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Foreword “This is the picture of our son that Richard had in his room before he died,” said the ninety-year-old woman in her thick German accent. The year was 1986. We were in San Francisco, on the top floor of the Fairmont Hotel, there to do a TV show about the fiftieth anniversary of her husband’s execution. As the city lights glistened below, she hugged the picture and sobbed, both her hands clutching my upper arm. After a moment of silence, she slowly muttered,“It still hurts like it was yesterday .” Yesterday. Fifty years.Yesterday. So said Anna, the widow of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was executed in 1936 for the murder of the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh . To this day, many believe that Hauptmann was innocent. That issue aside, Richard Hauptmann’s suffering ended in 1936. Once his death sentence was carried out, he could no longer be punished, and he could not live with the stigma and the memories. His family could; his wife still did, every day for nearly six decades, until her own death in 1994. In this important book, Professor Susan Sharp focuses our attention on the wives, parents, children, and siblings of death row inmates. Because this is a group that is rarely in the limelight, they can unquestionably be seen as “HiddenVictims” of the death penalty. Over the past twenty-five years I have had the experience of going through last visits with over fifty condemned inmates, sharing those last hours with the prisoner, his or her family, attorneys, and spiritual advisors, and getting to know scores of other families who dread the day when the life of their loved one on death row will be taken. No one has ever done a better job than Professor Sharp of shedding light on these families and allowing their stories to be told. Supporters of capital punishment argue their position very differvii ently than they did a generation ago. Then, the pro-execution forces saw the death penalty as a deterrent, or as a way to save taxpayers’ money, or as a penalty justified by biblical scriptures. Today, few if any criminologists would argue that executing prisoners is a better deterrent than life imprisonment without parole (which is now the alternative to the death penalty in thirty-six of the thirty-eight death penalty states), all would agree that the costs of the death penalty far surpass the costs of life in prison, and there are few issues on which more religious leaders agree than on the basic immorality of capital punishment. Instead, in recent decades the prime (or even sole) justification has become retribution: they deserve it, and executing offenders helps families of homicide victims in ways that prison never can. As Professor Sharp shows us, however, the retributive aspects of the death penalty are applied with shotgun accuracy, with effects that are often invisible to those who are not in the line of fire. Executions tend to create an ever-widening circle of tragedy, often affecting three generations . As we learn about these effects in the pages that follow, we learn that the death penalty punishes the innocent—that is, the families of the condemned—far more than alternative sentence of long imprisonment. This is possible only because the family members of those under death sentences are among the most powerless in our communities. To be sure, some of the mothers and fathers of these prisoners were terrible parents. Among them are former prostitutes, alcoholics, and drug addicts; some who were abusive and negligent and unbelievably selfish. At first glance, one might feel they deserve punishment as much as or instead of their children. But we learn from Professor Sharp that such traits describe only a small minority of the parents of America’s thirty-five hundred death row inmates. Instead, we find that most of the parents of death row inmates are in many ways not all that different from the mothers of police officers, nurses, or college professors. As a group they are people who have usually done their best with what they had. To be sure, many did not have much—poverty is one characteristic that most families of those on death row share—but they did what they could with what they had. And many are like the mother in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, who is forced by a Nazi physician at Auschwitz to decide which of her two children will die. There...

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