Growing up in Canada, the death penalty is something I\u2019ve heard about but never really affected me.\u00a0 None of my family were criminals (that I know of!) and even if they were, the death penalty hasn\u2019t been around in Canada for years.<\/p>\n
I always knew it happened in the States, I can still remember standing outside of my Junior High School when I heard some of the other kids talking about how Ted Bundy had been executed that day.\u00a0\u00a0 I knew what execution meant, I had a vague idea who Ted Bundy was\u2026 but I was a 14 year old girl and serial killers in the US weren\u2019t exactly on my radar.\u00a0\u00a0 I listened as they all talked about how glad they were that he fried, as I\u2019m sure many others were.\u00a0 Then I went home and forgot all about it.<\/p>\n
A number of times I\u2019ve been around discussions regarding the Death Penalty, listening to people\u2019s opinions and taking in how widely they vary.\u00a0 For some reason I actively tried NOT to get involved, and I think it it was because I found it confusing and wasn\u2019t sure what my own opinion was.<\/p>\n
There is such a wide range of opinions, at least from what I\u2019ve heard.\u00a0 From people who paint them all with the same brush, seeing them all as a \u2018Ted Bundy\u2019 and want them all to fry to others who are not entirely comfortable with the death penalty but feel there has to be an ultimate price to pay so they accept it.\u00a0 Some feel that it\u2019s wrong to punish murder with murder and feel very strongly against taking a human life, while others are against it because they worry about the system and how often they get it wrong \u2013 hence executing innocent men and women.\u00a0 There are also people who, while they don\u2019t totally disagree with the death penalty itself, don\u2019t feel that those on death row should sit in those conditions for years, decades even, waiting for their execution.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard all of these arguments at some time or another but was always successful in avoiding forming one of my own.<\/p>\n
Recently I met someone who is involved in an organization based in the UK called Lifelines<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a description from their website:<\/p>\n There are at present about 50 women and 3,500 men on Death Row in the US. They spend many years awaiting execution. When she told me she was involved in an organization that act as pen-friends to death row inmates, I was a bit taken aback.\u00a0 I was fascinated but a little freaked out at the same time.\u00a0\u00a0 I first thought oh god it\u2019s one of those romantic things like you see in the back of magazines where inmates are looking to write to people, ugh.\u00a0\u00a0 Then I thought oh no, she\u2019s all religious, this is a thing about saving their souls and no way she\u2019ll want to be my friend once she realizes I\u2019m about as non-religious as they get.<\/p>\n I was intrigued though and my curiosity got the better of me.\u00a0\u00a0 We sat there in the small bagel shop while I bombarded her with questions about it.\u00a0 She was really good natured about it and seemed interested in sharing her opinions with me and telling me what this organization is actually all about.<\/p>\n From their website, on how Lifelines came to be:<\/p>\n LifeLines began in 1988 when its founder Mr. Jan Arriens \u2013 a Quaker \u2013 watched a BBC documentary, Fourteen Days in May.<\/em> Jan was so moved by the words of the condemned prisoners who were interviewed, and by the dignity of the man who was to be executed, Edward Earl Johnson, that he wrote to three of the prisoners. They all replied, saying how much his letter had meant to them and how pleased they were to have their voices heard beyond the prison walls.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The more we spoke about it the more curious I got.\u00a0 She told me how one supporter of Lifelines is Sister Helen Prejean<\/a> who\u2019s writing about her experience with inmates on death row was the basis for the movie Dead Man Walking<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 The movie sounded familiar but I hadn\u2019t seen it, so I filed it away in my memory so I could download it later.<\/p>\n From what I can gather, Lifelines does this not because they all think the death penalty itself is bad, but rather everything surrounding it.\u00a0 From the astonishing amount of death sentences that later, due to new evidence or better legal representation, end up being over turned to the length of time they sit on death row waiting for their sentence to be carried out.\u00a0 They are also concerned about the conditions they are kept in during this time.<\/p>\n Sadly, in some of these cases where the sentences are overturned, the inmate had already been executed.\u00a0 In the case of Edward Earl Johnson, mentioned above, not only had the woman he was accused of rape said it was NOT him, but after his execution a woman came forward to the people who made the documentary claiming she had been with Edward at the time of the crime but when she went to give her testimony a white police officer told her to \u2018go home and mind her own business\u2019.<\/p>\n Since talking to my friend about this, I haven\u2019t been able to stop thinking about it.\u00a0\u00a0 I have this need to really figure out how I feel about the death penalty and the people who are on death row.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure why, I just do\u2026 but I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll ever figure it out.\u00a0 Probably because there are so many unknown variables.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ll never know what really happened with people, or truly understand or trust the United States legal system\u2026 I\u2019m starting to think there really is no right answer.\u00a0\u00a0 That depending on where you live, who you are and how this all may have touched you personally, your opinion is your opinion and it can\u2019t be right or wrong, can it?<\/p>\n On the one hand I think of someone like Ted Bundy.\u00a0 Would he have ever deserved someone writing to make his day a little brighter?\u00a0 How would the families of his victims feel knowing that someone out there was taking the time to try to make his life a little nicer before his execution?\u00a0 Surely, he deserved to spend his time in solitude, miserable for the things he\u2019s done.\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n But then\u2026 they aren\u2019t all Ted Bundy\u2019s are they?\u00a0\u00a0 Some are truly unfortunate for growing up in poverty with little to no parenting, sometimes mentally challenged in one way or another.\u00a0\u00a0 Not to mention lack of legal representation, influences of different legal officials with their own agenda and racial issues.\u00a0\u00a0 Some are people who for any number of reasons committed a truly heinous act, and some didn\u2019t at all.<\/p>\n Does this make them not human anymore, though?\u00a0 Should they be judged based on that one act and have it dismiss all their rights as a human being?\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure\u2026\u00a0 is the death penalty really about justice, or is it about revenge?\u00a0 Is it right for us to punish taking a life with taking a life?\u00a0 In the end, is it right for those who carry out the executions to do so just because it\u2019s deemed ok by the government?<\/p>\n It\u2019s all so confusing, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 Well, maybe not to some who already stand firm in their opinions, but to me it is.\u00a0 Since talking with my friend I have borrowed books from her, I\u2019ve downloaded Dead Man Walking and have watched the documentary that first brought Lifelines into existence.\u00a0\u00a0 I cried at the end of both movies, but maybe that was the intention of those who created them.\u00a0\u00a0 Had they been made through the eyes of people who believed in the death penalty I may have seen things very differently.<\/p>\n I\u2019m pretty sure if I spoke to most of my family and friends they would give the \u2018fry them all\u2019 speech and then think I was weird for even taking the time to think about this issue, let alone actually considering joining the organization itself\u2026 but for some reason it\u2019s touched me and I don\u2019t know why.<\/p>\n Am I crazy for wondering if maybe some of these people deserve more in life than they have?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Growing up in Canada, the death penalty is something I\u2019ve heard about but never really affected me.\u00a0 None of my family were criminals (that I know of!) and even if they were, the death penalty hasn\u2019t been around in Canada for years. I always knew it happened in the States, I can still remember standing …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[302,301],"class_list":["post-1968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-randoms","tag-confusion","tag-lifelines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1971,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions\/1971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
“It gives me life where sometimes life is hard to find, it lets me dream where dreams seem mostly to be only living nightmares.”<\/em><\/h5>\n
\nAlmost invariably the prisoners are from poor backgrounds, suffered abuse in childhood and received bad legal representation.
\nThe conditions in which they are held are harsh and dehumanising.
\nMany are abandoned by their family and friends and have very little, if any, contact with the outside world.
\nConsequently, letters can be a very real lifeline<\/strong> to them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n