My Victim’s Better Than Your Victim

First they brought a grandmother to the microphone. Rather, they brought to the microphone a woman who once had been a grandmother. “When people ask me if I have any grandchildren,” the silver-haired woman told the crowd gathered outside the prison gate on execution night, “I don’t know what to say anymore.” She shrugged. “Usually, I just say no.” With that, Sally Senior pushed her hands into the pockets of her parka and began the story.

Her daughter’s only daughter--a 13-year-old named Jenny, “with braces and pigtails”--was walking to a friend’s house in Novato one autumn afternoon. Jenny passed a churchyard where a deacon was raking leaves. The girl stopped to help. The deacon invited her inside the rectory. The girl was found four days later, raped, beaten, stabbed, strangled, dead.

That was seven years ago and now, Senior told the crowd, the deacon is serving life without parole in Folsom. “I hope he is miserable,” she said. “I haven’t forgiven him yet. But I think revenge is an ugly word, and I don’t think it helps. . . . I always felt killing was wrong, dead wrong.”

It was at this point hecklers began to punctuate Senior’s comments with taunts. Not everybody at the gate was opposed to the death penalty. Some had come to celebrate the execution of William Bonin, the “Freeway Killer”--and to do so, they said, in the name of his many young victims. They did not appreciate this woman confusing the issue.

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” one cried out.

“What about Bonin’s victims?” shouted another.

“I’m a victim, too!”

“Shut up, lady. Shut up.”

*

The execution Thursday night was the third at San Quentin in four years, and the scene outside was predictable. A couple hundred protesters held candles in the cold night and sang “We Shall Overcome” and listened passively to preachers and social activists and an actor. Death penalty supporters, smaller in number but louder in voice, jeered and heckled and counted down the midnight hour. The points made by both sides were familiar, the debate over the death penalty having been honed down across centuries to slogans that fit on picket signs.

“Don’t Kill in My Name.”

“An Eye for an Eye.”

“There is a Better Way.”

“Inject Some Justice.”

There was, though, one new wrinkle, and that was the participation in the protest vigil by Senior and others who had lost family to murderers. They represented a calculated attempt to counter what has become the ultimate tool in the campaign to ratchet up criminal punishment and recalibrate the justice system: victims, or, more accurately, the survivors of victims. With “three strikes,” it was Mike Reynolds, the Fresno photographer whose daughter was murdered by a paroled felon. With the resumption of capital punishment, it was the parents of the boys killed by Robert Alton Harris. With the emerging calls for jury “reform,” post-Simpson, someone like Fred Goldman no doubt will be brought forward to front the charge.

People like these, who have suffered so much, are difficult to debate. Who wants to tell Reynolds that, the death of his daughter aside, his three-strikes plan is a wrongheaded bit of overkill? Who will look into the eyes of a parent whose son was murdered by a Bonin and say it’s wrong to kill a killer? Instead, a man outside the gate noted, “we are letting victims and damaged people dictate public policy, and that’s crazy.” Understand, he could get away with saying this: His mother had been murdered--and his father accused--in a 1954 case that was the Simpson-like sensation of its time. Sam Reese Sheppard had paid the obligatory dues to enter the debate.

*

So had Derrel Myers. Only last month, his 23-year-old son was shot to death on a San Francisco street. “Peace, brother. One love,” the young man had said to his assailant, right before the gun was fired. Now Myers, a 53-year-old carpenter, was brought to the microphone. He handed his picket sign to someone for safekeeping. “My Son Was a Murder Victim,” it declared in bold letters. “He Opposed the Death Penalty. So Do I.”

He started to speak in tremulous voice, but the hecklers--wise now to the game--shouted him down. “What about the victims?” one kept crying out from the back. “What about the victims?”

Myers stopped, stared into the crowd. “If you care about young men getting killed,” he said angrily, “if you care about victims, then why don’t you care about my son, unless you don’t respect my son as much as these other victims. . . .”

The question was answered with a long, respectful silence. Maybe he wouldn’t change any minds. At least he would be heard.