Victims' families: 'end the death penalty.' - Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1993 by Tim Unsworth

CHICAGO -- When our friends Beth and Ed brought Marietta Jaeger to our home a few years ago, they whispered that she had lost a daughter. Something about kidnapping and murder. They didn't go into details.

It was only when I spoke to Marietta recently about the Journey of Hope, sponsored by the Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, MVFR, that I heard the awful details.

Just over 20 years ago, Marietta and her late husband, William, together with their five children, were on "a dream of a lifetime" camping trip in Montana. During the night, a man cut into their tent and kidnapped their youngest child, Susie. In the year that followed, he called Marietta, taunting her and demanding ransom. It was only after the killer's capture that the Jaegers would learn that Susie had been raped, tortured, murdered and butchered on the night of the kidnapping.

"A year later to the very minute he called again," Jaeger recalled from her inner-city Detroit home where she lives a life of evangelical poverty, in Auxiliary Bishop Thomas C. Gumbleton's parish. "But in that year God had really worked a miracle in me. I had changed from revenge to forgiveness. I came to recognize that, in God's eyes, the man who killed our daughter was just as precious as Susie."

That isn't a sentiment the majority of American Christians can readily embrace. It smacks of weakness, muddled thinking and left-wing politics. When Marietta told the killer she had forgiven him, he broke down. He rambled on the phone for at least an hour, revealing all kinds of details about himself. Marietta recorded the call and turned it over to the FBI in Montana.

Three months later, following another call, he was arrested. David lived near the campground and was already a suspect. He later confessed to three other murders and was a suspect in others. Shortly after, he took his own life. Marietta Jaeger joined MVFR, an abolitionist group founded in 1978 by Marie Deans, who currently serves as director of the Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons.

Deans founded the group following the murder of her mother-in-law. MVFR provides a voice for murder victims' surviving relatives and friends who oppose the death penalty, and who seek healing for themselves and society through compassion and forgiveness, instead of vengeance and retribution. From June 4 to 20, MVFR traveled through Indiana with side trips to Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois.

Billed as the "Journey of Hope," the organization sponsored rallies and other activities in the hope of reversing America's "eye for an eye" justice system that appears to simply produce more blind people.

"The offender just gets another victim," Jaeger observed.

According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, at the start of 1993 there were 2,676 inmates on death row. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 203 executions have been carried out for capital crimes that claimed 269 victims (64 other death row residents have died of natural causes while awaiting execution; 36 have committed suicide; 58 sentences have been commuted, and 1,268 sentences have been reversed).

Thirty-eight U.S. jurisdictions still have the death penalty on their books, although New Hampshire has sentenced no one. Fifteen other jurisdictions, including densely populated New York and the nation's capital, do not have the death penalty.

In January, a splintered Supreme Court narrowed another avenue for condemned inmates to get their cases reviewed by effectively shortening the time between sentencing and appeal. The case involved a Texas citizen who allegedly had killed two police officers in 1982. Texas is a guntoting state that boasts 56 executions since 1976 and 367 awaiting lethal injection. The frontier justice has done nothing for the state's crime rate, which has risen as steadily as the beer parties outside the prisons on execution nights.

There is a depressing pattern coursing through death row. The inmates are generally indigent and represented by overworked court-appointed attorneys. They have been on death row for six years or more and most had codefendants who testified against them in exchange for a lesser sentence. They are victims of child abuse; many are suffering from mental illness; many are measurably retarded. There's a good chance that many were sentenced because of race and an equally good chance that they could be innocent.

Finally, the death penalty is meted out terribly unevely. In 1990, the U.S. had 23,000 murders; only 23 people were executed.

MVFR's Bill Pelke has the rugged good looks of a movie gunslinger. He is a crane operator at Bethlehem Steel in Portage, Ind., and the grandson of Ruth Pelke, a 78-year-old Bible teacher to inner-city youths. In May, 1985, Mrs. Pelke was brutally hit on the head and stabbed 33 times by three teenage girls, one of whom was her Bible student, while a fourth acted as lookout.

At the time of the murder, Pelke, who earned three Purple Hearts in Vietnam, had no particular opinion on the death penalty. "If the law was on the books," he said, "I assumed it was appropriate."