You know what it's like

This article in Saturday's Los Angeles Times features MVFHR member Vicky Coward:

Some survivors of murder victims have been part of the recent debate over capital punishment. Victoria Coward of Connecticut was one of them. Her 18-year-old son, Tyler, was shot and killed in New Haven in 2007.

"When you lose somebody to homicide, you know what it's like to lose somebody in one of the most hurtful ways possible," Coward said.

Prosecutors told her it would be too difficult to go through a trial and have to see photos of her son's body riddled with bullets, and suggested offering the killer a plea deal, which he took in 2010.

Coward lobbied lawmakers to end the death penalty and watched as state senators voted on the issue. Her son's killer, Jose Fuentes Phillich, was 25 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. She seems at peace with the decision.

"The death penalty doesn't help at all," she said. "If you have the nerve to kill somebody, you should be able to sit there every day and think about what you did."

Thank you from Robert Deans

We are thinking of Marie Deans, who died a year ago today. Marie's son Robert sent this note and asked us to post it here:

It was a year ago today that my mom passed.

Recently my wife and I collected a few things from Mom's house, and we found a box of cards and letters that were sent around the time word got out that Mom was dying, and after she died. Right now there are too many to devote time to a personal reply, particularly considering how late those replies are given that I only just found the notes. So, if you will forgive the global response, I just want to thank everyone who sent a card or letter to my mom or me a year ago. I appreciate the thoughts and well wishes, and I am sure Mom did as well in her last days. And, for the movement itself, keep your aim true, your goals simple, and your course honest.

Robert Deans

A Turning Point

This Associated Press story, "Victims' families boost Conn. death penalty repeal," has been printed in several newspapers:

HARTFORD, Conn. - (AP) -- The vote to repeal Connecticut's death penalty brought a moment of triumph for Elizabeth Brancato, a lifelong opponent of capital punishment despite the murder of her mother in 1979.

Brancato had lobbied lawmakers for years, becoming more resolved against capital punishment as she met families of other victims frustrated by endless appeals. She also started a blog to highlight the voices of other victims' relatives in favor of repeal that she felt were overshadowed in the debate.

She was at the statehouse Wednesday night as the state legislature gave final approval to a bill that will make Connecticut the 17th state to repeal capital punishment. A week earlier, she was in the gallery when it cleared its biggest hurdle with an early morning vote in the state Senate.

"It was one of the best moments of my life," Brancato said.

Brancato is among roughly 180 relatives of crime victims who pushed for repeal in private meetings with lawmakers, via petition drives and at news conferences. National advocates say the large size of their campaign sets Connecticut apart from other states, but relatives who oppose the death penalty are speaking up more often across the United States.

On the other side of the debate, death penalty supporters had perhaps the state's most compelling advocate in Dr. William Petit Jr., the only survivor of a 2007 home invasion in which two paroled burglars killed his wife and two daughters. Last year, Petit successfully lobbied state senators to hold off on legislation for repeal while one of the two killers was still facing a death penalty trial.

This year, many lawmakers said they were swayed by the stories of people who oppose capital punishment despite losing loved ones to horrific crimes.

Rep. Kim Rose, a Milford Democrat, said she decided to support repeal after speaking with a man who found peace by forgiving his son's killer.

"The moment I looked into his eyes and heard his story and I felt his pain, I got (it)," she said. "For him to finally come to some closure with it, was kind of a turning point for me."

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, said he will sign the bill into law as soon as it reaches his desk, making Connecticut the fifth state in five years to repeal the death penalty. The legislation will apply only to future cases and not the 11 men already on the state's death row.

In more than half a century, Connecticut has executed only one person -- serial killer Michael Ross, who volunteered for the lethal injection in 2005.

Brancato, a Torrington resident whose mother was killed inside her Bantam home, wasn't forced to think about the death penalty in her own case because the killer was convicted of second-degree murder. But she said it did not sway her moral opposition to capital punishment.

"For those of us who believe killing is wrong, it somehow diminishes the deaths of our loved ones if we say in certain circumstances it is OK to kill," Brancato said. ...

Repeal in Connecticut!

Congratulations again to Connecticut, this time for the House's vote to repeal the state's death penalty. Here's a column in today's Hartford Courant that focuses on one victim's family member's support of repeal:

At a Wednesday press conference — before the House of Representatives' late-night, 86-62 vote to repeal the state's death penalty — the speakers included clergy, a man wrongfully imprisoned, and a woman whose mother was murdered in 1996.

Standing nearby was the dandelion-haired, sensible-shoed 76-year-old Sister Mary Healy, of West Hartford. For her, the discussion was personal.

And there she was, afterward, answering questions and explaining what brought her to Hartford. In 2000, Sister Mary's brother, a former priest, was enjoying his morning coffee at a Burger King in Wilkinsburg, Pa. It was his morning routine — Burger King, then off to tell stories on a school bus. Joey Healy was a grand storyteller, and the children loved him.

But before he could leave, a man came into the restaurant, fresh from killing two men and wounding two others, and shot Healy in the back of his head.

he storyteller gene is shared. As she gets to this part of the story, Sister Mary, a former teacher and a former prison chaplain, turns her hand into a gun, and points precisely to the place on her neck where the bullet entered her brother's body, and killed him.

He was dead, but the family kept him alive so his organs could be harvested. In the same random killing that took him, the former Father Joe randomly gave life to five strangers. He is, in short, his sister's hero.

During the killer's trial, Sister Mary traveled to Pennsylvania to testify for the defense. For the defense. Her brother's killer's action are and were indefensible, but her brother would not support the man's death, and neither could she. Nevertheless, the killer was sent to Pennsylvania's death row, where he remains.

After the press conference — and a quick afternoon nap — Sister Mary returned to the capitol around 2:30 to climb the stairs and sit in the gallery and listen to legislators, one after one, seek to speak for victims. Some, like Rep. Larry Butler, D-Waterbury, have lost family members. Butler talked at length about losing a brother to violence, and then he offered —- and rapidly withdrew —- two amendments, including an unusual one that offered $1,000 tax credits to survivors. There were amendments galore on Wednesday, including amendments to keep the state's death penalty for murders that occur during acts of terror, or a home invasion, or if the victim is a police or corrections officer.

Sister Mary sat through all of it in the gallery, with other women who are also survivors. Sometimes, she shook her head at the discussion. At one point, a representative said from the floor, "I want to talk about victims," and a woman sitting behind Sister Mary said quietly, "All right. We're right here." Sister Mary said she understood the passion of people who support capital punishment, and she understands survivors who support the death penalty. She's never wavered but it took her a while to get involved in the abolition movement. "I was doing my own grieving," she said.

She wrote a statement — her first attempt, she said, smiling — that included her thoughts about "the agony of complicated grief." She wrote about the closure that won't come from an execution. She wrote about the anguish of loss, the "outrageously expensive process" of capital punishment, and justice and pain.

She still grieves for "dear, dear Joey," but she felt the need to witness the discussion. Of the vote — which sends the bill to Gov.Dannel P. Malloy, who says he will sign it —she said she was "delighted, and I am thrilled seeing all these young people who have struggled and worked to bring this about."

Spring/Summer Newsletter!

“Every day I went home and I think I grieved a little more,” Yolanda remembers. “When Greg was released, that was when I really grieved. I was happy for him and for his family, because it was terrible that he spent almost 17 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

"However, on my drive home, I was thinking, now I don’t know who killed my sister. It felt like I was reliving the day over 18 years ago when the phone call came telling me my sister was dead. For all these years, this is the person the state of North Carolina told me had done it, and now we’re here and we’ve got nothing.”

Check out our Spring/Summer newsletter, with its special feature, "After Exoneration: The Effect on Victims' Families," and reports about MVFHR's Seminar for new victims' family member activists, work in Asia, members' trip to Africa, and other news and updates about victim opposition to the death penalty in the U.S. and around the world.

New MVFHR brochure

Here's a photo from MVFHR's beautiful new brochure, which is now available! Please let us know if you would like copies of the brochure to give out when you are speaking or staffing a literature table at public events.

"If I changed my position ..."

Congratulations to our colleagues in Connecticut on the Senate's passage of the death penalty repeal bill!

And in another state that has been working hard for abolition, here's an article about MVFHR Director Renny Cushing's upcoming visit. From yesterday's Billings (Montana) Gazette, "Murder victim's son works against the death penalty":

Renny Cushing is what some might call a conundrum: the son of a murder victim who opposes the death penalty.

The New Hampshire man held that stance on capital punishment before his father was shot to death in 1988. He didn’t alter it afterward.

“If I changed my position on the death penalty, it would only give more power to the killer,” Cushing, 59, said Thursday in a telephone interview. “Not only would they take away my father, they would take away my values.”

Cushing, the founder and executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, will speak in Billings on April 14 as part of the Montana Abolition Coalition’s annual meeting. The meeting and the talks by Cushing and Sabrina Butler-Porter are open to the public.

Read the full article.

A more useful approach

Today Amnesty International has posted this piece about MVFHR Executive Director Renny Cushing, "Don't let those who kill turn us into murderers":

One warm June evening in 1988, Robert Cushing and his wife Marie were at home watching a basketball game on TV, when they were interrupted by a knock.

As the retired New Hampshire school teacher answered the front door of the house where he and Marie had raised their seven children, two shots rang out, ripping his chest apart.

He died instantly in front of his wife.

Later that night, a police officer broke the news of his father’s murder to then 34-year-old Renny Cushing, who had visited his parents less than an hour before the shooting.

“For me, at that moment, thinking about what you do in the aftermath of murder stopped being an intellectual exercise and became part of my life,” says Renny Cushing, speaking to Amnesty International from the house where his father was murdered. Renny now lives there with his wife and three daughters.

For some, the instinct after losing a loved one to murder might be to want to see the perpetrators executed.

But since his father's death, Renny Cushing has become a leading voice against the death penalty, travelling throughout the USA. and Asia speaking with and on behalf of victims who oppose capital punishment.

And:

As executive director of MVFHR, he often meets families of murder victims who support the death penalty. But he doesn’t think wagging a finger at them to persuade them to become abolitionists is the right approach.

“I can understand other victim-survivors who support the death penalty, but I am never prescriptive to them. I find myself working in the death penalty abolition movement, often knowing that I have much more in common with a family member of a murder victim who supports the death penalty than I do with all my colleagues in the death penalty abolition movement who don’t know what it’s like to bury a relative who has been murdered.”

A more useful approach, he believes, is to provide support and counselling for families of murder victims.

Read the full piece.

In Connecticut

Congratulations to our colleagues in Connecticut on yesterday's passage of the death penalty repeal bill in the Judiciary Committee.

Victims' family members have been integral to the efforts to pass repeal legislation in Connecticut. Elizabeth Brancato maintains the Connecticut Victims' Voices blog, where you can see several pieces of testimony. Take a look!

In Maryland

MVFHR Board Chair Vicki Schieber is one of the victims' family members quoted in this CBS article about yesterday's hearings in Maryland:

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (WJZ) — The end of the death penalty in Maryland. That’s what some lawmakers and advocates are hoping to accomplish by the end of this legislative session. Derek Valcourt explains they’ve got some hurdles to clear first.

They made their case to a House committee Tuesday but it’s a Senate committee that could give them the most resistance. Supporters say they are one vote shy of getting out of a Senate committee to the full floor, where they say they have enough votes in both chambers to pass it.

Erricka Bridgeford says justice for the 2007 murder of her brother won’t come by lethal injection.

“It’s not justice to me to have another dead body in place of my brother’s dead body,” Bridgeford said.

She’s one of several advocates calling on lawmakers to repeal Maryland’s death penalty. She’s joined by the NAACP, which points to the outrage over the September execution of Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis as proof that attitudes toward the death penalty are changing.

“It’s a known fact that racism exists. We know that our system is not foolproof, so in that sense of the word, we need to move forward at this time not to have another Troy Davis,” said Gerald Stansbury, NAACP.

“It can happen like that,” said Kirk Bloodsworth.

Bloodsworth knows about wrongful convictions; he was released from Maryland’s death row after he was exonerated by DNA.

“I don’t want to see anybody executed,” Bloodsworth said.

“My daughter was murdered in 1998,” said Vicki Schieber.

Schieber argues the lengthy appeals in the death penalty process can be cruel to crime victims.

“It puts them through hell. There’s no better word. They can go on for years and years and years,” Schieber said.

Read the full article.