Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Voices of Families of the Executed - Part 5
Here is the final installment in our series of excerpts from the MVFHR panel of families of the executed at the Third International Women's Peace Conference in Dallas this past July. See the original post announcing this series, the current issue of our newsletter with more about the peace conference panel, and MVFHR's report about families of the executed.

Remarks from Tamara Chikunova:I am the mother of a son who was arrested and sentenced to death [in Uzbekistan] against all justice and human rights. My son was tortured, but he refused to sign a confession saying he killed somebody, because he had not. When the police then arrested me and started to torture me, my son heard this and said, “All right, I’ll sign whatever you want, but please don’t hurt my mother.” In this way, my son signed his own death warrant, to save my life.

The trial lasted six months and in all that time I had no chance to see him. Afterward, I learned that during those six months he had been tortured in all kinds of cruel ways, from gas to electric shock. The lawyer that I had hired for my son was denied access to the court. Instead, my son was given a court-appointed lawyer, but she actually acted against him: she brought evidence from the prosecution against him. At the beginning of the trial, my son stood up and said that he is not guilty and that he signed the confession only because he was tortured and believed he was doing it to save his mother’s life. The judge said, “People like you should be killed right here in the courtroom.”

The trial lasted only three days, and on November 11, 1999 my son was sentenced to death. Seven months later, on July 10, 2000, I was allowed to visit him. I arrived at Tashkent prison but I was told there were no visits allowed. Shortly before this I had received a letter from my son in which he wrote that he missed me very much and looked forward to the visit on July 10. That day, July 10, he did leave his cell, but not for a visit with me; instead, it was for a visit with death. He was shot in the head that morning. It is incredibly cruel when a mother stands behind the prison’s wall and her son is waiting for her visit. We could have had even just ten minutes, but no, that was not allowed; the law in Uzbekistan does not require that families be given a last visit, and families are not told about the execution date ahead of time. The body is not released to the relatives to be buried, and the place of burial is a state secret.

After seven years, I still do not know where my only child is buried.After the execution, I didn’t want to live, because my son was all my life. I received a letter that he had written to me:“My dear mother, If it is not our fate to see each other again, remember that I am innocent. I have not spilled blood! I would rather die than let anyone hurt you. I love you very much, you are the only person dear to me. Please remember me. I send you a kiss. Your son, Dmitri”My son wrote to me please remember me, and for his memory I established my organization, Mothers Against the Death Penalty and Torture, that fights for life and against the death penalty in Uzbekistan and in the world. Our work has led to the overturning of 22 death sentences.

Our work is very difficult, but it’s not fruitless. This year, on June 29, official legislation was passed saying that on January 1, 2008 the death penalty in Uzbekistan will be abolished.This is a great victory, but we still have work to do. There are still hundreds of people in Uzbekistan who don’t know when their children were executed or where they are buried. Five months ago, a UN resolution was issued saying that there were several human rights violations in my son’s case and demanding that reparation be paid to my family and that such violations cease in the future. The Uzbekistan government has not responded to the resolution. What’s the price for human life? What’s the reparation if my only child was killed? I asked the UN not to give me the reparation but to give me my son’s body so I can bury him myself.Thanks to Elena Misheneva and Natalia Glebova for translating these remarks from the Russian. Read more about Tamara Chikunova and her work here, here, and here.
at 8:27 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 8, 2007

Voices of Families of the Executed - Part 4
We continue our series of excerpts from the MVFHR panel of families of the executed at the Third International Women's Peace Conference in Dallas this past July. See the original post announcing this series, the current issue of our newsletter with more about the peace conference panel, and MVFHR's report about families of the executed.

More from Melanie Hebert (see Friday's post for the first excerpt from Melanie): When my uncle was sentenced to death, I was just entering high school. For a young girl who is not dealing with any kind of issue, the transition to high school is still difficult, so you can imagine how it was compounded by the fact that I was from the same town and shared the last name with my uncle who had just been sentenced to death, and it was a very big news story. I was really taunted at school, and I went into a deep depression for the first two years of high school. I had a very tough time going to school every day.

There’s so much shame attached to it. Of course now, as a competent adult, I look back and say why didn’t I stand up and say yes, he did do that, but I didn’t do anything wrong, I shouldn’t feel any shame. But I was young and naïve and embarrassed and I felt like nobody would want to be friends with me because my uncle had done something terrible. Certainly I wish that the adults at my high school had had more knowledge and awareness about how to help a young person in my situation, and I also wish that they had been more proactive in coming to me. I didn’t know what resources were available to me, I didn’t know to go to the counselor or if this was something it would be appropriate to go to her about.

I wish that people in the school system had come to me and offered more support.When he was executed, I was grown up, I had been through college, I thought I had put all this behind me, but it kind of all came up again. By this time I had an entirely different circle of friends and peers, and people weren’t as direct in their shaming of me, but I still definitely felt it. One of the most difficult aspects was taking time off from work. I knew that I would be visiting with Spencer and essentially what I felt forced to do was to lie. I said I had had a death in the family and I needed time off to mourn. In fact that death had not yet occurred, but I didn’t feel comfortable disclosing that. When I returned to work I remember seeing my boss with the newspaper opened to the story and I thought well, she does know now.
at 7:49 AM 0 comments
Friday, October 5, 2007

Voices of Families of the Executed - Part 3
We continue our series of excerpts from the MVFHR panel of families of the executed at the Third International Women's Peace Conference in Dallas this past July. See the original post announcing this series, the current issue of our newsletter with more about the peace conference panel, and MVFHR's report about families of the executed.

Remarks from Melanie Hebert: My uncle Spencer Corey Goodman was executed here in Texas in 2000. He had been adopted by my paternal grandparents, and he was much younger than their natural children. He and I had a very close relationship and he felt much more like a brother to me than an uncle. We were just seven years apart in age and we spent a lot of time together during my childhood.

He became estranged from the family when I was in elementary school and the next thing I heard about him was after he had committed a murder and my grandfather was called to testify at the trial. My family wanted us to have nothing to do with him, and they didn’t speak about him much. I kind of just put it out of my mind and went about my life until shortly before he was executed. My sister had been visiting him and he requested that I come and visit before his execution. She asked me if I would, and I agreed. When I went to visit him, I was really surprised that he wasn’t the monster that I had been led to believe he was.

My heart was really changed as I spent the next couple of days with him before his execution. I was reluctant to get involved with any kind of political activity regarding the death penalty. I wasn’t sure where I stood and I was so young, I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with it. But I woke up the next morning and I had such a hollow feeling. I felt compelled at that point to speak out against the atrocity that is the death penalty and let people know what my family went through. We didn’t have a lot of support from our friends or from our church; people didn’t know what to do or say, so they left us to deal with it on our own.

In any other circumstance when you know someone who has had a loss, the neighbors and friends and church pull together to support that person. A surreal aspect of it was that while we were mourning the loss of our loved one, people were cheering about it and saying that justice had been served, and that’s something I don’t think people experience with any other death. It would have helped if we had been treated with more compassion by the judicial system. One of the most difficult parts of dealing with Spencer’s execution was that we had to learn the information from the television. That’s a really difficult way to learn about your loved one’s fate. We learned about the death sentence from the TV on a night that happened to be my father’s birthday. It was very hard. Later, I asked every single person at the prison to please call our family to let us know when the execution was complete. No one called us. Finally we turned on the television and learned that he had died. It’s a really cruel way for families to be treated.
at 8:48 AM 0 comments
Thursday, October 4, 2007

Voices of Families of the Executed - Part 2
We continue our series of excerpts from the MVFHR panel of families of the executed at the Third International Women's Peace Conference in Dallas this past July. See the original post announcing this series, the current issue of our newsletter with more about the peace conference panel, and MVFHR's report about families of the executed.

More from Lois Robison (see yesterday's post for the first excerpt from Lois): One of the things that always worried me was that I knew they would set Larry’s execution date 30 days in advance, and I wondered how I was going to go into my classroom and teach my little third graders while the clock kept ticking and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was very difficult for all our family. Our daughter, who was 12 years old when this happened, was teased at school. It affected her terribly and affects her to this day.

As a matter of fact, she too is mentally ill. I know she had the genes for it, but I think that this precipitated her breakdown, because she began to have trouble from that point on and was finally diagnosed as bipolar and schizoaffective when she was 19. Many of our family members have had depression. I have been taking medication for depression for years. Some people were very kind to us when this happened and others were not.

My principal told me just before I retired that every year there were parents who came to him and told him they did not want their child in my classroom because they knew my son was a murderer. He always told them that he would not honor their request, but if they came back at midterm and still wanted their child transferred to another classroom, he would do it. He said in every case they came back and apologized.

The church where we were attending was very kind when Larry was arrested, they came and brought us food, they were there when it hit the television. But later on when we became involved in groups working to abolish the death penalty, they were not as supportive. We finally ended up going to another church, where we were asked to speak about the death penalty. Larry’s execution date was set once before and it came within three hours of his execution and then he got a stay. We had tried to get ourselves prepared for it and then he got the stay, and we had to go through it all again. Two of our children got hysterical and said I can’t go through this again. But we did; we had to.

I would like for our country to be educated about the nature of mental illness because it is an organic brain disease, and it is treatable, but there is very little available treatment for it, especially in Texas. Texas is right at the bottom of the heap in treating the mentally ill and it’s right at the top in executing the mentally ill and there’s something wrong with that picture. If we would use just one tenth of the money that’s spent on imprisonment and execution to have some prevention, if we had mental health treatment for anybody who needs it, these horrible, horrible crimes like Larry committed would not happen. But instead our state and our federal governments are cutting the benefits for the mentally ill.
at 8:05 AM 1 comments
Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Voices of Families of the Executed - Part 1
Today we begin our series of excerpts from the MVFHR panel of families of the executed at the Third International Women's Peace Conference in Dallas this past July. See the original post announcing this series, the current issue of our newsletter with more about the peace conference panel, and MVFHR's report about families of the executed.

Remarks from Lois Robison:We’re just an average family, except we have a son who was executed by the state of Texas. Larry was every mother’s dream: he was in the band, he was a good student, he did church work, had a paper route, he would have made Eagle Scout if he hadn’t got sick. We realized he had a problem and took him to the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, where we lived at the time, but he wasn’t diagnosed until after he got out of the Air Force when he was 21.

Unfortunate timing: we took him to the hospital, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but our insurance didn’t cover him because he had just turned 21, so they discharged him and told us to take him to the county hospital. We took him there, and they kept him for 30 days and then told us they were discharging him and not to take him home. I said, “He has no job, no place to stay, no car, you can’t just put him on the street.” They said, “You’d be surprised, we do it every day.”We got him into the veterans’ hospital; they kept him for 30 days and then told us the same thing: “We don’t have the money, we don’t have the beds, and he’s never been violent so we can’t keep him for more than 30 days.”

They told us to take him to the county MHMR (Mental Health and Mental Retardation) for treatment, but they forgot to have him sign a release of records, so MHMR would not treat him or give him his medications. Consequently he disappeared and he ended up not getting treatment for four years. The first violent thing he ever did was to kill five people, very brutally. We were horrified, and we felt terribly for the families that lost their family members. We thought that Larry would probably be sent to a mental hospital for life.

We were wrong: he was jailed for a year, tried, and given the death penalty – found sane, by the way, despite his record. I collapsed outside the courtroom and was hauled to the hospital in an ambulance, screaming all the way, “They’re going to kill my son.” I was in the hospital for four days. When I came up out of it, I got angry and I said, “This is not right. They told us if he ever got violent they would give him treatment, and instead they gave him the death penalty.” I determined that I was going to tell this story to everyone in the United States. I haven’t told them all, but I’ve told quite a few of them! Larry was on death row for 17 years and was executed on January 21, 2000. The day that he died I promised him I would spend the rest of my life working to help the mentally ill and people on death row.
at 8:04 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Panel of Families of the Executed

In the current issue of our newsletter, there’s a story titled “Families of the Executed Come Together at Women’s Peace Conference,” about the panel presentation at which MVFHR members Lois Robison and Melanie Hebert from Texas were joined by Tamara Chikunova, who traveled from Uzbekistan to the U.S. for the first time to participate in this Dallas, Texas conference. In the newsletter story, you can read Lois’s and Melanie’s reflections about what a powerful experience it was to meet and connect with someone who has suffered a similar tragedy to theirs, in a country halfway across the world.

As organizer and moderator of the panel, I also found the experience powerful in ways I haven’t fully been able to articulate, except that it has something to do with an awareness that whatever it is within human beings that we’re fighting when we’re fighting the death penalty, it isn’t unique to any one country. I knew that before the peace conference, of course, but there are different kinds of knowing, and the experience of bringing these three women together and listening to them listen to each other will stay with me for a long time. Beginning tomorrow, our next series of blog posts will feature excerpts from the women’s peace conference panel presentation.

As you visit us here over the next several days, you’ll be able to read Lois’s, Melanie’s, and Tamara’s heartbreaking accounts, which remind us that each execution creates a new set of victims. You’ll read, too, about the courage of these survivors who continue to fight so that others don’t have to experience what they experienced – very much like the survivors we featured in the Preventing Violence series.

And for more on the subject, read MVFHR’s report on families of the executed, Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind. Read about the Third International Women’s Peace Conference here.