Ultimate Punishment by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online Page B

killer’s life term might now be unlawful. If so, his sentence could be shortened to sixty years, which would put him back on the street at the age of forty-five.
    Mrs. Larson is right. As long as a killer is alive, he’s likely to keep throwing paper. From a penitentiary cell, there’s not much to lose. And eventually the law may come to his aid. The reality, though, is that a death sentence is probably more illusory than a life term. As I noted, even before Governor Ryan’s moratorium, more than a third of the time a condemned prisoner in Illinois eventually escaped death row; and less than half of one percent had actually been executed, which is consistent with national averages. Moreover, no jurisprudence is more unstable than that governing capital sentencing. Until June 2002, the mentally retarded could be sentenced to death. Now it’s unconstitutional, with no telling how many sentences across the country will be overturned as a result.
    But the fact that survivors never stop hearing about the killer while he’s alive motivates victim families to talk again and again about “closure,” an end to the legal process that will allow them to come to final terms with their grief. Only an execution, they maintain, will provide that irreversible conclusion.
    On the Commission, a number of us tried, without success, to determine whether the hope of closure is satisfied in reality. I have not found any long-range studies of survivors which attempted to assess their emotional state in the years following an execution. As Mrs. Larson said, “[S]urviving families are sentenced to a life of pain, unanswered questions, what-ifs, and trips to the grave.” These remain whether the killer lives or dies. Jay Stratton, who lost his mother in the Oklahoma City bombing, watched the execution of the principal perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh. Stratton reportedly said, “I thought I would feel satisfied, but I don’t.” Some scholars maintain that survivors only experience more emotional turbulence in the wake of an execution.
    Yet Mrs. Larson and many others assert that large numbers of survivors find the execution of their lost loved one’s killer a meaningful emotional landmark. Because McVeigh had killed more than 160 people, his execution provided a broad sample of survivor opinion, and many of those who witnessed it, either in person or through a closed-circuit feed to Oklahoma City, told reporters in the immediate aftermath that they had experienced a sense of relief. There are enough such anecdotal accounts that I, for one, am unwilling to dismiss them, particularly because execution brings a definitive end point to what seems to be the most enduring grievance of many survivors.
    As Dora Larson put it:
    My Vicki will be 10 forever. On February 8, 2001 would be her 32nd birthday. And I am going to take a little 10 year-old Winnie the Pooh arrangement out, because she’ll be 10 forever…[T]he victims will never see another birthday…[T]he inmate on condemned row has the freedom of choice. The victim had none.
    The fact that a life-incarcerated killer still has birthdays, Christmases, sees the sun rise and set, can look through the visiting room panel and hear his mother say she loves him and can repeat those words to her, is the ultimate indignity to many victim families. Some critics may label the survivors’ desire for death “retribution,” or even “revenge,” but that’s subtly off the mark. From what I heard, they do not await the murderer’s execution simply to establish a gruesome tit-for-tat, in which the horror of being killed is revisited on a killer, or out of the logic of the sacrificial altar, where witnessing someone else’s anguish will expiate their own pain. The justice they seek is the same kind embedded in the concept of restitution: the criminal ought not end up better off than his victim. To survivors it is unconscionable