Nina Martyris writes the OpEd, "Victims don't want the US's death penalty," for today's Guardian. Martyris is a US-based journalist who is a consulting editor with The Times of India Crest.
The US death penalty debate is back in the national spotlight thanks to a 9/11 hate-crime victim who was shot at and blinded in one eye, but is campaigning for his shooter's death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.
In September 2001, crazed by the death of his sister in the World Trade Centre, a heavily tattooed, bandana-sporting stone-cutter named Mark Stroman set out with his shotgun. He killed two men, assuming they were Arabs (one was an Indian Hindu, the other a Pakistani Muslim), and then walked into a gas station and shot into a third man's terrified face after asking "Where are you from?".
Rais Bhuiyan, who is also not an Arab but a Bangladeshi, survived, but had to undergo four operations and now lives with a dead eye and a face and head pitted with metal lumps. Remarkably, then, the 37-year-old aeronautics graduate who quit the Bangladesh air force to fly to the US in search of "more freedom", has been working with Amnesty and Stroman's lawyer to reduce Stroman's sentence. He says his main crime is ignorance and that killing him will only continue "the cycle of hitting and hitting back". Bhuiyan has been accused of being motivated more by the glitter of publicity than the glow of forgiveness, but whether or not that is true, this case is significant for several reasons.
And:
Third, and perhaps most important, here is yet another case of a victim opposing the death penalty. Bhuiyan, who keeps in touch with the other two victims' families, says that one of the families is actively supporting him, thereby countering the pro-death camp's argument that while it's all very well for nuns and liberals to sing from the abolitionist songbook, families whose loved ones have been murdered, raped or tortured have an emotional and moral need to see the perpetrator punished with death in order to get some kind of justice and closure. This, despite the anguished testimony of innumerable victims' families that capital trials, with their endless hearings and appeals, only prolong their trauma, and that, eventually, when the execution does take place, watching the offender die brings neither catharsis nor redemption.
Earlier coverage of Bhuiyan's campaign for a commutation of his attacker's death sentence begins at the link. Stoman's execution date is July 20.
Abe Bonowitz of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty will host a live Facebook chat with Rais Bhuiyan today at 1:00 pm (EDT), 12:00 pm (CDT), 11:00 am (MDT), 10:00 am (PDT). Details at the link.
Comments