Letter Writing Campaign

I had a goal in high school to get into as many yearbook photos as possible. Being editor of the yearbook my senior year helped, but so did joining a boatload of school organizations. I had a bunch of friends in Amnesty International, so I thought, "I can go to a lunch meeting once a month to protest against torturing people. I mean, that's bad stuff."

One week, we started writing letters in protest of the death penalty. I pulled our advisor aside and told him I thought I'd have to drop out of the group. I believed in the death penalty. I believed that if you killed someone, your death was a logical punishment. An eye for an eye type of thing. Fortunately, the AI advisor said I could stay in the group and focus my efforts on another letter writing campaign. If you look at the 1995 Manual HS yearbook, I'm totally in the Amnesty International group photo, probably rockin' my favorite red & blue rugby shirt and some sweet ripped jeans (ah, grunge).

Fast forward 6 years after high school graduation...

I got a phone call from Jon's mom. Jon was a childhood friend that I hadn't seen in about a year. I knew it had to be bad news because why else would Jon's mom be calling me? I thought maybe someone's dad had a heart attack. 

It turned out that our dear friend, Roberta, had been brutally, brutally murdered out in LA. Her body had been found in a park by some joggers and the killer was still on the run. The police had an ATM photo of the killer from the night before when he'd forced Roberta to withdraw money from her bank account. They knew who he was, they just didn't know where he was.

It took about three days for the killer to turn himself in - he had taken Roberta's car and driven all the way to Michigan. During those three days, I thought a lot about this guy. Was he mentally stable? What happened to him that he could be capable of the horrible things he'd done? What made him so powerless in life that he felt the need to violently dominate another person? 

Faced with the stark black and white reality of Roberta's murder, my stance on the death penalty was all of a sudden very gray. I'd think about what Roberta's last moments alive must have been like and that this guy was responsible for those last minutes consisting of fear and pain. I wanted him to feel those same things. To feel what it was like to know someone else held power over whether he lived. And yet if this guy was executed, it wouldn't bring Roberta back. It wouldn't make me feel any better.

The crime qualified for the death penalty - kidnapping, robbery, rape and murder. The trial was relatively quick. With DNA and photographic evidence and the car, there wasn't really too much to defend. The killer got life in prison, and the relief I felt at his sentence was surprising. The death toll ended there. One life was gone, but another life still held hope for something good to somehow come of it. 

This year, the Colorado legislature has been considering a bill that would take away funding for the death penalty and instead put the money toward solving cold cases. In effect, this would take away the death penalty from Colorado courts without jumping through the hurdles of declaring it unconstitutional. It looks like opponents of the bill will defeat this legislation by providing alternate funding for cold cases. 

If the bill does face defeat, I think I can pick up where my teenage self left off and start up that letter writing campaign.