|
Why Should Murder Victims
Support the Campaign
Against Death Penalty?
Lorry Post
is an organizer with New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death
Penalty. He founded the group in 1999 to honor his daughter, who was
murdered in Georgia in 1988. He’s a retired legal aid attorney. He
has just been named the director of Murder Victims’ Families for
Reconciliation. Lorry Post.
This is a
first hand account by Lorry Post.
My
daughter was murdered. It was domestic violence nineteen years ago.
Her killer, her husband, received a twenty-year sentence. I was, as
my wife describes me, a zombie for the next ten years, sitting
around waiting to die. And then, one day, about nine years ago or
so, I took up this topic, because I was trying to save the life—I
was asked as an activist, a legal aid lawyer—someone asked me to
save the life, try to save the life, of a Pedro Medina in the state
of Florida. But we worked to save Pedro’s life and had his Holiness
the Pope send a letter to the governor of Florida, but in the long
run, we failed. He was executed, and his head was set on fire. And
my wife and I said, you know, what is this about justice.
It was a
botched execution. Florida, three times with the electric chair,
botched executions, and Pedro was one of them. And they set his head
on fire, as simple as that, or as horrible as that, I should say.
And we thought, why this one man who kills, stabs a woman to
death—that woman happened to be our daughter—why does he get
twenty-year sentence, and another man who stabs a woman to death,
his next-door neighbor, why does he get executed by us, as citizens
of this country, and has his head set on fire?
From that
moment on, I became alive. I took up this cause with some others.
And now, in New Jersey, we’ve grown to a 12,000-person organization
of, I would like to say, a well-oiled machine. But we’re not that;
we’re just a bunch of volunteers.
I don’t
want to miss saying this. We started out, it was just my wife and
myself, and for a couple years, we were the only victim family
members and kind of a little bit felt like freaks. You know,
everyone—the common wisdom was that if you lost a family member,
especially a child, to murder, you would want that person killed, so
we thought standing alone. Then I found this organization. You know,
I wasn’t the founder. It was there, and we joined it: Murder
Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, where people felt that way,
and then since—against the death penalty. And then, from that day to
this day, there are now sixty-two of us in New Jersey—I mean,
sixty-two that have joined up, and we didn’t recruit them or
anything. And we all signed a letter to the legislature and the
governor, saying we want this abomination of the death penalty
ended.
About
organizing, it was just hit or miss at the beginning.
Whoever—wherever two or more people would gather, I would be there
if they’d invite me. Mostly churches, synagogues, schoolrooms,
rotary—whoever would hear me—many times agreeing, many times in
opposition. I debated on television and radio others who felt
differently than I did. And it just grew from there. And mostly from
religious faith groups were our greatest ally, clergy and folks from
churches and synagogues who would join our group, and it just kept
growing.
People
applaud me for going out and doing this and say, “I don’t know how
you can do it.” Well, there is a selfish motivation, as well as
trying to do a good deed, and that is that it’s been tremendous
therapy for me. I do this work, and I think of Lisa. I have her with
me all the time. When I was a legal aid lawyer, as you mentioned
earlier, she was proud of the work I did for racial justice, for
economic justice, what little I could do, and I know she’s proud of
me right now. So it certainly lessens my pain, and I was just
talking to my wife about that the other day and saying, you know, I
started to cry more lately like the old days I cried so much, and I
couldn’t understand why. And it suddenly struck me that if this
situation is ending, I feel somehow, you know, I might be going a
little bit way from her. But recently, I was selected to be the
director of that Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation
organization, so I’ll still be doing this, so Lisa will still be
with me.
Adapted from: Democracy Now
19 December, 2007
|
Read Also
