Bonita Spikes’ hus­band was mur­dered 12 years ago. She now works to end the death penal­ty in Maryland. She recent­ly wrote about her per­spec­tive on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the Baltimore Sun. She stat­ed, in part:

I know that my late hus­band, Michael, who was an inno­cent bystander in a 1994 con­ve­nience store shoot­ing in New York City, would be proud of me because he, too, opposed the death penalty. 

… [M]ost rel­a­tives of mur­der vic­tims drop their guard when I tell them that I expe­ri­enced the grief-dri­ven impulse for revenge when the hos­pi­tal cur­tain was pulled aside, reveal­ing my hus­band’s body with a bul­let wound in the chest. 

But Michael’s killers were nev­er found, and I even­tu­al­ly real­ized that my desire to see the mur­der­ers brought to jus­tice was pro­long­ing my pain. I know I was a bas­ket case until I decid­ed to ​“let go and let God,” as they say. I also know that it is wrong to kill and, there­fore, pun­ish­ing a mur­der­er with death is as wrong as the orig­i­nal crime.
…
As an African-American woman, my oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment deep­ened when I learned how race infects who gets sen­tenced to life and who gets sen­tenced to death.… The mur­ders of white Marylanders are more than twice as like­ly to bring death sen­tences, a dis­par­i­ty that only increas­es when the defen­dant is black. The vast major­i­ty of mur­der vic­tims in our state are black, but all the men cur­rent­ly sit­ting on our death row were con­vict­ed of killing white peo­ple.
…
We may be mov­ing toward end­ing the death penal­ty. We will all be bet­ter for it.

(Baltimore Sun, Nov. 7, 2006). Read the arti­cle. See Victims.

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