Body and Soul
on whether the death penalty truly has the power to “heal” the victims’ families:
It occurred to me in reading this article, how much the short attention span of the press does to
feed this beast. When perpetrators of ghastly crimes are tried, we almost always hear the victims’
families calls for vengeance. After an execution, family members are trotted out to announce they
are happy with the result. And if there is “closure” for anyone at that moment, it seems to be the
press — because that’s where the story ends. The only problem is that the victims’ families are
still left with the pain, and for all the talk of “caring about the victims,” once they’ve achieved
their purpose of helping the prosecutor get his conviction and sentence, and helping the press wrap
up a neat story of “justice,” nobody’s terribly interested in them anymore. It would mess up our story
if we knew that relief was ephemeral. As everyone, deep down, knows it must be. As Bud Welch says,
“God didn’t make normal human beings to feel good out of watching another human being take his last
breath.”