Yesterday's New
York Times has an opinion
piece from a victim's family member about the unusual circumstances
under which he came to oppose the death penalty. Matthew Parker was 19 when his
brother John was murdered.
My brother
had been stabbed numerous times, his throat slashed. The crime occurred in a
park in South Phoenix. An ex-con from Oklahoma was later found guilty of
first-degree murder.
Overnight,
I became a believer in the death penalty. Before John’s murder, I thought that
killing a person in any form was wrong. “I want closure,” I would rant to
anyone who’d listen. “I want justice.” But what I really wanted was blood and
vengeance.
A few years
after John died I moved to Arizona and, several years after that, was sentenced
to prison. I was a junkie and a petty thief, the latter a direct result of the
former. Between 1987 and 2002 I was constantly being locked up. Aside from time
in the county jail, I also served roughly 10 years in both federal and state
institutions.
Matthew Parker
confronts the possibility of encountering his brother's murderer in prison, and
writes:
It’s easy enough
to think about vengeance, even to declare a desire for it, but being confronted
with the mechanics of murder is a different matter entirely. It forced me to
examine my motives more closely, and to think about the sheer intimacy inherent
in acts of violence. I’d been in fistfights in jail and prison — fighting is
just a fact of life on the inside — but they were relatively harmless and over
quickly. Now I was forced to contemplate actual murder, and decided that it
just wasn’t in me to attack another human being with intent to kill or, a
distinct possibility, be killed. It took [being in the same prison system as my
brother's murderer] to teach me that I didn’t want to kill anybody, and from
there it wasn’t much of a mental leap to conclude that I didn’t want the state
do it for me, either.
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