts, it wouldn’t apply to the men who killed [my son] Jeffrey, but I thought maybe if we had the death penalty, people would think twice before doing this kind of thing to some other child. My main thing was that I wanted to prevent this from happening to someone else. And I think at some level, working for the death penalty offered me a kind of distraction from my own pain. It gave me something else to focus on, a goal, an idea that I might be able to do something good.