by Eleanor O'Donnell

Created on: November 12, 2008   Last Updated: August 14, 2010

My Dad spent 11yrs in prison because he killed someone.  If anyone is qualified to write on this subject, then surely I am.

The death penalty that so many people argue is the right and just way to handle severe crimes against society is not really a sentence against the perpetrator. You murder a murderer and suddenly it is not just the victim's family who are left to grieve but the murderer's family also. What does the person sentenced to death care? They'll be dead. It is the grieving family that are ultimately being punished for having done nothing wrong.

My Dad is my Dad no matter what he's done.  He's still the man who kicked a football around in the garden with me as a little kid.  He's the man who made me wear stupid pink frilly dresses to parties because I was his only princess.  He was the man who bought me toys at Christmas and took me horse riding on a Saturday morning.  He's the man who yelled at me for drawing on the walls and praised me for doing well at school.  What he did was cruel and terrible, but it doesn't stop me from being his daughter; it doesn't stop me from loving him.

Sentencing my Dad to death would not serve to undo what he had done, it would have just made it doubly worse.  Instead of one family drenched in grief, there would have been two.

My Dad's crime has not gone unpunished.  He has lost his freedom forever more.  He cannot reveal who he really is to anybody even now he has been released from prison.  He missed out on his grandson's first few years of life, and he missed out on his own children's teenage years.  He has to live with what he's done.  He has to look in the mirror every day and know that he caused irrepairable hurt to his own family as well as the victim's.  He's not proud of what he did and he'd turn back time if he could, but he can't.  Death would have actually released him from the obligation of guilt - leaving behind his family to carry the burden alone.

I fail to see what killing a killer is supposed to achieve in the grand scheme of things. It's a little bit like when you hit a child for hitting; all you're doing is teaching them that it is a way to solve problems afterall. What kind of message is killing a killer sending to society as a whole? We deal with our problems by killing them? That's just not a message I think we should be sending to our children if we want them to grow up in a world where knifes and guns aren't accepted

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