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One more heart wrenching thing to ponder. .

Another good reason to end capital punishment. . . I got this report from the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

Report: Death Penalty Creates More Victims
Tuesday, December 05 2006 @ 10:01 PM EST

Family members, especially children, suffer in the aftermath of an execution PFADP via BBSNews 2006-12-05 -- Cambridge, Mass. ï¿½ Families of the executed are victims too, according to a new report that Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights will release on December 10. "Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind" draws upon the stories of three dozen family members of people executed in the United States and demonstrates that their experiences and traumatic symptoms resemble those of others who have suffered a violent loss. "It's something you don't ever get over," said Pam Crawford, one of the family members featured in the report. Crawford, a Charlotte native, is the sister of a man who was executed in Alabama in 1996. She described the nightmares and other difficulties that her teenaged granddaughter still experiences in the aftermath of the execution. Other family members agreed that children, in particular, suffer as they struggle to understand a relative's death at the hands of the state. "What impact does this event have on children's impressionable lives, and what cost does society pay for that impact?" asks Robert Meeropol, another survivor featured in the report. Meeropol's parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed in New York when Meeropol was 6 years old. As a victims' organization, Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) researched and published the report to highlight the similarities between the experiences of survivors of homicide victims and survivors of people who are executed. "Family members of the executed are the death penalty's invisible victims," said Renny Cushing, executive director of MVFHR. "With each execution, we create a new grieving family who experience many familiar symptoms of trauma, some of them long-lasting. As a society, what are we doing to address the suffering of these families?" "Creating More Victims" includes recommendations for mental health professionals, educators, and child welfare advocates. MVFHR also plans to deliver the report to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights and request that that office undertake further study of the impact of executions on surviving families.

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Words to live by

These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.