Friends and family often ask me if being employed in an organization focused on abolishing capital punishment depresses me.  A reporter even asked me if we death penalty abolitionists ever smile or laugh, or if we are always grim given the work that we do.

Usually I just answer that abolitionists are human with the same emotions as everyone else, and I go about my business. Recently, however, an Internet article I read at work had me sobbing quietly in front of my computer screen.

The article was about Ronnie Lee Gardner, the Utah death row prisoner executed by firing squad in June for murdering attorney Michael Burdell during an attempt to escape a courthouse, and imprisonment. It briefly described Gardner’s horrific childhood rife with abuse, including sexual abuse, and neglect, a life that was not detailed during his trial.

Reading about Gardner’s life, if one could call it that, moved me to tears. It was so typical of the lives of most death row prisoners. So many were victimized children; despised, ignored, deserted, born to substance-abusing young people too poor, uneducated and immature to parent correctly. Alternately, many death row prisoners had no parents, and were left with people who were cruel, who mistreated them, and/or didn’t care a thing about them.  Considering their circumstances, is it any wonder that they’ve grown up – more like struggled up – to become severely damaged adults living in a world of hurt? They remind me of the t-shirt slogan popular with the youths of the 1980s: “Kill me, because I’m dead already” – a sentiment expressing the ultimate in learned self-rejection and self-hate.

Lest you think I’m a naïve “bleeding heart,” I was crying for the murder victims and their families, too. I have lost family members – an uncle and a cousin – to murder.  I understand family members of murder victims' expection that executing someone responsible for taking away our loved ones forever,  someone who has caused us unending grief, will give us emotional resolution.  I also understand the profound disappointment when the grief doesn’t stop and the healing doesn’t occur in the minutes, months and even years, after the murderer is put to death.  

People who kill should be punished, but killing broken individuals is not the way.  The death penalty is ineffective in deterring homicides, and does not even begin to address the reasons why people whose lives are like Gardner’s would kill. For every person we execute, there’s another mistreated, neglected, abandoned child out there with the potential to become prison fodder.

After a few minutes, I dried my eyes, remembering the title of a song recorded years ago by Canadian artists about ending famine in Ethiopia: “Tears Are Not Enough.”  Crying changes nothing.  Instead, let’s work on reforming criminal justice.  Let’s take the money wasted on capital punishment and spend it on programs that save children at-risk, preventing them from becoming the next Ronnie Lee Gardner.  Let’s take the money and fund more substance abuse prevention and rehabilitation programs. Let’s spend it on support programs that assist families of murder victims, entities which, unlike the death penalty, really help them heal and reconstruct their lives.  Let's work together to end the flawed criminal justice policy of capital punishment, replacing it with viable alternative punishments that keep out communities safe from harm. Let’s finally and forever obliterate that world of hurt the death penalty creates for people who kill as well as for their victims’ families.