The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2021 was carrying life in her body when she died. The last thing she would have wanted is more killing. Also, the notion that the lives of my family members could be paid for by snuffing out the life of their killer seemed preposterous to me. How could his one life even begin to recompense the lives he took? Shedding more blood and digging another grave and creating another grieving family like mine could never heal me. It would not bring Nancy and Richard and their baby back. It would not honour their lives or what they stood for. It would not give me that thing people often say that murder victims’ families want and need above all: closure. Closure is this mythical state in which all your pain and heartbreak over losing your loved ones will be neatly wrapped up and put to rest when a dire punishment is imposed on the one who took them from you. It is a lie. I will love my sister and brotherin-law and their unborn baby forever. I will mourn them every holiday, every birthday, every time I see a blue car like the one they drove or a young woman wearing her hair in a French braid, as Nancy did. My love and grief over her death will live on in me as long as I live, and motivate me to love as she did, to live passionately and joyfully and to have courage at the end. I do not want to close that. After I made that public declaration against the death penalty, a group reached out to me: an organization of people who had lost family members to homicide, but who opposed the death penalty for all offenders, including the ones who killed their loved ones. Those people have become my heroes: Bud Welch, the father of an only daughter, Julie, who died when domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Marietta Jaeger, whose young daughter Susie was abducted, raped and murdered by a man who took her from her tent on a family camping trip. Bill Babbitt, whose brother Manny, a Marine who had served in wartime, was executed for murder despite his post-traumatic stress disorder. Robert Curley, whose 10-year-old son Jeffrey was asphyxiated, raped and dismembered by two pedophiles. Kate Lowenstein, the daughter of a congressman shot by an activist. Renny Cushing, whose father Robert and brother-in-law Stephen both were murdered decades apart in eerily similar circumstances: on the front steps of their homes in front of their spouses. All have spoken with unimaginable courage, across the country and around the world, about the necessity of abolishing the death penalty everywhere. I began to follow their lead, to speak out against executions from my perspective as a murder victim’s family member. The first time was at an event at my former law school, Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. One of its professors was trying to overturn the conviction and death sentence of an innocent man wrongfully 9