Words From Families Don’t Belong in Death Sentences

Ask any group of reporters about their least favorite assignment and most will say it’s interviewing the surviving family members of someone who has just died. Accidents are bad, murders are worse. You know before you get to their house that you’ll be talking to someone whose life will never be the same again.

The reading public probably recoils at our invasion of their privacy at such moments, but most of the times I’ve had to do it, the family members seemed to feel some kind of catharsis after talking about the tragedy. In some cases, they even thanked me for letting them air their feelings.

Even though it’s all part of doing your job, the memories of the families’ pain sticks with you. I remember sitting in a comfortable living room with a middle-aged woman in Denver in 1984, trying to take notes as she described how she learned that her 21-year-old daughter had been murdered by a man on their first date. Although the murder had occurred several years earlier, the pain was fresh. She was reliving it because the convicted killer was coming up for parole.

It was 6 in the morning on that day, she said. The cops came to the door, waking her and her husband. She remembered some hazy pastiche of words that weren’t making sense when strung together: daughter, date, knife, dead.

But she put it together, and her life changed in that instant.

You’d have to be a coldhearted wretch not to understand that when a loved one is killed, the heartache is spread throughout the family. There are victims all over the place.

It’s that recognition that prompted the legal practice of allowing relatives of murder victims to talk to a jury before it begins deliberating on a sentence. It’s all part of the general movement toward “victims’ rights.”

An Orange County jury listened last week to relatives describe the hole in their lives that the murder of their 19-year-old daughter created. The jury listened before beginning deliberations on whether the defendant it earlier had found guilty, Cynthia Lynn Coffman, should get the death penalty or life imprisonment for her involvement in the murder.

This is a classic case of public disgust with crime resulting in bad policy.

Despite unanimous sympathy for the surviving families, why should their suffering be a factor in sentencing the guilty party? The crime on the books is for murder, not for inflicting pain on the survivors.

Allowing relatives to speak to the jury, thereby inviting the jurors’ personal biases and emotions to enter their decision-making, creates potentially troubling scenarios for the uneven distribution of justice.

Let’s say a fictitious Smith family describes in the most painfully poignant language how their lives have been ruined by the murder of their loved one.

How could a juror not respond with sorrow and a heightened desire to want to make things right?

Then, let’s take the fictitious Jones family. Let’s say they speak to the jury about the murder of their loved one and say that although they were devastated by the murder, they have a powerful faith that has led them to feel no hatred toward the murderer. Indeed, they forgive the killer and pray for his soul. They tell the jury that their loved one would be more honored in death if the killer were allowed to try and make something of his life in prison.

What is that jury likely to do?

Or, what about the cases where the murder is just as heinous but there are no relatives left behind? Should that killer’s sentence be less severe because no one came to speak about their pain?

The law speaks clearly about what constitutes murder and its varying degrees. The penalty requirements are also codified.

Most jurors don’t welcome life-and-death decisions in the first place, but they can at least soothe their consciences by falling back on the language of the law to guide them. Requiring them to listen to aggrieved family members talk about the greatest pain they’ve ever experienced can’t help but, in some cases, direct jurors away from acting on the law and acting instead on emotion.

Do we want a death-penalty sentence determined by which speaker can make a more compelling argument in front of the jury? Is a murder worse because 10 relatives implore a jury, compared to a murder where only two people are available to testify?

As much empathy as we feel for families, it’s the crime and its circumstances that should drive verdicts and sentencings, not the eloquence of survivors or the widely disparate family situations of victims.

We as a country have always prided ourselves in saying justice is blind.

When it comes to considering the death penalty, it should be deaf too.