“I was 11 years old in 1997 when Geoffrey West shot and killed my mother, Margaret Parrish Berry, while robbing the Attalla gas station where she worked,” Will Berry writes in his powerful op-ed in the Alabama Reflector. Berry explains his efforts to meet with West, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1977 for killing Margaret Parrish Berry. “His execution date is set for September 25,” Berry writes. But I do not want the state of Alabama to kill him. That won’t bring my mother back; it will only add to the pain I have lived with since the night she was shot. I believe there is a better way.”
Alabama has denied Berry and West’s requests to meet, refusing to let the two men find even a modicum of peace. The state refused to explain why it denied the request. Maybe it was because Berry didn’t want West to be killed. Maybe it was because West wanted to apologize to Berry. Maybe, and most likely, it was just plain cruelty. Berry’s poignant essay lays bare the many layers of the brutality and callousness of capital punishment, a barbaric practice that ripples outward, hurting everyone involved, denying peace to those who need it most.
“If you support the death penalty because you think that [the victim families] are ever going to be healed by the murder of another person, that isn’t healing, that’s revenge. And revenge isn’t actually that sweet,” Death Penalty Focus board member Bethany Webb says in an interview on a recent Vitamin OC podcast. Webb explains why she is opposed to the death penalty, even though her sister, Laura, was killed, and her mother was wounded in 2011 in the worst mass shooting in Orange County history. Webb was always opposed to the death penalty and, while the other victims’ family members were divided on whether to seek death in the case of the shooter, Scott Dekraai, who walked into the Meritage Salon in Seal Beach, and shot nine people, killing eight and injuring one, then-Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas insisted on seeking death. The result was a six-year-long trial that ended when the judge declared a mistrial based on prosecutorial misconduct and sentenced Dekraai to eight terms of life in prison without parole, with an additional 232 years to life for attempted murder and other charges. The end of the six-year ordeal for Webb and her mother, Hattie Stretz, was “so freeing,” Webb says.
“Today, the State of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in violation of the laws of our country simply because they could. No one in a position of power, certainly not the courts, was willing to stop them,” public defender Kelley Henry wrote after her client, Byron Black, was executed earlier this month. The 69-year-old Black had a documented intellectual disability, end-stage kidney disease, congestive heart failure, and cardiomyopathy that required a pacemaker. Despite his many disabilities, the state executed him, and Black endured a torturous death. “What happened here was the result of pure, unbridled bloodlust and cowardice. It was the brutal and unchecked abuse of government power. It was the result of a failed criminal legal system that countenanced, even rewarded, attorneys who told half-truths and untruths,” Henry, a veteran public defender, wrote.
“Authoritarians love the death penalty, and have long used it to repress not crime, but dissent,” Anita Chabria writes in her Los Angeles Times piece, “Trump’s D.C. death penalty threat is a dangerous assault on civil rights.” She maintains that President Trump’s recent declaration that federal prosecutors in Washington D.C., “should seek the death penalty for murders committed in the capital [because] we have no choice,” is “about much more than deterring killings, though,” and “stomping on civil rights is at the heart of it — ruthlessly exploiting anxiety about crime to aim repression at whatever displeases him, from immigration protesters to murderers.” Still, despite the administration’s threats and overt displays of aggression and unconstitutional arrests, “resistance is alive, well, and far from futile,” Chabria writes.
In her article, “Gendered Capital Punishment,” in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, Sandra Babcock states that, “Women facing capital sentences—the vast majority of whom are survivors of gender-based violence —are nearly always condemned in courtrooms dominated by men.” And, she writes, “there is good reason to believe that the gender of those who prosecute, defend, and judge women facing the death penalty affects the quality of justice that women receive. And, even if “women magically took the place of the men who prosecute, preside over, and defend capital cases, it would not eradicate bias or guarantee fair treatment of women facing the death penalty,” because of the undeniable fact that “The legal architecture that sustains the death penalty, which operates independently of those who serve it, has long provided cover for systemic bias based on class, race, gender, and other identities.”
“As governor of Alabama, I had a chance to commute death sentences to life in prison without parole. I didn’t, and have lived to regret it,” former Alabama governor Don Siegelman writes in his op-ed in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Siegelman says, “Because Florida’s execution selection process is shrouded in secrecy and is marred by racial bias, it’s even more dire.” He cites the August executions of Kayle Bates and Curtis Windom, stating that they “highlight a disturbing racial disparity, and they show the danger when a governor is the sole decision maker in selecting who lives or dies. Regardless of ones’ views on the death penalty, can’t we all agree that a secret process to select those whom the state executes erodes the public’s faith that the law is being fairly applied?”