When relatives of victims cry halt to death row

Over the past weeks there has been a deluge of information about capital punishment in the US. Some of it has been considered, some prurient and sensational, some merely hype, a sick blurb for newspapers or television programmes.

With the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, on for last Wednesday, then off - it has been rescheduled for June 11th supposedly serious newscasters filled time with commentary more suited to the build-up to a football match.

My thoughts were mainly with the relatives of murdered people who do not agree with capital punishment and whose voices have been almost totally neglected by the landslide of commentary. One would hardly believe such people exist. They do.

A number of years ago I started a (recently completed) novel. A central part of the story is based around capital punishment, here in Ireland firstly, and later in the US, because that is the only country that still executes in the same language as we did here. Outside the world of fiction are more pressing reasons to examine the US on this issue, the most obvious being that, as self-appointed policemen of the world, they are on laughable ground when it comes to talking about human rights.

In the course of my research I spent a day on death row, in Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania, and a fortnight on one of the strangest roads I've ever followed.

The day on death row had been preceded by rigorous negotiations for permission. One evening I got a telephone call from its governor. The voice of such a man in my kitchen made me extremely nervous. I knew I would be speaking to him eventually, but not in my home. Just as there are matters we conceal from children, so there are places we use as hiding havens for ourselves. Duly the letter arrived. I will keep it, but I won't read it often.

The day itself is indelibly printed on my mind. I hope I shall die without seeing anything closer to a Redemptorist's notion of Hell. The carnage of war, or the murder scenes of some of these men, could be worse, but the difference is that, as civilised human beings, we agree such butchery is wrong.

But the evil intent of the state on death row is done in the name of civilisation. It is not just American people who are demeaned by the existence of such places; we are all lesser people because of them.

Putting as much distance between myself and the experience of walking corridors flanked by 52 caged men, I proceeded to the next stage of my research. I joined a unique group of people who meet yearly and descend on a state. An onlooker, seeing them on their bus in Tennessee, might mistake them for a holiday tour group. But these people are deeply affected by murder and unequivocally opposed to capital punishment.

Some of them have had relatives murdered, and some of these murderers are on death row. But these people believe their execution would only add to their own grief.

Others among them, coming from the opposite extreme, have family on death row. It is hard to believe such a chasm of experience could be bridged, but they have managed it.

There is a grand opening concert and then it is down the hard work. The participants go to schools, colleges, open-air meetings and churches, where they tell their heartbreaking and chilling tales and painstakingly explain why they are opposed to the death penalty. They are, sadly, united by their experiences but are, of course, utterly diverse people.

SueZann was in the living room with her father when an intruder stabbed him 24 times. She was stabbed four times and has a plate in her face, to the right of her left eye. She can still wink, but she forgets details of things occasionally. She cuts hair for a living. She fought for 10 years to get the man responsible off death row; she did not want his blood on her hands.

He can stay in prison for every day of his life for all she cares, but she does not want him killed, does not want to be a party to his murder. To her surprise, she is even learning to forgive him a little, and she considers that to be the greatest gift of all. She laughs a lot, now she has remembered how.

Celeste Dixon, a former navy woman, was always in favour of the death penalty, vehemently so after her mother was murdered. But within a few hours of the sentence being handed down to the man who killed her mother, she was shocked to discover she did not want any part of it. The thought of it heightened her grief. She knew murder was wrong. She is now a park ranger, offering history tours of historical sites around Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Sam R. Sheppard speaks eloquently, not only of suffering, but also of the terrible damage a media circus does to the individual. He speaks of the vulturous nature of these media that descend on a townspeople about to have an execution, of the manipulation of their words, and of the stunned emptiness that remains when the show moves on.

He should know. His pregnant mother was murdered when he was a boy of seven. His father was then wrongly convicted of her murder and served 12 years before being acquitted. By then Sam was 19, had lost his mother and had spent his childhood visiting his innocent father in prison. His being has been affected by the intrusion of a media that turned his life into a television series and, later, a film: The Fugitive, loosely inaccurately based on the murder of his mother.

Many made their fortunes on the back of his grief. He believes the death-penalty industry is shattering the lives of people in their most vulnerable hours, and asks how people can memorialise the dignity and beauty of their loved ones through humiliation, fear and cruelty.

He ekes out a living as an activist and a speaker against capital punishment. He owns a computer and a bicycle: not enough, he laughs, to make him into marriageable material.

And then there was Lois and Ken Robison. They are teachers, and whisper together that they should have lied and said Larry, their mentally ill son, had been violent. Without his displaying violent behaviour, they couldn't have him hospitalised long enough for his treatment to work. Eventually, he cracked, committed a murder and was sentenced to death. All the proof is that he was mentally ill. He was executed last year. I was sent a short note, telling me he was dead.

There were dozens more on that journey: men and women united by the question of why we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong. They had come from all states of the US, from Alaska to Texas, New York to California. They say they convince people of the barbarity of capital punishment. But they are never followed by truckloads of cameras. Evelyn Conlon is a short-story writer and novelist