Earlier this month, I stood in front of the N.C. Governor’s Mansion and asked Gov. Roy Cooper to remove all 135 people from our state’s death row and commute their death sentences to prison terms. I am the daughter of murdered parents myself.
In 2001, my father and stepmother, Terry and Lucy Smith, were brutally murdered by two teenagers in Pennsylvania. As I made the request of our governor, I stood arm in arm with other North Carolinians who have felt the pain of homicide, having lost children, siblings, mothers and fathers. We are all survivors of senseless violence that devastated our families.
While we all desire safety, accountability for offenders, and healing for our families, none of us believes that a death sentence will achieve these needs. We reject the idea that more killing could bring justice or closure, and we told that to Gov. Roy Cooper in a letter we read aloud outside the mansion on Dec. 10.
We were joined there by about 200 other North Carolinians, including civil rights leaders, death row exonerees, and representatives from many statewide organizations. All of us are working with the N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty to call on Cooper to use his commutation power to clear death row.
We are often told that society must continue to seek the death penalty to get justice for the families of victims. In the years since my parents’ murders, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what justice means. I understand it better now as everyone in a situation getting what they need — which includes among other things accountability for offenders and help to families to put the pieces back together after enormous loss).
I disagree that justice is synonymous with revenge, which creates more hurt and ignores any mechanism for healing or meeting families’ actual needs after violence occurs.
In fact, the more I learn about this system, the more I realize that it perpetuates the opposite of justice on a statewide and national scale — racism, more violence, economic division, financial waste for our state in comparison to life sentences, and extremely high stakes mistakes when the criminal justice system makes an errant conviction.
In North Carolina, 12 people have now been exonerated after being sent to death row. All but one of them was a person of color. One of them is Alfred Rivera, who lost his father to murder before being wrongfully sentenced to death. He marched next to me toward the governor’s mansion to join in making our request and is part of our survivor group.
To move toward the true definition of justice, we must reckon with the conditions that foster violence and use our resources to instead build strong, supportive communities that prevent crime before it happens and address trauma after it does.
As a middle school teacher, I see every day how far we have to go in creating a safe and healthy world for our children. My students need a society that invests its collective resources in mental health care and other positive social programs, not state-sponsored killing.
One of my parents’ killers is on death row in Pennsylvania. I cannot imagine what good it would do to kill a person who is incarcerated and away from the public. No one would be made safer. However, I can think of many people who would be harmed by his death — including his innocent family members and the prison workers who would be asked to carry out his execution. Not a single person would be healed.
On Dec. 13, Oregon’s outgoing governor, Kate Brown, took the very action we are requesting of Cooper. She commuted the sentences of everyone on death row to life imprisonment, saying that the death penalty is “an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot and never has been administered fairly and equitably.”
Every one of those things is true in North Carolina. And just like Gov. Brown, Gov. Cooper has the power to correct injustice while still assuring accountability — and create a better future for our state.