tized for many years. He began a crusade to bring the victims, and their families, back into the criminal justice system. That crusade ended with the passage of a law in Oklahoma that allowed the families of victims, and victims themselves, to witness executions.
For the legislator, that would represent closure for him. It was not anger, exactly, that he expressed toward the criminals who changed his life so radically. Instead, he argued that victims psychologically needed the closure that witnessing an execution would represent. He argued that this represented justice and provided them with a means to let go of the past with a sense that meaning had been restored to them through the doing of justice, which they had witnessed.
The arguments of many of these people is based on the fact that they, too, are victims, and that they, rather than the state, are best able to speak for the victim. However, the voices of those who have witnessed, or experienced, the execution of murderers of their loved ones are not uniform. In some respects, they are quite mixed. For example, in an article in Redbook, several different people discussed their experience of the execution of the murderer. Their feelings varied widely. While some did experience satisfaction upon the execution, others experienced anger or sadness about the execution, and still others felt disappointed. Revenge did not satisfy everyone, and there were those family members who believed that the murderer should not be executed. However, most had strong feelings about having justice accomplished in the case of their lost family member.
A particularly strong statement of the impact of crime on those left behind was provided by Alice Kaminsky, whose son was murdered. Kaminsky's book, entitled The Victim's Song (1985), has a very different focus than that of Helen Prejean, which is apparent from the two titles. Prejean's focus is the perpetrator, who is a dead man s...