The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2021 memory of their loved ones. That it would contradict everything they believed in. That it would make survivors less like the innocent victims and more like their killer, a deliberate taker of human life. One such survivor was Mamie Till Mobley, whose only child, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in the American South in 1955. Emmett’s mother insisted on an open casket at his funeral to display for the world the evil done to her son. She told me that when an all-white jury acquitted the men, she did not thirst for their death. “I erased them,” she said, making a sweeping motion with her hand like an eraser over a blackboard. She focused instead, until the end of her shining life, on teaching children about the struggle for civil rights. Ross Byrd’s father, James Byrd, Jr., a Black man, was chained to the back of a truck in Texas and dragged to death by three white men. The force of the ground skinned his flesh to the bone in some places and decapitated him when his head struck a culvert. The night before the execution of one of the men who had killed his father, Byrd’s son Ross spoke out against it, telling Reuters, “You can’t fight murder with murder.” Even victims’ family members who believe in the concept of capital punishment oppose it in practice, as being bad for victims’ survivors. When the State of New Jersey abolished its death penalty in 2007, the effort to halt executions was led in part by the families of murder victims. Larry Post, father of a daughter who was murdered, started New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty in a church basement. The organization grew into a powerful and effective coalition of murder victims’ family members, clergy, legislators and law enforcement. The group was striking in that many of its members favoured the death penalty in principle but not in practice. Their argument was not that it was wrong, but that it was bad for victims’ survivors. One of the organizers, Celeste Fitzgerald, argued that the death penalty, “condemns the family members of murder victims to a life in limbo” and tied them for years to the killers of their loved ones. In the run-up to abolition, family members of 52 murder victims wrote in a letter to legislators that while capital punishment drags victims’ loved ones through an agonizing and lengthy process, a life without parole sentence would keep society safe, hold killers responsible for their brutal acts, and begin as soon as survivors left the courtroom.8 8 “N.J. on verge of repealing death penalty,” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2007, reporter byline Henry Weinstein. 11