originally published in a community site dedicated to hosting challenging conversations from people with divergent viewpoints (from which I've excerpted links to other articles and identifying details - not that it would be terribly hard to track me down - but someone would have to go to a little effort, at lest).
Having a loved on on death row is really hard. My brother was there for 20 years, before the court - quite unexpectedly - found a way to order a new trial, 36 hours before his execution. They spent about a year deciding whether to have another trial, and ultimately decided not to - by commuting his death sentence to life in prison without parol.
But in that process, we went through prison visits with pat-downs (or more) for every visit (and having our children strip searched until around age 2), deciding whether to tell them why their uncle was in jail - and when execution became a near certainty, whether to tell the then 8 year olds that their uncle was going to be executed. My brother and I made different decisions - which made it hard for my daughter who then had a secret she couldn't tell her cousins. Making arrangements for disposal of his body, before he was actually dead, writing a final note to send to the people who had stood by us for 2 decades, and figuring out whether to be present for the execution - or in the church with the victim's families (or just to vanish, knowing the circus that was about to start). And, of course, the up and down so many times before the final time - and the times he wanted to just give up and let the state kill him (holding our breath hoping he would change his mind before the appeal date passed - knowing that we had to let him control the only thing he had control over). Not something I ever expected to be involved with, or would wish in my worst enemy.
I'll send you a link to the blog. It has a link to the another article about the incident and how the families handled it you might find helpful.
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