I am here as the son of a genuinely kind woman who was murdered during rape by a nighttime intruder 6 weeks from her 75^th birthday, and also as the father of a boy who lost his grandmother to the same murder when he was three years old. I am here because I oppose the use of lethal injection in state executions and feel compelled to testify because I believe there should be a full public record of the entire execution process.

As background, it is important to understand what the capital process does to families of murder victims. Capital trials and appeals interfere with grieving and healing. Given that the process can take up to 20 years, with 15 being not at all uncommon, the victim’s families are forced to endure a continued connection to the murderer. I question whether healing can ever really occur under such circumstances. Grief is incompatible with legal proceedings, punishment, and revenge, but it becomes embedded in these incompatible contexts early and over many years in capital cases. Grief and a clear coming to terms with death and its finality is far healthier than spending nearly a quarter of your life being frustrated by the judicial system and your search for revenge. I say this having achieved an end to my connection to the specific legal aspects of my mother’s case after a period of a little over three years with a Life Without Parole verdict.

Also, it is important to know that when families are asked to decide on and speak to this issue, differences occur that polarize families at the time togetherness is most needed. When one is isolated because of deeply ethical issues from family in a time of grief, the social isolation and pain is immeasurably exacerbated. Thankfully I had my wife and child to go through this with.

The process touches more victims than you might see on the news. In my son’s case, he could have, had cooler heads not prevailed, been forced to spend his entire life from toddler to late adolescence publicly encountering questions and fears over his grandmother’s death while his parents worked through the legal stages, family division, absences for travel and our own suffering. As it is, his therapy sessions are just beginning, now that he’s eight, to touch on some of the fears and extreme vulnerability the murder has left him with. At least now he can deal with it without the confusion of trying to resolve the unethicalness of murder with the desire of the state to kill the killer. Many of us are confused by that, imagine the children.

Despite my objections to the death penalty process, I must say that I have never wanted to flinch personally from experiencing the process to its end, in all its ramifications. I’m sure that, had an execution occurred, I would have been present—straight from the protest line to the viewing area. I say this because I do not believe it is healthy to hide from the ugliest parts of life, especially when one has already been irreparably stained by one of those parts. The ugliness of this process should be made public to everyone, since everyone is participating, willingly or not, in the death of an individual. We should know what we are doing, that we have identified ourselves ethically with the murderer.