On Victims and Killers and Survivors. On Life and Death. On Forgiveness. - UPDATE

Lexington, Kentucky.  April.  2015.  An apartment complex.  Salahuddin Jitmoud delivering a pizza. 

Well, not exactly.  Exactly, Jitmoud was delivering his life (so the cops and courts said) to 3 men who were looking to rob pizza delivery guys.  He was 22-years old.

I don't know who actually killed Jitmoud.  Apparently the actual killer hasn't been indicted.  But Alexander Relford, according to the prosecutor (via Marwa Ettagouri at the Washington Post), "set up the robbery, he provided the knife, he tampered with evidence."  And there's the fuck-you factor.

[H]e is the one who ate the pizza afterward.

Relford got 31 years.  

• Complicity in murder.
• Complicity in robbery.
• Attempted tampering with evidence.

He'll be out when he's 55.

In the criminal courts, that's little more than business as usual.  

What's not is what Abdul-Munim Sombat Jitmoud did.  He's the father of Salahuddin Jitmoud.  The kid who was murdered for his pocket change and a pizza.  He's the one who gives the lie to pretty much everything the haters want you to hear.

A Brief Digression

The case involved a shooting.  There were two victims - one intended, one an innocent bystander.  (Shit happens when bullets fly.)    

Wait, did I say there were two victims?  Only sort of.  Oh, the defendant was separately charged for each shooting.  And there's no question they were both shot (one in the leg, the other in the hand).  But the accidental victim of the gunshot?  She couldn't identify anyone as a shooter.  All she knew, all she could tell the cops was that the guy who shot her wore a red hoodie.

But the defendant didn't have a red hoodie. 

The detective said, testified under oath, that she wouldn't cooperate.  All she'd tell us about the shooter, the detective said, is that he wore a red hoodie.  And since she wouldn't cooperate, the detective said, she wasn't an "actual victim."  

Really.  That was the testimony.

End Digression

You hear that Muslims are terrorists.  The President tells you that thousands cheered in the streets in New Jersey as they watched the World Trade Center collapse.  They say it's all about hate.

Talk to Abdul-Munim Sombat Jitmoud.  Whose son was killed for a few bucks and a pizza.  Ask him.  Or just note his words, from the witness stand, at the sentencing of Alexander Relford who was at the least complicit in the murder of his son.  

Forgiveness is the greatest gift of charity in Islam. . . . I don't blame you, I blame the Devil, who misguided you to do such a horrible crime.  

There are things you rarely see in court.  

Teary-eyed after the father's gesture, Fayette County Circuit Judge Kimberly Bunnell called for a break in the hearing.

And then, after court resumed, after Relford apologized, after that.

Then the father and the convict hugged, Relford wiping his face with tissues as Jitmoud wrapped his arms around the 24-year-old.

In a couple of hours, the good people of the State of Ohio will be putting Alva Campbell to death.  It's pretty clear it won't go well. The nurses who examined his arms for the execution team said his veins can't support the needles. He'll be struggling his way to the death house with his walker.  I assume he'll still be wearing his colostomy bag.   They're giving him a special pillow so he won't have trouble breathing while they kill him.  (Yes, you read that right.) 

His will be the 56th state-sponsored murder in Ohio since we got back in the killin' business in 1999.  We've got folks lined up and set to go until well into 2022.

As I said, Relford will get out when he's 55

UPDATE

Execution failed.  They couldn't find a vein.  They're going to try again, another time, if they can manage to keep him alive until then.  It'll get easier, of course, 69-year-old, terminally-ill men routinely have their veins get bigger and sturdier over time.

I can't help but note that Ohio is now the only state to have failed even once to complete an execution since the bungled electrocution of Willie Francis in 1946.  And we've now failed twice.

He Held Her. They Both Cried.

It was 1983.

She was 19.  He was 22.  She was white.  He was black.  She was raped.  He wasn't the guy who did it.

But she identified him.  In a photo array.  In a courtroom before a jury.  In another courtroom before another jury.  Guilty!

60 years,  Four times what he'd have gotten from the plea offer he turned down even though his lawyer urged him to take it.  After all, he was factually innocent and the truth would surely come out and set him free.  Because God or the American way or just blind faith.

But no.  The trial lasted one day.  The jury was out for one hour.  Guilty!  

And 60 fucking years.  Which might as well have been a lifetime.

He appealed.  You know how that went.

His appeals failed, and he grew to accept that he would die behind bars. He shut himself off to the outside world — an adjustment exacerbated by the fact that, other than a visit from a friend in the first year, no one, not even his family, came to see him. He began to doubt his own innocence. 

There are, of course, two stories here.  

While he was losing his life, the woman he didn't rape* was working on hers.  She was comforted because the guy who'd raped her wouldn't get to do it again.  To her or anyone.  60 damn years.  And he deserved every one of them.

This was Oklahoma, so it's maybe no surprise (it shouldn't be anyway, but hey, this is my storytelling) that a church choir came to the prison for a Christmas musical.  One of the women from the choir noticed him.  She was impressed.  She followed up.  She believed.  They got married.  

When they learned about DNA she cashed out her retirement and used the money to hire a lawyer who managed to get the samples and have them tested. (I keep saying they should test the fucking DNA - this time they did.) 

And of course, since he didn't rape anyone, including the woman who'd repeatedly said he was her rapist, well . . . .  Damn!  He was the first person in Oklahoma to be cleared by DNA.  And after only 13 years.

“There’s nothing I can do to correct the 13 years of injustice that he has endured in this case,” the district attorney at the time, Tim Kuykendall, said in court.
Kuykendall also stressed that blame did not lie with the victim. “I do not believe she lied,” he said. “I think she truly believed [he] was the perpetrator.”

And so he went home, with his wife.  And he found a job and was getting his life together.  Which is maybe a whole lot tougher than you'd think, because really, innocence isn't enough.

Oh, it looked like things were going well.  He had a job.  He had a home.  But it's not that easy.

“I went from 14 years in prison to the streets in less than eight months. No halfway house. No integration. No nothing,” he said.
He also had no opportunities to explore the trauma of having been locked up and treated as a criminal for nearly half his life.

He was maybe ready to howl a little.  His wife, the church lady, not so much.  Still.

They worked together and Oklahoma passed a law to compensate exonerees for their years in prison. 

Well, some exonerees.  They didn't make the law retroactive.  Fucked again.  And then there was the drinking and the drugs and he lost his job and his marriage.  He ended up homeless.

“I had expected that all I needed to do was just get out, and then I can pick up where I started off,” he said. “But what I didn’t understand was that I didn’t know how to live life. I had lost the ability to cope.”

Of course, there was still the woman he didn't rape.  She'd known about the DNA testing, 

but she’d thought little of it, because she was sure there’d been no mistake — she’d even traveled to prison to fight his parole. So the disclosure was hard to accept. It brought back terrifying memories of the attack — and the realization that [he] was not the one responsible. 

And that, of course, in another way, she was. The day he was exonerated and set free

She knocked on the door of a church, weeping, and asked to see a pastor. “I told him I just needed God’s mercy,” she said. “I needed forgiveness and mercy.”

About 6 years later, the woman he hadn't raped called the wife he no longer had.  They spoke for a while.  How is he?  How is he doing?  She wanted to know.  And the ex-wife, How did you do that to him?  How could you?

In the fall of 2012, some 30 years after he was accused and tried and convicted of the rape of the woman he didn't rape, some 7 years after he was exonerated, he bottomed out.  He started to reclaim his life.  He got housing.  He got disability payments.  He went into recovery in a 12-step program.  

Last year, he was to speak at high school with a bunch of other exonerees.  The woman he didn't rape was an alumna.  She saw reference to the program, saw his name as one of the panelists.  She screwed up her courage.  

She tapped him on the shoulder.  Some 33 years after the fact.  After they'd last seen each other - her glaring and him mystified - across a courtroom.

“Could I talk to you for a minute, please?” she asked.
He followed her into a hallway, where she told him her name. His gut skipped.
She stepped back, afraid of how he’d react.
“I’ve been waiting so long to say this: I’m so sorry,” she said. She crumpled into tears. “I’m so, so sorry.”
[He] listened in amazement. It was the first time anyone had apologized for what had happened to him. “It’s OK,” he told her. “I forgive you. I forgave you a long time ago.” He put his arms around her. He began to cry, too.

It is one of the myths lies they tell people who've been victimized.  You'll only feel better if the monster is destroyed.  Or at least kept away.  But they learned otherwise.  Her apology freed him. His forgiveness cleansed her.  They'd both been victims.

His name is Thomas Webb.  At her request, the NBC News team that put this story together refers to her, at  as K.  I don't know how she picked that.  I assume it's her initial.  Or maybe she'd been reading Kafka and sensed - if only subliminally - a connection to Joseph K.

Every so often, he and K meet on lunch breaks. They check up on each other. He calls her sis. She says she loves him like a brother.
Their friendship has brought each of them a level of peace that neither thought possible.
“She’s able to move on with her life now instead of being stuck in fear and guilt because of me, and I’m able to be free from the resentment, the anger, the disappointment,” Webb said.

---------------

* Don't be a smartass.  Yes, There are actually millions of women, billions of women he didn't rape.  But you know what I mean.

The Banality of Samantha Hill

Apparently I was mistaken.

I was deeply moved by the families of the victims of the Charleston killings.  I thought it a wondrous thing, not to forget, but to forgive.  To return mercy for hatred.  That's a theme here, of course.  And while I don't know that I'd be capable of such generosity of spirit if it were my child/spouse/sibling, I know that I wish I were.

But, as I said, I was apparently mistaken.

The rule, Samantha Hill explains in a post at the Hannah Arendt Center is that one should forgive small harms but not big ones. 

In cases of willed evil, like that of Dylann Roof,[*] forgiveness is not called for. Forgiveness absolves the guilty and says, “But for the grace of God we all could have done what Roof did.” Forgiveness offers solidarity with the wrongdoer based on the Christian principle that we are all sinners: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

And see, what Dylann Roof [if you believe the stories] did is not what we might do.  We're better than he is, so we should hate him unreservedly.  

On the other hand, we should be careful not to punish him. 

Punishment is a response to a crime that reintegrates the criminal back into society. Once the punishment is born, the criminal again is to become a member of society. But some crimes are so horrible that no reintegration into society is possible, and the institutions we have are not designed to deal with such acts. 

Since he can't be redeemed, or in any event should not be, we can't punish him.  LWOP? Death penalty?  No, because either way, after he's dead we'd be welcoming him back into our midst.  And we can't allow that because he's evil.  Pure evil.  

In fact, Hill tells us (securing her place in line as a potential winner in the race to be among the first to embrace Godwin's Law), he is Adolf Eichmann who oversaw the Nazi's deportation and execution of millions. Eichmann, who said he would

leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the comparison is bullshit.  Even if the Charleston killer aspired to be Eichmann, he didn't succeed.  The single act of a crazed loner (even an evil crazed loner) cannot match the horror (and yes) banality of implementing the Final Solution.

Regardless, Hill is quite clear that her version of Dylann Roof cannot/should not/must not be punished.

In my judgment, we do not have the power to forgive or punish Roof; even sentencing Roof to the death penalty would constitute recognition of his act. His act is the kind of willed evil that “radically destroy[s]” our “potentialities of human power.” We must refuse to forgive Roof and also resist the urge to normalize his acts by punishing him within our legal system. There is no punishment equal to his crime.

What then?  The easy answer is that he must be expelled from human society.  Not by locking him away from society for eternity.  That would be punishment and would bring him back into society.** Nor, for the same reason, can we expel him from society by giving him the death penalty.

No, what we must do instead of locking him away or giving him the death penalty is execute him.  As a political but not a legal act.  

You know, as he killed people to make a political rather than a legal point. 

Oh, wait.

H/t Joachim Kübler

-----------------
*Hill accepts, without any apparent doubt, that Roof was the killer and that what the police say about him, including the statements they say were in his purported confession, is true.  Those may be fair inferences from what the media tells us.  It does not follow that they are in fact accurate.
**Hill has a PhD in philosophy and a particular interest in  incoherent and self-contradictory "poetic thinking."  

Words

Shakespeare knew.
From Romeo and Juliet, Juliet to Romeo, Capulet to Montague:

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part 45
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Of course, they both ended up dead.  it's perhaps not all that simple.

Still, words, names, count.

God, after all, named the world into existence (or so claims Genesis). The word, logos (λόγος), calls forth the thing.

God said, "Let there be light, and there was light."

Which, as I've noted before, is a pretty cool trick.

And brings me to Charleston, South Carolina, and what was surely murder whatever else it might be. Ah, but that "whatever else."

DOJ is trying to determine whether it was a hate crime or terrorism.  Presumably, that's so that they can prosecute the bad guy if South Carolina decides to give him a medal.  And folks across the spectrum are arguing about which of those it should be called.

As if it mattered.

Scott Greenfield:

Murdering people is offensive. Murdering people because of their race is offensive. What you call it is irrelevant. When you understand that, the debate over whether to call it terrorism begins to look a lot more ridiculous, narcissistic and offensive.

Which is of course true.  Kinda.  Because naming is explaining, and explaining gives us categories that tell us what to do.

If it's Terrorism, we have a box we can put it in.  And we can add it to the war.  Something to eradicate.  Send drones.  Take out the leaders.  Kill enough of them and its over.  (Just look how well that's been working in the middle east, but I digress.)

If it's a hate crime, well, then we educate or send people to church where they'll learn about love. (OK, that was a bad example.)

If it's racism?  Hey, that's over.  Remember, we elected a Kenyan as President.  But if we'd just get the Stars and Bars off the S.C. flag.  (And after all, Texas won't have to put them on license plates.)

Or maybe it's guns.  Obama says to control them.  The gun lobby says the problem is that we don't have enough. 

Or drugs.  Rick Perry, who called the killing of 9 an "accident," blamed it on drugs (while admitting he didn't know what he was talking about).

Also, I think there is a real issue to be talked about. It seems to me, again without having all the details about this, that these individuals have been medicated and there may be a real issue in this country from the standpoint of these drugs and how they’re used.”

So crank up mandatory minimums.  Or decriminalize.

Or provide the mental health care crazy people need.

Or maybe it's just evil.  Which is maybe a result of Adam and Eve eating that piece of fruit.  Or maybe untreatable psychopathy that isn't the same as being crazy.

Or gee, maybe he was just born that way.

The thing is, none of this, no name, will change the fact.  Scott again.

No matter what characterization floats your boat, there will still be nine dead human beings in Charleston, and none of them will be you.

And nothing will bring them back.
Of course, we'll put up a plaque.  Raise money.
And then?
Nikki Haley, South Carolina's governor, called immediately for the death penalty.  Mark Berman in the Washington Post.

“We absolutely will want him to have the death penalty,” Haley said Friday morning. “This is the worst hate that I’ve seen and that the country has seen in a long time.”  

Of course, she's not alone.  Even some from the family of Dylan Roof who's been arrested and charged with the killings. Bob Fredericks in the (sorry) NY Post.

“If he’s found guilty, I’ll be the one to push the button myself. If what I am hearing is true, he needs to pay for it” uncle Carson Cowles told “Good Morning America.”

The local prosecutor, Scarlett Wilson, expresses more restraint. Mark Berman, again, in a different story.

The prosecutor who will pursue the case against the gunman accused of killing nine people inside a historic church in Charleston, S.C., said Friday she has not decided whether she will seek the death penalty in the case.
She said that decision would come at a later time, after she was able to speak to the relatives of the people killed Wednesday inside the church.
“My first obligation, my primary obligation is to these victims’ families,” said Scarlett A. Wilson, the prosecutor for Charleston County, at a news conference Friday afternoon. “They deserve to know the facts first. They deserve to be involved in any conversations regarding the death penalty.”

Actually, her obligation is to "justice," whatever that might be, and then perhaps to the people who elected her.  But at the moment that's almost (not quite, but almost) a quibble.  In any event, what of those "victims' families"?

They forgave him.

Jeffrey Collins for AP.

Felecia Sanders survived the attack on her Bible study group by pretending to be dead, but lost her son Tywanza.
On Friday, she came face to face with the alleged shooter, as she had the night of the slaughter.
“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” Sanders told Dylann Storm Roof, who appeared via video conference for a bond hearing. “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know. Every fiber in my body hurts … and I’ll never be the same.”
“Tywanza was my hero.”
And then Sanders did something remarkable: She forgave the young man who has been charged with nine counts of murder for the bloody attack at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“As we said in Bible Study, we enjoyed you, but may God have mercy on you,” she said.
Sanders was one of several family members of victims to be given a chance to address the court during Roof’s bond hearing. Others also forgave him. They advised him to repent for his sins, and asked for God’s mercy on his soul. One even told Roof to repent and confess, and “you’ll be OK.”

One more from Collins.

The families are determined not to respond in kind, said Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, the Rev. Daniel Simmons.
“Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, this is proof — everyone’s plea for your soul is proof they lived in love and their legacies will live in love, so hate won’t win,” she told Roof during the bond hearing. “And I just want to thank the court for making sure that hate doesn’t win.”

See, forgiveness and mercy are words, too.  They don't explain.  They don't categorize. They don't offer easy solutions.
But they heal.  Which is probably the most any of us can hope for in the wake of horror.

On Mercy Considered As One of the Fine Arts: Part the Second

Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins won't remember the time I met her.  I'll never forget it.

It was 2003.  She was coming to Cleveland to speak at at the ACLU about the death penalty.  I was to give some general comments and then introduce Jennifer.

She was, at that time, chair of Murder Victim's Families for Reconciliation.  Her pregnant sister Nancy, and Nancy's husband had been murdered, shot to death in a Chicago suburb.  She opposed the death penalty and had, as I understood it, forgiven the killer.  I didn't know much more than that. I was eager to hear her speak.

I gave my comments, introduced Jennifer, and was quickly reduced to tears.

I write a lot about forgiveness and mercy and grace in these posts.  They are, I say, about those who give, not those who receive.  They define those who bestow them ("bestow" for they are gifts) as surely as the bitterness of hatred and vengeance define those who cannot get past them.  They aren't things that can be earned, they're not about what's deserved.  If they were, they'd be about the recipients rather than the donors.

I'd understood that in a generic way before that night in April.  I understood it in a visceral way after hearing Jennifer speak.  Stories will do that.

So, when I learned that Nancy's other sister, Jeanne Bishop, had written a book about her journey to forgiveness and reconciliation, I just naturally asked the publishers to send me a copy.  Which they kindly did.

The book is Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister's Killer.  I finished it Sunday morning, right before reading Antjie Krog's op-ed in the Times on the parole of Eugene ("Prime Evil") de Kock in South Africa.  The coincidence of mercy and mercy - and the question of whether anyone is irredeemable - are what turned what was going to be a book review into this two parter.

The crime was brutal and callous.  It was the night before Palm Sunday, 1990.  Nancy and Richard had just returned home from a family dinner.  They walked in the house and there was this kid, David Biro.  16 years old.  Sitting in a chair in the darkened house.  With a gun.  He forced them into the basement.  Shot Richard in the back of the head.  Shot Nancy twice, in the side and abdomen as she "huddled in a corner, protecting her head with her arms."  Biro fled.  Nancy lived another 15 minutes or so.  

Nancy dragged herself by her elbows again, to where her husband lay dead.  Next to his body she wrote a message of love in her own blood: the shape of a heart and the letter u.
Love you.It was the way she had signed letters to Richard over the years.  She died there next to him.

As I said, brutal and callous.  

Jeanne was, of course, horrified when she learned.  The heartsick family gathered at the police station.  They tried, Jeanne tried, to understand what could make someone kill like that.

As I did, I spoke for the first time since arriving at the station.  It wasn't a thought I had formulated; it just emerged.  I heard myself saying these words to the assembled group: "I don't want to hate anyone."

Not hating was a start.  it wasn't a finish.  

They caught David Biro, of course.  Put him on trial.  He tried to blame a friend.  The jury didn't buy it.  LWOP.  

And though Jeanne came to forgive Biro, her number one goal was to never have to hear of him.  In fact, she didn't speak his name.  For years.

But, and here's where this gets tricky.  That has to change.  She can't run from the fact of him.  For her to heal, she has to reconcile herself to him.  That means coming to speak his name.  And then, praying for him.    

I need to pause here, for a moment and consider, as she does, David Biro.  "Who was" he, she wonders when she starts praying for him.  She reports.

• One of his high school counselors:  "Biro wasn't the worst kid I had.  But he was the scariest."  When other kids did something wrong, they'd feel bad about it.  "He didn't even understand why he should feel bad."
• A psychiatric social worker "described him as charming, manipulative, and utterly without empathy."
• A cell mate:  "wrote from prison to tell me that David had casually discussed the murders with him, expressing no remorse.  When another high-profile, multiple murder occurred while they were in custody together -- the shooting deaths of women shoppers at a local Lane Bryant store -- one of the victims happened to have the same name as my older sister.  The cell mate said David had hoped that it was she who had been killed."

Jeanne turns to Biblical parables to understand possibility.  Jesus, she concludes, can heal.  And apparently he does.

Praying for him isn't enough.  She has to meet him, to apologize to him for not forgiving him more openly and fulsomely sooner.  This person who has never even hinted at accepting responsibility, let alone feeling remorse for what he did.

And so, to the prison, where it seems he's no monster.  He's thoughtful.  He feels badly for what he did.  They discuss.  They see each other every couple of months.  And she sees that he's been heeled from his budding sociopathy.

Or, of course, although she never mentions this as a possibility and appears not to see it, he's canny enough to understand how to make her support him, how to manipulate her with lies and false professions.

I am, perhaps, being too cynical.  I believe in redemption.  But it's mostly not that neat.  And prison isn't a place where those with serious psychological problems tend to get better.  

If I'm too cynical, Jeanne seems insufficiently so.  Biro expresses remorse.  Hence, he's remorseful. He didn't plan to kill anyone, he says, so clearly that's the case.  She attributes all to God.  (It's no accident that Change of Heart  is published by Westminster John Knox Press, a religious publisher.)  She's deeply religious.  She turns repeatedly to the Bible and to priests and Biblical scholars and lawyers.   Folks like Mark Osler, a law professor, former prosecutor, devout Christian, anti-death penalty activist, who himself wrote a curious book, Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment, arguing that the prosecution, trial, and execution of Jesus follow a process very like that the capitally charged and ultimately executed in this country experience.  Somehow we're to find in that parallel an understanding of why killing people here is like killing the factually innocent Jesus and is, therefore, wrong.*

There were times I wanted to toss Change of Heart across the room.  Enough with the Christian sermons.  Enough with what God can do and Jesus does and how the Bible's lessons . . . .

But you know, the book is, ultimately, deeply moving.  Jeanne Bishop's story - and this is very much her story - is remarkable.  She became a criminal defense lawyer, a public defender, because her sister was murdered.  She ultimately became an activist in the movement to abolish LWOP sentences for juveniles.  She became, if not a friend, exactly, a force for the man who coldly murdered her loved ones.  Not because she loved them insufficiently, but because love is transcendent.

And because, finally, redemption for Biro is about redemption for her.

She went to speak to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders at a Catholic school.  Her topic: forgiveness and reconciliation.  She went to mass with them.  Then gathered with them and spoke.

I told of Nancy and Richard, who had lived in an apartment only a block away from the church as a happy young couple, of the murders, the arrest, the sentence, the change in me, my visits with David.  The student's faces changed; you could see them pondering. The room was quiet as I finished; you could hear the slightest rustle of the wind on the snow outside.
The principal of the school, a lively, white-haired nun, came forward at the end to than me.  She turned to address the children: "Let's dismiss Ms. Bishop with a blessing."
A blessing? For me? I had never been given such a treasure before, especially not by angels in plaid skirts and khakis.

It's a lovely moment.  But what matters is what follows.

This is what led me to that moment: the story I had lived and told.  The tears.  The cost.  Like every blessing, every grace, it was unearned.  I had as much to atone for as anyone, and many of my scars were self-inflicted.  Much of my life I have been a striver, the girl who wanted (and got) the best grades and the best job, who cringed when she failed.  Part of that, perhaps, was the idea that I had to earn the blessing and affirmation of others and of God.  In that moment, surrounded by children, I saw the deeper truth: grace is given, not earned, a function of being loved rather than of worldly accomplishment.

So let me come back where I began, in Part the First.

The essence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was that knowing the truth, hearing it from those who inflicted pain, brings peace.  You can't force remorse.  It's there or it's not.  But speaking truth has healing power to those who hear.  And, ultimately, to those who speak.

And they gave amnesty not because it was deserved but because it served two goods:  it led to the speaking of truth.  And it put to an end having to deal with the bad guys.  They could be, as the word suggests, forgotten - even as their evil could be remembered.

And de Kock's parole - he did good, regardless of motive.  And while he could never do enough good to make up for the evil, releasing him was, at some level, enough.  

Jeanne Bishop's take is broader still.  David Biro tells what happened, expresses remorse (real or feigned) after he's forgiven.  The reconciliation may help him, but ultimately it helps her.  She grasps from the beginning the lesson others never do.

From the moment the police told me that Nancy and Richard had been murdered, I sensed in my deepest core that hating the person who did it would affect him not a bit, but it would destroy me.  I'd heard this saying: Hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.  I refused to give him that power over me.

And there it is again.  It's about us, not them.

Change of Heart is not without flaws.  But insofar as it teaches that lesson, it's a winner.

----------------
*I'm not being quite fair to Osler, but I thought he stretched his analogies further than they wanted to go, and his repeated claims that Jesus was innocent strike me as flawed.  He was, certainly, if you believe him to be the Jesus of Christian faith, the son of God who killed and thereby (and by choice) took upon himself all human sin, innocent in the sense of pure.  But if the reference is to legal guilt . . . .  He was charged with blasphemy for holding himself out to be the son of God.  He did that.   Caveat:  I'm a lawyer and an atheist.  I was not raised Christian.  I've read the New Testament, studied it as a work of literature.  But I'm no Biblical scholar.  Take my readings with a large dollop of salt.

One Killing that Didn't Happen and One Killing that Won't

First to Georgia where the Board of Pardons and Paroles said it reviewed the record and the pleas from lawyers and 21 witnesses.  And then offered Kelly Gissendaner the finger.

Die, bitch! Fuck you!

Which would seem to have ended things since the courts were out of it by then and the governor has no clemency power.  And so at 7 this evening, Kelly would be killed.

Except what the Governor can't and the Pardon & Parole folk won't . . . .

It seems there's snow in the Peach Tree State.  AP explains the problem

Jackson [where the killin's to happen] is on the southern fringe of an area that forecasters predicted would get up to 2 inches of snow on Wednesday. However, the forecast for Gissendaner’s hometown was for heavier snowfall, which would have made it difficult for prosecutors, witnesses and supporters to make the trip.

To which the Board of P & P might well have told Mother Nature to go fuck herself.

Instead, they put off killing Gissendaner until Monday evening.  They being god fearing types, I suppose.  And of course, they wanted to make sure that everyone could get a good seat.

* * * * *

It's now clear and settled that the Georgia Board doesn't care that the victim's kids want his killer to live, though if weather is an act of god, perhaps she takes a different view.  

Or maybe it was just chance.

Meanwhile in Las Vegas, where they know a lot about chance, it seems they also know something about knowing when to fold 'em.  At least, the prosecutor does.

It was almost four years ago that Mike Portaro was shot and killed.  Last week, a jury found Brandon Hill guilty of the murder.  The prosecutor was going for a death sentence.  But Monday Mike's mother, Cynthia Portaro, came to court. . . .  Here's Karen Castro for KLAS-TV.

Cynthia Portaro stood in front of a courtroom asking a judge to spare her son's killer.
"We do not ask that the court pursue the death penalty," she said.
Just as Cynthia was returning to her seat, Hill got up and came face-to-face with the woman who potentially saved his life.
"Thank you for forgiving me," said Hill. "I'm sorry for everything that you've been through. If I could take it back, I would."
"I hope you find peace, you still have a life and destiny," she told Hill.

And then, outside the courtroom, the mother of the killer and the mother of his victim hugged.

And the prosecutor withdrew his request for execution.

"I felt a sense of relief that there is no hatred, animosity, anger because if you live in Christ, you cannot live with those things," Cynthia Portaro said.

A friend of mine, a sometime capital defense lawyer, said once that "the death penalty brings out the worst in everyone."  He didn't add, "except when it brings out the best."

For a Chance To Chat

It was February 1997 when Doug Gissendaner was found stabbed repeatedly, murdered, in a remote wooded area of Georgia, about a mile from where his car was recovered.

He'd been missing for a week.

Gregory Owen pleaded guilty to the murder. But he was, according to the prosecutors, just the instrument.  All he did was kill.  The, er, mastermind was Kelly Gissendaner, Doug's wife.  She and Owen were having an affair.  He wanted her to divorce Doug.  She wanted Owen to kill him.  

Greg's doing life.  Kelly's on death row.  She's to be killed today.  She'll be the first woman in Georgia to be executed in 70 years.

This isn't about her.  It's about her daughter, Kayla, who was 7 at the time.  Kate Brumback in the Washington Times quotes a letter she wrote to the Parole Board.

My father’s death was extremely painful for many people, but I’ve recently concluded that in many ways I was the person who was most impacted by his murder. 

Her father's death was, she said,

the most painful experience of my life.

She wrote in the letter about her bitterness and anger.  She wrote about how she wanted no contact with her mother.  Which you've gotta say is hardly surprising.  

But she, and her brother Dakota who also wrote, talked about how that has, over the years, changed. They have, in Brumback's words, formed meaningful relationships with her now.  Kayla:

The impact of losing my mother would be devastating. I can’t fathom losing another parent. 

Years ago, I listened as members of a capital jury explained how it is that they'd decided against sentencing a woman to death for ordering the contract killing of her husband.  In that case, their children had testified against their mother, had talked to the jury about how what she'd done had destroyed their lives.

And yet the jury voted for life.  Not because the mother didn't deserve to be killed, they said.  Not because of anything about her.  But because, finally, those jurors concluded, that someday the kids might want to know just why their mother had their father killed.  Someday, those jurors concluded,  
her children might want to ask their mother about it.  Someday, those jurors concluded, her children might just want to talk with their mother.  

If she were dead, they wouldn't have that chance.

Kayla and Dakota Gissendaner would understand. 

They Don't Know How They'll Feel

September 25, 1996.

That was the day Robert Charles Ladd raped, strangled, and beat to death Vicki Ann Garner, then set her on fire.  Today is the day the good people of Texas plan to strap him to a table, stick him with needles, and kill him for doing that.

What Ladd did was devastating to Garner's family.  Kenneth Dean of the Tyler Morning Telegraph spoke with some of them, including her sisters Teresa Wooten and Kathy Pirtle the other day.  They have, he reported, 

ridden an emotional roller coaster through the years topped with the deaths of their parents, who did not live to see their daughter receive justice.

The killing itself.  Just the loss, the emptiness.

“Part of our hearts were broken that day, and they have been ever since,” Teresa said.

Then the trial.   Ladd had been in prison before for a killing.  It took the jury 18 minutes to decide they wanted Ladd to be killed himself this time.  The family were happy with the verdict, but not satisfied.

They felt betrayed by the justice system, which they said failed them and all of the residents of Texas and allowed a killer to kill again.
"If he would have still been in prison, then our sister would be alive today," Teresa said, who now works as a sexual assault director in Mount Pleasant. "He was released on mandatory release, because the laws had changed, and this allowed him to kill our sister.”

And then the years.  

In 2003, the family were on their way to Huntsville to watch Ladd be killed when they learned he'd gotten a stay.  

More years while the federal courts reviewed.

And, of course, it's not over yet.  They plan to kill him tonight, and they probably will.  But executions do get halted at the last minute.  Ladd's intellectually disabled.  He has an IQ of 67.  The Constitution forbids executions of people with his disability.  Then again, Georgia killed Warren Lee Hill the other day, in violation of that same constitutional prohibition.  The courts let that one happen. Texas will likely get it's way.

For Vicki Ann Garner's family?

"It's really been a long, hard journey. Over the course of time, we have lost both our mom and our dad, and neither one of them ever saw justice," Teresa said of the lengthy process.
Her sister, sighed and added, "It's been real emotional roller coaster of ups and downs."
Kathy’s husband, Clint, said Vicki's death created a ripple effect in the family, but all of the couples managed to stay committed to each other, and the family as a whole grew stronger.
"It disturbed the family dynamic somewhat. ... Not so much the marriage, but in how we related to our children and everything. There was a ripple effect throughout everything that we did. It seemed everything happened at the most inopportune time whenever you're trying to be supportive ... you have to push everything aside and take care of that," Clint, a retired state trooper, said.
Kathy said the fabric of the family unit was stretched, but it never broke. Her sister agreed.
"It really has been a tough time for all of us. I can tell you that without Michael, I wouldn't have made it. This man has been throughout the past 18 years my rock, and I don't know what I would have done without him," she said clutching her husband's arm.
In a soft-spoken voice, Michael replied, "It was a really tough time, and you see a lot of emotions, but the days are getting shorter for him. He will have judgment day pretty soon."

But there's also this.

Despite losing their daughter tragically, Gene and Lawanta decided they needed to forgive the man who took her life.
Teresa said, a few years after the murders, her mother and father wrote Ladd, telling him they forgave him of the crime.

And she and her sister?

“For me it's been an on-going process. You know I forgive him, and I'm at peace, and then something happens, and so it's a constant thing. I can’t say I have forgiven and totally let go of it, but I am working on it," Kathy said.
Teresa said she wrote Ladd a letter telling him she forgave him, but she stressed the forgiveness was not for him, but for her peace of mind.

It's a hard thing this business of forgiving.  As Teresa said, it's not for him, it's for her.  That's how it works.  To ease the forgiver.  To make it possible, finally, to get on with life without the bitterness and hate.  

Still, forgiven or not, they want Ladd killed.  And they plan to see it happen.  They said they don't know how they'll feel when it happens.  But they'll be there.

When Wilford Berry was killed by Ohio in 1999, our first execution since 1963, then-Ohio-Attorney- General Betty Montgomery, who fought to make it happen, who we called Bloody Betty for her eagerness to finally get some people killed here, said in a rare moment of awareness,

There are no winners here tonight.

What she didn't say that night in 1999, but what was also true, is that everyone lost.

On September 25, 1996, Robert Charles Ladd raped, strangled, and beat to death Vicki Ann Garner, then set her on fire.  Today the good people of Texas plan to strap him to a table, stick him with needles, and kill him for doing that.

Vengeance Has Left My Heart

You remember her, of course.

If you don't, go immediately and read this post.  I'll wait.  Back now?  Cool.

CNN told us her name was Maryam Hosseinzadeh, though Saeed Kamali Dehghan in the Guardian calls her Samereh Alinejad.  Whatever her name is, apparently people are now referring to her as "their mum." 

Which is, when you think about it, perfectly understandable.

Anyhow, and whatever her name or whatever you call her, you'll recall that she couldn't bring herself to forgive the killer.  Dehghan puts it this way.

Furious in her grief, she was determined Balal would hang.

But her son, killed by Balal seven years ago now, didn't want vengeance.

But as Balal's execution date drew nearer, Abdollah appeared to his mother in a series of vivid dreams.
"Ten days before the execution was due, I saw my son in a dream asking me not to take revenge, but I couldn't convince myself to forgive," she told the Guardian. "Two nights before that day, I saw him in the dream once again, but this time he refused to speak to me."

Still she would not, could not, forgive.

When she climbed up onto that scaffold, it wasn't to slap Balal and forgive him.  It was to be the avenging angel.  The executioner.

Iran's Islamic penal code allows the victim's heir – "walli-ye-dam" – to personally execute the condemned man as Qisas(retribution) – in this case by pushing away the chair he was standing on.

She Noose around his neck, support gone from his feet, Balal would be hanged.  Probably slowly and painfully, twisting and struggling, hands tied behind his back, desperately trying to find a way to breathe as he strangled to death.  She would have her time.

Seconds away from what could have been his final breath, Balal pleaded for his life and called out for mercy. "Please forgive," he shouted, "if only for my mum and dad," Alinejad recalled. "I was angry, I shouted back how can I forgive, did you show mercy to my son's mum and dad?"

There are those who imagine  that killing Balal, especially getting to do it herself, would bring some level of satisfaction.  Closure they call it.  A kind of peace.  She'd have evened the score.  Tie game. That's what it's all about.  A life for a life.  Blood will have blood.

Instead, as you know,

Balal's fate then took an unexpected turn. Alinejad clambered up on a stool and rather than pushing away his chair, slapped him across the face.

Which led to the extraordinary.

"After that, I felt as if rage vanished within my heart. I felt as if the blood in my veins began to flow again," she said. "I burst into tears and I called my husband and asked him to come up and remove the noose." Within seconds, as Abdolghani unhooked the rope from Balal's neck, he was declared pardoned.

And there's yet more.

Balal's mother Kobra, sobbing, reached across the fence separating the crowd from the execution site, and embraced Alinejad before reaching to kiss her feet – a gesture of respect and gratitude. "I didn't allow her to do that, I took her arm and made her stand up … she was just a mother like me, after all."

"[J]ust a mother like me."

Every execution brings new mourners, after all.  New collateral damage.  How necessary that the family of the killed must make new widows, new orphans, new parents to lose a child.  By god, they must suffer as we did!

And from that they expect comfort, peace.  

She who saved the life of he who took her son's.  She knows better.

One week after pardoning Balal, Alinejad has found a peace lost since her son's death. "Losing a child is like losing a part of your body. All these years, I felt like a moving dead body," she said. "But now, I feel very calm, I feel I'm at peace. I feel that vengeance has left my heart."

Forgiven!

Calm.  At peace.

I feel that vengeance has left my heart.

It's OK.  You can cry if you want to.

Even When It’s Hard – Maybe Especially Then

I need to tell you a story today, illustrated with real photographs.

It’s about this woman.  Her name is Maryam Hosseinzadeh. 

But no.  I cannot tell you about her yet. You must first meet Koukab.  Here she is.

She is crying because she has just been told that the next day, her son, Balal

Because he killed Abdollah Hosseinzadeh (whose picture I don’t have), stabbed him to death in a street fight (about which I know nothing else).  Abdollah was 17.  Balal was 19.  Abdollah’s parents, Maryam (yes, it’s back to her, now) and Abdulghani Hosseinzadeh

were, understandably, as grief-stricken at their son’s death as Koukab was at the prospect of her son being hanged.

Maryam spoke to the crowd (executions by hanging in Noor, in Iran being public).

Arah Khamooshi of the semi-official Iranian news agency ISNA, who took these pictures, described what happened next (all this according to a CNN report). 

She said she's been living a nightmare since she lost her son and couldn't bring herself to forgive the killer

Then she walked toward Balal and asked for a chair to stand on. 

And

She stepped up, slapped Balal and said, "forgiven."

At which point she and Abdulghani

removed the noose from about Balal’s neck.

It’s a fairly regular theme here, this thing about forgiveness. 

Because, I marvel at it.  Because it’s wondrous.  Because the alternative is the hatred that eats you up and leaves you bitter and cold, friendless even in the company of friends, alone even amidst others, the old man or old woman (however young) with pinched face and pinched views, seeing the world as a place only to hate, unloved and unable to love.

And, of course, because it’s so damn hard.

One more picture.  Koukab embracing Maryam