I Forgive You, but You Must Die: Murder Victim Family Members, the Death Penalty, and Restorative Justice

Abstract

Previous studies have noted that in some capital cases, victim family members express forgiveness of the offender, empathy for his family, or for his adverse life experiences—but still support the execution. This article attempts to explain the phenomenon by identifying three types of forgiveness and the motives for them, and it explores the applicability of reparative dialogues between murder survivors and offenders. Empirical evidence comes from 52 interviews and/or open-ended questionnaires with survivors whose capital cases ended in an execution in Texas or Virginia. Most of the 52 survivors witnessed the execution, supported the death penalty, and rejected remorse when it was expressed by the offender. Yet some of them forgave the offender, empathized with the offender or his family, or were ambivalent about the death penalty, despite supporting the execution—the “forgive but die” sentiment. This subset of survivors—forgivers and empathizers—who are the most amenable to mediation dialogues are the focus of this study.

Keywords:

• murder victim survivors
• murder co-victims
• death penalty
• capital punishment
• execution
• mediation dialogue
• restorative justice
• closure
• forgiveness
• empathy

The author would like to acknowledge Bloomsburg University for a grant that furnished research assistants to help with the data collection, and to Mary Katherine Waibel-Duncan of Bloomsburg University and the anonymous reviewers and editor of Victims and Offenders, whose poignant recommendations made the paper better, but who certainly are not responsible for any of its shortcomings.

Notes

1. Productive sites used were the Associated Press archive (http://www.apnewsarchive.com/NewsArchive/MainPage.aspx#?SearchText=executions&Display=&start=0&num=10), Reuters Edition U.S. (http://www.reuters.com/news/us), United Press International (http://www.upi.com/), Fight the Death Penalty in the USA (http://www.fdp.dk/uk/exec/), Pro Death Penalty.com (http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/pending/scheduled_executions.htm), and the Death Penalty Information Center (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf)—all of which contain news reports and information regarding executions. Executions are also covered by local newspapers where executions take place in Texas that are available online—the Austin Statesman (http://www.statesman.com/), the Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com/), and the Huntsville Item (http://itemonline.com/). This information was placed into the White Pages website (http://www.whitepages.com/) to obtain addresses, but unfortunately there were numerous people with the same names at different addresses, which led to many false leads. To date 964 questionnaires have been mailed; many of them were returned as undeliverable, many were returned by same-named but wrong persons, and others were not returned at all.