Allowing family members of victims to witness executions is posing a challenge to capital punishments in America; at least that is what a new research says.
It is generally believed that the extreme punishments act like a closure for families of the murder or rape victims. However, according to a research by Annulla Linders, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of sociology, family members of victims watching executions complicates actual execution arrangements and the role of capital punishment in the public imagination.
The research is based on extensive reviews of newspaper accounts of executions from the 19th century public hangings to current execution chambers that have 12 official witnesses.
Linders says that present day executions are expected to bring emotional satisfaction to the families. "I argue that the opening up of the witness box to the murder victim's family has turned the execution into a somewhat different kind of event than it was - it has come to re-personalize executions and re-infuse them with interestedness and passion," Linders said in a press release. "No longer is it enough that the death is swift and the arrangements are efficient, the execution must now also satisfy the psychological demands of long-suffering relatives and other intimates of murder victims."
Before the 1990s, Louisiana was the only state that allowed family members of victims to witness executions. The number has increased to 18 states now. At present 32 states in America have capital punishment.
"Neither morbidly curious spectators (in the old sense of public executions) nor disinterested witnesses (in the new sense of closed executions), the family members of murder victims are in the witness box to view and judge something other than the execution of the law," Linders said. "They are there as survivors, not so much to observe the execution - there are official witnesses to do that - as to bear witness to the pain and suffering experienced by murder victims and those they leave behind."
The study 'Bearing Witness: Victim's Relatives and Challenges to the Execution Narrative,' was presented at the 109th Meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco.
