I interviewed Marietta Jaeger for http://www.mo.be. She is a longtime activist against the death penalty, despite having lost her daughter to a mentally deranged serial killer in the 1970’s.
On the website the article is written in Dutch, but here I present the English version:
Marietta Jaeger was invited to Belgium by the Community of Sant’ Egidio in Antwerp.
We meet a courageous woman who overcame a tragedy and has since shown people how to deal with negative experiences. She never meant to be an activist.
‘Local churches began to invite me to share how my faith got me through it. Then people began coming back to me, saying they’d heard me speak and they realized that if I could forgive and have compassion, then they could also overcome a difficult situation in their life. I began to see that God was using Susie’s death as a gift of life to people, to help them know that forgiveness was possible. It takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight, but forgiveness is possible and it sets us free to move on.’
‘Through the years I’ve learned there is no amount of retaliatory deaths to compensate for the loss of my little girl. You could be killing somebody everyday but that wouldn’t bring her back to me. All it does, is creating another victim and grieving family.’
Death row is not compatible with a civilized society, that’s something Marietta Jaeger has always known, inspired by her faith. ‘We can never use the same mindset as criminals. As a society we need to set higher moral principles than the killing of another human being.’
‘When it comes to the death sentence, the United States are in the same bed as Saudi-Arabia and Pakistan. Each year there are states who abolish it, but still executions take place. Texas leads the country, but the state where I live, Florida is right behind. There was an execution last week.’
‘Recently they’ve been rushing to have more executions because the chemical they use to kill, is expiring. So in order to get full value, they hurry up in carrying out death sentences. Which is so barbaric.’
‘It’s really inhumane, the conditions of death row. The prisoners are in an isolated situation for 15 years, some of them even 30 to 35 years. In that period they’re locked up 23 out of 24 hours, and when they get exercise, it’s by themselves, they don’t get to exercise with other prisoners.’
There is also a racial component. The reason there are less death sentences, is because less white people are on death row. ‘Still, for the first time in Florida’s history, a white man got executed for the murder on a black man. That’s very rare. It’s more often the other way around.’
Innocent on death row
It’s unknown how many innocent people were on death parole. Based on the exonerations, the website Vox.com calculated there is about 4 percent of innocent people who get trialed with death row. Jaeger confirms: ‘At this point, unless something has changed, last week, there were 160 exonerations across the states.’
Getting released from death row doesn’t mean it’s easy to build a new life. ‘With the exception of a couple states, they’re not given anything to start a new life with. One man in Florida, an exoneree, was on death row for 40 years before they discovered by DNA evidence that he was innocent. Another guy that I know, in New Mexico, he walked out the door of death row in his shower slippers.’
‘The thing I don’t understand, when somebody is released they cannot have any contact with me for a whole year. With me, somebody who knows them, who can help them find a job, a place to live, that first year they need support the most, they’re not allowed to have it by people who know them well, who have gone into the prisons, talked with them and spent time with them.’
Crowded prisons
United States not only has the death row, but also faces crowded prisons. ‘The whole system is screwed up. I visit a lot of lifers in prison, almost all of them have committed their crime before they were 20 years old and under the influence of drugs and alcohol. When you sober them up and they get straight, they’re nice people. I would entrust my life to them. They are repentent, they have accepted responsibility for their crimes.’
‘The money they spent on executing people should be used on literacy programs, writing. Some prisons have art classes, some of these guys who have never held a crayon in their hands turn out to be very talented, it encourages a better self-image. There’s a lot more that should be done, instead of executing them, to use the money to rehabilitate them.’
‘People are really ignorant of the fact that the whole execution process of one offender costs the county minimum a million dollars, whereas to incarcerate them for the rest of their life, it only costs like $ 600.000. It’s a lot cheaper to put them in jail, which in essence is the death penalty because a lot of them are going to die there, but it will be of natural causes.’
‘More and more guards are coming forward to speak out about the toll of their job, eventually they leave because they can’t take it anymore. That’s another facet that you don’t hear about. They have to go home to their family and say “I killed somebody”. There’s something deep, I think in everybody, that finds killing repulsive and yet that’s their job.’
‘What we do and what the community of Sant’Egidio does, is try to educate the general population, because the politicians will go where the votes are. If the people say they don’t want their tax dollars used to pay for an execution, then the politician will listen.’
