The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2021 The parents of the youngest victim of the Boston Marathon bombing, 8-year-old Martin Richard, made this appeal when prosecutors sought the death penalty for one of the bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The Richards wrote in the Boston Globe: “We understand all too well the brutality of the crimes committed. We were there. We lived it. The defendant murdered our 8-year-old son, maimed our 7-year-old daughter, and stole a part of our soul. We know that the government has its reasons for seeking the death penalty, but the continued pursuit of that punishment could bring years of appeals and prolong reliving the most painful day of our lives… As long as the defendant is in the spotlight, we have no choice but to live a story told on his terms, not ours. The minute the defendant fades from our newspapers and TV screens is the minute we begin the process of rebuilding our lives and our family.”9 Victims’ survivors made a similar argument in the most recent state to abolish its death penalty, the Commonwealth of Virginia, a former slave state and the first Southern state to end its death penalty. Victims’ families wrote in a joint letter that the death penalty fails victims’ families by diverting resources and attention to the killer rather than using funds for funeral costs, counselling and other services for survivors.10 Finally, even murder victims’ survivors who supported executing their loved ones’ murderer and saw those executions carried out have reported feeling re-victimized and agonized rather than helped and healed. Bud Welch said that before the execution of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, some fellow survivors were, “tortured, in pain all the time because they were carrying revenge, and that’s never going to heal you.” After the execution, some of those survivors felt guilt for the harm inflicted on McVeigh’s surviving family members — his grieving father and sisters — and for the death of Timothy McVeigh himself. The pro-death penalty survivors reported feeling that they had been put in the same position as McVeigh: killer. We who have suffered the loss of a loved one to murder know common pain: the moments that did not come and never will, the empty chair, the fading photograph we cannot bear to look at. We ask only this: to be considered as fully human, rather than only as vessels for anger and vengeance. Our experiences with death diverge as much as each mother’s experience with birth, a complexity beyond imagination. In this report are truths that reflect that very human lack of simplicity. I commend the telling of these truths. 9 Open letter of the Richard Family to the United States Department of Justice, published on the front page of the Boston Globe on April 17, 2017. 10 See section: the role of victims’ families. 12