How the death penalty creates more victims

When Anthony Darrell Hines was executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution August 13, Hines’s son was there, bearing witness to his father’s murder by Tennessee. As reported on the website of ABC-affiliated television station WKRN in Nashville, “According to his attorneys, Hines met his son for the first time four days before the execution.” Fox 17, another TV station in Nashville, reported on its website Hines’s son was “visibly upset.”

When asked if he wanted to make a final statement, Hines initially declined according to WKRN but “one minute later, witnesses reported Hines said, ‘Tell my son I love him.’” In a twist, one all good Tennesseans—as well as all good people everywhere—should meditate on, Tennessee Department of Corrections Commissioner reported Hines’s final words as, “Tell my son ‘hello.’”

After the execution, Fox 17 reproduced a statement by Hines’s attorney, Katherine Dix, expressing sympathy for the family of Catherine Jean Jenkins, who was savagely sexually assaulted and murdered by Hines.

In her statement, Dix also said: “The leaders of this state repeatedly invoke the sanctity of life, but today the State put to death a man who was blind and paralyzed on his left side, could not walk, and was in constant pain. They lifted his body onto a gurney and wheeled him to the death chamber.”

In “griev[ing] for the family of Catherine Jean Jenkins,” Dix also ‘griev[ed] the violence the State of Tennessee inflicted” on Hines’s “son, who met Darrell four days ago for the first time and watched him die this morning.” Admirably, Dix stalwartly insisted, “What we witnessed here today is not normal, and I urge us all to not become numb or indifferent to the cruelty.”

Studying the ramifications of another death penalty case this past July, in an article called “The children who loved a killer,” Masha Hamilton reported in The Guardian that “Sociologist and death penalty scholar Michael L. Radelet” told her: “The family members of the executed are among the most powerless in our communities. The death penalty just doubles the number of innocent families who are mourning the loss of a loved one.” Hamilton also quoted from sociologist Susan Sharp’s book “Hidden Victims” in which Sharp describes the family members of the executed as “tainted by association”; “We assume they must have done something wrong.”

Almost ten years ago, in September 2016, I too had occasion to consider “The death penalty’s toll on the children of the condemned”—people like Anthony Hines’s visibly distraught son. In relevant part, I wrote that “The death penalty victimizes the innocent children and family members of condemned men and women. These are citizens of this country who have committed no crime, and yet, because of capital punishment’s ignominious existence, they are punished too.”

Three years before that writing, Marta Santos Pais, the United Nations’ Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children, said: “The sentencing of a parent to the death penalty compromises the enjoyment of a wide spectrum of children’s rights.” Further, she implored, “It is critical that the situation of children of parents facing the death penalty get the urgent attention and action required.”

My conclusion almost a full decade ago remains the same—and especially so after Hines’s execution: “Of course, the children and family members of those who have been murdered are victims; that’s so obvious, no one needs to study the phenomenon. But, when as a society we choose to descend to the killer’s level by sanctioning the death penalty, we must acknowledge all of the dirty, nasty consequences, many of which can hardly be described (or swept under the rug) as ‘collateral.’” Hines’s son, for reasons that weren’t reported and I would submit ultimately don’t matter, had just met his father for the first time four days before Tennessee executed him; in part that’s what makes the discrepancy of Hines’s last words so tragic, because both seem so equally plausible and equally sorrowful: “Tell my son I love him” or “Tell my son ‘hello.’”

Litigating over the death penalty to execute Hines, Tennessee spent a lot of money that could have gone to innumerous things everyday Tennesseans need to improve the quality of their lives—like better schools and better hospitals—and in the process the state needlessly created another innocent and sympathetic victim, one who didn’t deserve to watch his father be killed.