Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online Page A

of civilized behavior. Even before the law’s technicalities, its unfamiliar language, privileges, and procedures, and its decade-long delays from trial to execution—even before all of that starts, the law, by its own terms, has failed these people.
    This recognition was a long time coming to our legal system. Crime, as we conceive of it, is committed against the community as a whole, and thus matters of policy, including punishment, depend on community judgments. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled as late as 1987, in Booth v. Maryland , that it was unconstitutional in a capital sentencing proceeding to admit a statement of the impact of the crime on the survivors. Such evidence was inflammatory and irrelevant, the Court said, since sentencing should look solely to the character of the defendant and his crime, not to the tears of the bereaved.
    By the end of the 1980s, the so-called victims’ rights movement had gained ascendance nationwide, and the Court, as has so often been the case on questions of capital punishment, reversed itself in 1991. Now, in most states, victims have a statutory right, as they do in Illinois, to be heard by the sentencing tribunal.
    Do survivors want the killer to die? Not universally. But more often than not, they do. And what is it they hope to gain by seeing a murderer put to death? Obviously, answers to this question are highly individual, but in speaking to victims, certain themes emerged.
    Dora Larson has been a victim advocate for nearly twenty years, helping the surviving family members deal with both the tribulations of violent crime and the way the legal system addresses it. She herself is a survivor.
    â€œ[M]y 10 year-old daughter, Victoria Joell Larson—-or Vicki—was kidnapped, raped, and strangled and put into a grave her 15 year-old killer had dug three days before,” she told us when she testified before the Commission on December 13, 1999. Given her professional and personal experience, Mrs. Larson was in a unique position to describe what survivors want.
    [W]e survivors, our biggest fear is that some day, our child or loved one’s killer will be released. And we know we never, ever get our loved one back. But we want these people off the streets so that others might be safe. To many of us, justice means we never have to worry that our killer will ever kill again…
    Clearly, it would render a loved one’s death even more meaningless if the crime was repeated. This concern presumably can be met by a life term. Yet Mrs. Larson noted several ways in which life sentences pose a far greater emotional burden than an execution. Because Vicki Larson’s killer was under eighteen, he was not eligible for the death penalty.
    When I was told life, I thought it was life. Then I get a letter from the Governor that our killer has petitioned the Governor for release. And do you know, I have testified before…[b]ut going before that Prisoner Review Board to beg them to keep him behind bars was the toughest thing I have ever done since Vicki’s funeral.
    Even if we guarantee that life sentences will include no possibility of parole, anxieties remain for survivors. Another woman who appeared before us, Laura Tucker, pointed out that the man who’d savagely beaten and murdered her nine-day-old niece, the baby’s father, had made two escape attempts while awaiting his death sentence. With his history of vicious child abuse, she contended that no child in the state would be safe were he again at large.
    Survivors’ concerns are also accelerated by the dynamism of the legal process: laws change. In Dora Larson’s case, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Apprendi v. New Jersey , creating new constitutional requirements that must be met before imposing so-called enhanced sentences—sentences that, in particularly aggravated cases, can be extended beyond the statutory maximum—has left her worrying that her daughters