As the sister of a murdered brother, I believe that bringing back the death penalty to Delaware, as several legislators are threatening to try, is exactly the wrong thing to do if we want to honor law enforcement and public safety officers and keep them safe.
Honoring law enforcement and public safety officers means remembering them and celebrating their lives and their work. It means offering support and respect to their families. It means supporting all public safety officers in the difficult work they do, with proper training, staffing, health care, equipment and salaries. It means allocating resources toward best practices that build community and prison safety.
The death penalty does none of those things. It puts front and center, not the victim, but the one who committed the murder. It doesn’t focus on the life but instead amplifies the gruesome details of the victim’s death, over and over for years. The death penalty doesn’t respect families but gives them false promises that a death sentence will result in a speedy execution and will heal the pain they feel. The death penalty diverts scarce resources, including our tax dollars, away from prevention, support and best practices. It diverts resources toward the promise of an execution that statistics in Delaware tell us is unlikely. Only 16 of the 60 men who received death sentences in Delaware since 1976 were executed. That’s a failure rate of 73%.
I urge lawmakers to focus their efforts and our resources on prevention and support, and on honoring lives, not on bringing back the death penalty, with its wasted tax dollars and false promises.
Kristin Froehlich
Wilmington
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.