You hate the wrong people.

It’s easier that way. Easier to point at us and say we’re defending monsters. Easier to believe we’re the problem, not the system. You hear “anti-death penalty” and you stop listening. You think we want to protect killers, comfort them, maybe even forgive them. You think we’re blind to the pain, the blood, the horror. But maybe you’re the one refusing to see.

We don’t wear halos. We don’t hand out excuses. And we sure as hell don’t call anyone a saint. What we do is look straight at a machine that doesn’t work. A machine that chews up truth, spits out lies, and asks for more money when it’s done. You think we’re soft. But softness doesn’t survive in this fight.

You talk about justice like it’s clean, sharp, simple. One crime, one punishment, one grave. But it’s never that simple. Behind every execution, there’s a courtroom full of flaws: buried evidence, bought confessions, prosecutors chasing wins instead of truth, rushed trials, misled juries, and judges who turn a blind eye. Look at Curtis Flowers, tried six times for the same crime by the same prosecutor in the same courtroom, each trial riddled with misconduct and jury tampering. It took over twenty years to undo that damage. Or Rodney Reed, who sat on death row while evidence piled up suggesting he wasn’t the man they said he was. Witnesses ignored. Timelines that never matched. And a justice system that didn’t want to hear it. These aren’t rare mistakes. They’re patterns.

You think we’re defending criminals. What we’re doing is pointing at the rot you refuse to see.

You say we don’t care about the victims. You say it louder and louder, hoping repetition makes it true. You call us heartless. Delusional. You say we comfort killers and spit on the dead. But you’re not telling the truth. Worseyou know it. We don’t excuse horror. We don’t dismiss grief. But we refuse to call this broken performance justice. We refuse to bow to a process that grinds families down for decades, dragging them through courts and appeals and delays, only to hand them a hollow sentence wrapped in legal theater.

You claim to stand with victims, but you use their grief like a campaign slogan. You hold their pain up like a shield every time someone questions the system. You don’t argue with facts you deflect. You say “victims” like a magic word meant to silence all criticism. You want the public to believe this is about choosing between the victim and the perpetrator. But it’s not. It’s about pulling back the curtain on a system that feeds on both.

You call it closure, but you mean silence. You want the story to end. The headlines fade. You want to believe someone paid, so you don’t have to think about what it really cost. But it never ends for the family who has to sit through every step, reliving the trauma again and again. For the condemned, who waits in a cage for decades while the system decides if he should die. Guilty or not, most of them are broken long before the needle ever touches skin. And for the people who make it happen, the guards, the doctors, the wardens, they carry that moment with them. They live with what they did because the State said it was justice.

It’s easy to talk about punishment when you’re not the one delivering it. But everyone touched by this system carries the stain. Some carry it in public. Others drink with it. Bury it. Try to outrun it. But it’s always there. That’s what this system does. It doesn’t heal. It haunts.
There are no winners here. Just damage, spread across every life this system touches. It doesn’t matter which side of the courtroom you’re on. Whether you lost someone, fought for someone, sentenced someone, or watched it happen from the sidelines. The weight lands anyway. This machine corrupts everything. It turns people into tools of cruelty. It teaches revenge and calls it virtue. It punishes, not to protect, but to perform.

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And in the end, we all pay. Some with blood. Some with silence. Some with decades of doubt they’ll carry alone. But all of us, victims, families, prisoners, guards, lawyers, judges, and every single person who funds it, we’re bound to the same sinking structure. Not by accident. By design. Because when justice stops being about truth and starts being about power, no one escapes clean. Not even you.

You want less crime? So do we. You want to stop the violence before it happens? Same here. You want a system that protects instead of reacts, that stops harm instead of repeating it? We’re fighting for that too. But the system you defend does none of that. It runs on repetition. It runs on fear, on pain, on full prisons and overflowing budgets. It needs crime. It feeds on it. And as long as people suffer, it survives.

That’s why we fight. Not because we hate justice, but because we believe in it. Not because we deny harm, but because we want to stop it before it starts. And we won’t get there by staring each other down, stuck in roles this system wrote for us. We’ll get there by looking in the same direction.

Like Saint-Exupéry wrote, love isn’t looking at each other. It’s looking together in the same direction. And that direction is forward. Toward a world where we protect the next victim before they’re hurt. Where we lift the next perpetrator before they fall. Where justice means fewer cages, fewer graves, and fewer broken lives.

So stop seeing enemies where there are none. Stop playing the part this system handed you.
We’ve all been used. But we are not enemies. We are human beings caught in the same storm, fractured by the same violence, tired of the same lies. And if we have the courage to stop looking across the divide and start reaching across it, we might finally build something that doesn’t destroy us to feel like justice. Something that protects, uplifts, and remembers that every life carries the same weight before and after the damage is done.