The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2021 convicted of a heinous rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl. The man, Rolando Cruz, had an execution date that was drawing closer. My message was this: I must try to save an innocent man’s life because I could not save the lives of my family members. If I had known the date, time and place that the killer was going to break into their home, I would have done anything to prevent it. But we did know the date, time, location and even the manner in which the state intended to kill Rolando Cruz, and I had to do my utmost to stop it. The collective efforts of so many worked; Cruz was later exonerated and released from custody. That speech was the first of many in the days to come, before state legislatures in the United States and in countries around the world: Mongolia, Japan, France. Often, in response, voices on the other side would say this: “Victims’ families need the death penalty to have justice, to end their nightmare. They need to know the person who killed their loved ones will never walk the streets again.” That contention stopped the conversation in its tracks. No one wants to hurt survivors of murder victims. Bill after bill seeking to abolish the death penalty in the United States would die in state houses, in Congress. The voices purporting to speak for all murder victims’ survivors would drown out the rest. Some of those voices argued that the murdered themselves would want those that killed them to be executed, would be pleased to see them suffer. One such person was a relative of one of the victims of Karla Faye Tucker, who killed two people with an ice pick. Tucker took full responsibility for her crime, gave her life to God while in prison and behaved there in a manner so exemplary that prison personnel spoke out against executing her. The relative told reporters that if Tucker went to heaven after her death by lethal injection, he hoped that her victims would assault her when she got there. Richard Thornton, husband of victim Deborah Thornton, witnessed Tucker’s execution and as it proceeded, said to his dead wife, “Here she comes, baby doll. She’s all yours.” It was a conception of heaven as a place of vengeance that intersected in no way with my faith or the beliefs of anyone I know; it was heaven as dystopia. But it is that dystopia of vengeance that too often drives our politics. I believe to the depths of my soul that murder victims would wish on no human being the fate that befell them. Most of those Americans who support the death penalty are Christians, but Jesus himself rejected “an eye for an eye” retributive justice and instead urged his followers, like me, to turn the other cheek. The angriest voices do not speak for all survivors. On the contrary, many victims’ families argue eloquently that a ritual killing of the perpetrator would desecrate the 10