The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure

The notion that death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions pro­vide clo­sure to vic­tims’ fam­i­lies is a myth, says Susan A. Bandes, Centennial Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at DePaul University law school. In a January 8 com­men­tary in The Crime Report, Bandes, a pio­neer in the study of emo­tion and the law, takes on and debunks the idea that exe­cu­tions bring vic­tims’ fam­i­ly members closure. 

Prosecutors, includ­ing for­mer Attorney General Bill Barr, often offer the promise of clo­sure as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as a pol­i­cy and for car­ry­ing out par­tic­u­lar exe­cu­tions. When the Department of Justice announced its inten­tion to resume fed­er­al exe­cu­tions after a 17-year hia­tus, Barr declared that ​“we owe it to the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies to car­ry for­ward the sen­tence imposed by our jus­tice sys­tem.” Yet, Bandes explains, ear­li­er in his career, Barr had cit­ed deter­rence and ret­ri­bu­tion as his rea­sons for sup­port­ing the death penal­ty. ​“Barr’s shift mir­rored a sub­tle but pow­er­ful change in the nation­al con­ver­sa­tion about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” she says. ​“As the deter­rence ratio­nale proved hard to jus­ti­fy, and the ret­ribu­tive ratio­nale began to sound too angry and venge­ful, both have been replaced with a kinder, gen­tler-sound­ing jus­ti­fi­ca­tion: by car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions we can hon­or the vic­tims and help their families heal.” 

Despite its pop­u­lar­i­ty as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the death penal­ty, clo­sure has no basis in psy­cho­log­i­cal research, Bandes says, and there is no evi­dence that exe­cu­tions pro­vide relief to vic­tims’ fam­i­lies. In fact, research has shown that fam­i­lies often feel re-vic­tim­ized when an exe­cu­tion does not bring about the clo­sure they had hoped for. 

“The most telling find­ing is that a num­ber of fam­i­ly mem­bers feel relieved sim­ply because they are final­ly free of the legal sys­tem,” Bandes writes. ​“As Matthew Shepherd’s par­ents and the Richard fam­i­ly (vic­tims of the Boston Marathon bomb­ing) under­stood, much of the pain comes from the cap­i­tal sys­tem itself — lengthy, heart wrench­ing legal pro­ceed­ings in which the fam­i­ly would be called to tes­ti­fy and the defen­dant would remain at cen­ter stage for years.”

In oth­er research, a 2012 study com­par­ing the well­be­ing of vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers in Texas, which has the death penal­ty, and Minnesota, which does not, found that the fam­i­ly mem­bers in Minnesota had ​“high­er lev­els of phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and behav­ioral health.”