Grany in her 40’s (?) and my grandfather’ shoes
This morning I read Elizabeth Bruenig’s piece, Witness:Sin and redemption in America’s death chambers. She writes:” To a Christian, mercy derives from charityAnd in the liminal space where families of murder victims are recruited into the judicial process–to either bless or or condemn a prosecutor’s intentions–showing mercy is an especially heroic decision. To think this way is to understand that the moral dimension of capital punishment is not just about what we do to others. It’s also about what we do to ourselves.”
I mentioned in an earlier post that my grandmother was murdered in a home invasion. When time came for the trial of the two perps (the third man, a boy, really turned state’s evidence ) as fate would have it I was teaching a course in the mystery novel to a class of police detectives. My mother thought she wanted to go to the trial. The police asked me if she had a strong heart. I thought they meant metaphorically but they meant literally. I said yes to both. Then they said, in the most profound pedagogical reward of my entire life, they said, ‘well, you’ve been teaching us about closure. That’s what this would be.’
So my mother and I attended the entire 2 week trial. Dad went the first day and then said “I can’t go back; I want to kill them.” I told him that that’s why we have a judicial system. How did I get so smart, or so snarky, at the age of 30?
When I got back to my police detectives they asked about the trial and what the sentencing had been. I said that the shooter had been sentenced to fifty years without parole and the main accomplice to something less. The police said, were you disappointed that they didn’t get killed?" I said that I would never be able to decide to send someone to death and so wouldn’t ask anyone else to. They said, well, then they’ll be out on the streets one day to kill someone else.
In another post I’ll talk about what actually happened with them. But now, a poem.
Interrogation (1)
Do you hate them,
Leon and Eddie and Donnie?I don’t know them.
Do you hate them,
Illie and Donna and Carrie? The girls were so young.
Do you hate them?
It wasn’t personal.
Do you hate them?
They were drunk.
Do you hate them?
They didn’t plan to.
Do you hate them?
And on a lighter note, I had my first (brief) swim in our harbor this afternoon. Water temp 62*. But I’d been dipping in a cold pod since February to be prepared.