Late one afternoon in February 2014, ten-year-old Hailey Owens was abducted from a street near her home in Springfield, Missouri. Police say her abductor raped her, then shot her, then wrapped her body in garbage bags and stuffed it in a plastic tote.
A few hours later, Craig Wood, a stocky football coach and bluegrass musician, was arrested after police found Hailey’s body in the tote in his basement. Witnesses, local news media reported, had seen someone matching Wood’s description abduct Hailey.
In October, Wood is scheduled to go on trial. But at least one person would prefer that trial never happen: Hailey Owens’s mother, Stacey Barfield.
This past April, Barfield wrote to the prosecuting attorney in Greene County, Missouri, asking him to accept a plea agreement in which Wood would plead guilty in return for a sentence of life in prison instead of execution.
“I am writing to request your mercy,” Barfield wrote. “Mercy for me, for my family, and for the memory of my daughter, Hailey Owens.”
Sparing Wood’s life with a plea agreement, she told the local newspaper, would also spare her family the ordeal of having to “relive the nightmare” of her daughter’s brutal killing.
The prosecutor, Dan Patterson, did not respond to a request from The Progressive for comment about the case. He has told local news media he cannot comment on possible plea negotiations for ethical reasons, and must consider many factors in deciding whether to seek the death penalty for Wood.
Stacey Barfield’s story is not unique. Many people who have lost a loved one to violent crime have, for various reasons, pleaded with authorities to forgo the death penalty for the accused authors of their grief.
Some act out of spiritual principles. Some, like Barfield, are motivated by practical concerns. Whatever their reasons, these crime-victim survivors often find themselves marginalized by prosecutors and the legal system—both otherwise quick to appeal to public sympathies on the part of victims and their survivors as they seek the ultimate punishment. Their stories have in large part been muted beyond their own network of shared tragedy.
Crime-victim survivors often find themselves marginalized by prosecutors and the legal system—both quick to appeal to seek the ultimate punishment.
It’s a group Christian activist Shane Claiborne encountered when he began researching his recent book Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us, a spiritually grounded polemic that urges his fellow evangelicals to support the abolition of capital punishment.
“Many of them are compelled by their faith to find alternatives, convinced that it doesn’t actually bring closure, it just extends the trauma and creates a whole new set of victims,” Claiborne tells The Progressive. “[These] are folks who have used their deep pain and trauma to try to heal the wounds rather than exacerbate resentments and violence.”
This group of opponents to state-sponsored killing in the name of justice may prove crucial in turning the broader culture away from the death penalty in the more than half of the fifty states where it is still practiced.
According to the human rights group Amnesty International, the number of known executions around the world in 2016 declined to 1,032. But that figure omits countries such as China, which keep secret the number of people sentenced to death, potentially in the thousands.
According to Amnesty’s annual report, 104 nations explicitly outlawed execution as of the end of 2016—up sharply from sixty-four countries in 1997. During this same twenty-year period, the number of countries reporting executions fell by nearly half, from forty in 1997 to twenty-three in 2016. Adding places where capital punishment remains on the books but has fallen into disuse, the group calculates that 141 nations have “abolished the death penalty in law or practice.”
At the same time, the number of people sentenced to death increased last year by more than a third over 2015, to more than three thousand individuals—suggesting that any reduction in the number of actual executions may owe more to delays in carrying them out than a greater desire to spare human life.
Among Western democracies, the United States remains a death penalty outlier. In 2016, it was the only one of the thirty-five-member Organization of American States to execute convicts, and just one of two members of the G8 (the other is Japan) or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (the other is the former Soviet republic of Belarus) to do so.
Among Western democracies, the United States remains a death penalty outlier.
Yet even in the United States, executions are declining—from a high of ninety-eight in 1999 to twenty in 2016, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. New death sentences, which topped 315 in 1996, fell to thirty-one in 2016.
Since the turn of the century, legislatures or courts in seven U.S. states have ended the death penalty, bringing the total number without capital punishment to nineteen; governors in another four states have imposed moratoria on the practice. Some manufacturers of chemicals used for lethal injection—the leading means of execution—have added yet another roadblock, turning against the use of their products to carry out death sentences.
Still, the death penalty and its champions aren’t going away. In Nebraska, where the Republican-majority legislature voted to abolish capital punishment, overriding the governor’s veto, a 60 percent majority of voters in the November 2016 election repealed the measure and restored execution. The same day, California voters rejected a state ballot initiative that would have abolished the death penalty and narrowly approved a second initiative aimed at speeding up the process of appealing death sentences. And in Oklahoma, voters voted two-to-one to amend the state constitution to hold that death is not “cruel and unusual punishment”—a preemptive strike aimed at blocking the courts from ruling otherwise.
Early this year, the state of Arkansas rolled out a plan to execute eight prisoners over an eleven-day span in April. State officials cited the looming expiration of the state’s stockpile of lethal injection drugs for the planned mass execution. Ultimately four executions took place; courts temporarily blocked the others.
Lamenting the delay, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson declared, “I understand how difficult this is on the victims’ families, and my heart goes out to them.” He also groused to reporters of “insufficient attention that is paid to the victims and the families in these cases.”
Death penalty advocates are quick to valorize families who have lost loved ones to murder as a partial justification for state executions. And certainly, there are plenty of survivors of murder victims who cheer the death penalty and decry delays in the execution process.
Many death penalty opponents are driven by concerns about the execution of the wrongfully convicted. But especially compelling are those who call for mercy even though they believe the accused are guilty.
Among the responses to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, whose co-founders, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez, lost their son, Greg, in the World Trade Center towers. The Rodriguez family publicly opposed the death penalty for one of the conspirators, Zacarias Moussaoui, instead calling for reconciliation and peace.
Two years after the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Bill and Denise Richards—whose eight-year-old son died and seven-year-old daughter was injured in the attack—wrote a Boston Globe op-ed urging federal authorities to take the death penalty off the table for the accused bombers.
“We know that the government has its reasons for seeking the death penalty,” they wrote, “but the continued pursuit of that punishment could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives.”
Abolitionist Action Committee
SueZann Bosler was one of several family members of murder victims arrested at the United States Supreme Court on January 17, 2017 for protesting the death penalty. Protesters unfurled a banner reading “Stop Executions!” and scattered yellow and red roses to remember the families of murder victims and the families of the executed.
For SueZann Bosler, the death thirty years ago of her father in a brutal stabbing, and her own near-death in the same attack, became the springboard for a lifelong mission seeking the death penalty’s abolition.
In 1986, when Bosler was twenty-four, James Bernard Campbell broke into the home where she and her father lived in Miami, Florida. Campbell stabbed both of them repeatedly, killing her father, Bill Bosler; SueZann Bosler feigned death and survived.
Bill Bosler was a minister in the Church of the Brethren, a small Anabaptist denomination that, along with the Quakers and the Mennonites, advocates nonviolence as a core Christian principle. Bosler, in an interview, recalls “testing him” regarding his opposition to the death penalty. “He said something I will never forget,” Bosler says. “He said, ‘Let me give you an example, SueZann. If anything were to happen to me, I would still not want that person to get the death penalty.’ ”
Bosler, now fifty-four and still living in Florida, where she works as a hairdresser, related her father’s convictions to prosecutors and begged them not to seek the death penalty. As a victim herself, at a time when the criminal justice system was increasingly seeking to represent the rights of crime victims, she believed her request would warrant the attention of the court.
She was wrong. At Campbell’s first trial in 1988, and in two subsequent proceedings that resulted from his successful appeals, Bosler was denied the opportunity to speak to the court about her father’s forceful opposition to capital punishment.
After Campbell’s second appeal required a new sentencing hearing in 1997, Bosler had had enough. She hired her own attorney and sought to assert her right to speak for mercy as a crime victim. The hearing, which was later the subject of a CBS television 48 Hours episode, was held before a twelve-person jury, where the prosecutor would question Bosler about the night of the crime.
Before the hearing, Bosler had been ordered to keep her opinions about the death penalty to herself. The double standard was clear. “Courts have no problem if I want to stand up and say, ‘I want the death penalty for that person,’ ” she says. But in calling for mercy, “I felt like an enemy of the state. I wasn’t respected. I felt horrible.”
“Courts have no problem if I want to stand up and say, ‘I want the death penalty,’ But in calling for mercy, I felt like an enemy of the state.”
In what she recalls was the very first question put to her on the stand, Bosler saw an opening to defy the denial of her right to speak. What was her occupation, the prosecutor asked her. “I have several jobs,” she answered. “I do hair, and another job is to abolish the death penalty.”
Later, when Campbell’s defense attorney called her back to the stand, the judge paused the proceedings and sent out the jury. Reiterating his order forbidding her from talking about the death penalty or her father’s opposition to it, he threatened her with criminal contempt of court, six months in the county jail, and a $500 fine. “I was in tears,” Bosler recalls. “I was traumatized. I felt like I was the one on trial.”
After finding Campbell guilty of murder, the jury recommended that he be sentenced to life in prison. The judge accepted the recommendation. After passing sentence, the judge asked if anyone in the courtroom had anything to say. At last Bosler was free to speak her mind. “I told the jury, ‘Thank you for giving life and not death.’ ”
In 2002, an organization called Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation published “Dignity Denied,” a report on the experience of family members of crime victims who have stood against the death penalty. Claiborne devotes a chapter to their stories in Executing Grace, where he notes the frequency with which they are pushed aside by the criminal justice system—sometimes, he says, even denied simple information about court dates and procedures.
Victims and survivors who stand against the death penalty, Claiborne says in an interview, undermine its rationale. “It doesn’t fit the narrative of ‘We are pursuing justice for the victims’ when the victims say, ‘That’s not how we think of restorative justice, that’s not how we think of righting the wrong.’ ”
Claiborne’s own research finds a double standard in how crime victims and their loved ones are treated based on their position on capital punishment. “There are incentives for being involved in the narrative of the prosecution to seek the death penalty and there are penalties, very clear penalties, if you don’t fall in line with that.”
When friends and family of murder victims are shut out of the process because they challenge capital punishment, he says, “it further traumatizes someone who is the victim of a crime.”
That’s part of what Claiborne finds “heartbreaking” about the death penalty: “We’ve used so much of our energy and resources and confined them to this one narrative that we are robbing a lot of families of, I think, better possibilities for healing and closure.”
For the first five and a half years of seeing through the trial and retrial of the man who had killed her father and left her for dead, Bosler faced her own deep conflict about her mission. While loyally carrying out her father’s wishes, she realized, “I didn’t want to do it, but I knew it was right.”
She would come home angry, filled with hatred for Campbell. “It scared me,” she says. As the daughter of a minister, “I was supposed to know what forgiveness was all about.” Yet, her own sense of forgiveness was elusive.
Execution, she knew, would not bring her father back to life. James Bernard Campbell would forever carry the label of murderer. And yet, she realized, “If I’m going to help the prosecution and the government execute James, I would be the same as him. I thought, ‘I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be the murderer.’ ”
Campbell was first convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death. An appeal resulted in new hearings. And one day in the courtroom, in a break in the proceedings, Bosler found herself face to face with Campbell. She recalls what happened next: “I pointed at James and said, ‘I forgive you.’ ”
“I pointed at James and said, ‘I forgive you.’ ”
And in that moment, she found the compassion that had until then seemed out of reach. “I had more inner strength,” she says, “to work for him to get life, not death.”
Today, that compassion compels Bosler to seek an end to the death penalty everywhere. She helped found Journey of Hope with several other murder-victim family members, including Bill Pelke, a former steelworker who sought mercy for the fifteen-year-old girl who killed his grandmother in 1985. Bosler and Pelke were among eighteen people arrested in January for unfurling a banner on the steps of the Supreme Court that said “Stop Executions!” She was jailed along with others for thirty hours. In late June, she was convicted after two days of testimony and sentenced to time served.
Along the way, Bosler has befriended other crime-victim families as well as the families of people on death row. From time to time, she says, someone challenges her commitment to ending capital punishment.
“People say to me, ‘SueZann, these are murderers! They kill people. Some you can rehabilitate, but some you can’t!’ My response is, ‘Yeah? What’s your point?’ ”
Bosler has a wristband from another friend she’s made in the struggle. “There’s no such thing as a lesser person,” it says. She believes this wholeheartedly.
“No matter what color their eyes are,” Bosler says, “what color their skin is, what they’ve done, they still do not deserve the death penalty.”
Erik Gunn is a Wisconsin-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Progressive.