Of course, that doesn't stop some victims families from hoping it will. Stardust Johnson plans to watch the death of the man who killed her husband eight years ago, even if it takes another decade. She'd been married to Roy Johnson, a music professor at the University of Arizona, for 35 years when he was kidnapped, robbed, beaten to death and left in the desert by Beau John Greene, who was high on crystal meth. "We had an unusually happy marriage," she says, her voice cracking. "We were very close, very loving and caring. I was so fortunate, I can't tell you how fortunate I was to have met Roy and had those 35 years, but I'm growing old alone and I sure didn't count on that."

"Before my husband was murdered I probably was not in favor of the death penalty, but after [Greene] brutally took the life of my husband, who was a beautiful human being, I do feel that the death penalty is appropriate for him," she says. "I think that what it does is give a sense of release. I don't want him to be out there anymore. I would like that chapter closed."

Johnson doesn't expect the execution to happen for at least another decade, which means she'll have waited 18 years for the sense of release she longs for. Meanwhile, the appeals process has been grueling. Recently, she says she told a friend it might have been easier if the killer had gotten life in prison so "there wouldn't be an appellate process and it all would have stopped. It's the appellate process that continues and drags you in that's really difficult to deal with."

It's a common complaint among survivors. "Either have it or don't have it, but don't carry it out for 19, 20 years," says Tewksbury.

"If anything prevents closure, it's the death penalty," says Richard Moran, the author of last year's "Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair" and a criminologist at Mount Holyoke. "If you have a trial in which the person is sentenced to life imprisonment, it's over, that's it. If the person is sentenced to death, you will be contacted by authorities and will relive that murder every two years for the next 15 years. Then, if they finally do execute the person, then you can start beginning your closure. What it does is, it puts off any healing. Wounds are being reopened and whole process is being prolonged."

Johnson surely echoes other victims' families when she says she thinks death row convicts should be allowed only one appeal. But such a solution would only exacerbate the problems that led Ryan to empty his state's death row in the first place. "Thank God for the long appeals process, because there are a hell of a lot of people we would have killed that were wrongly convicted if we didn't have it," Welch says. In Illinois alone, 17 death row inmates have been exonerated, many after more than a decade in prison. As it stands, when it comes to the death penalty, there's no way to reconcile the victims' desire for a speedy conclusion with the need to make sure the state doesn't put innocent people to death.

So these cases can drag on for years. In 1999, Welch testified at a hearing for Manuel Babbitt, who'd been on death row at San Quentin nearly two decades (he was put to death later that year). Babbitt, a decorated Vietnam vet and former mental patient, broke into the home of 78-year-old Leah Schendel, beat her and tried to rape her. She died during the assault. At the hearing, one side of the room was dominated by the Schendel family, the other by the Babbitts. "I didn't even say what I had intended to say, which is that what we have seen unfold before us this day is an absolute American tragedy," Welch says. "The state of California chose 20 years ago to put Manny Babbitt on death row, and two large families have been unable to move on with their lives for 20 years."

He believes the Schendel family was the more ill-served by the process. "If you take Manny from his cage and kill him, the Babbitt family will be able to move forward," he remembers thinking. "The Schendel family will not find peace and they will not be able to move forward for some time."

His assessment is backed up grief experts, Moran says. "Most of the psychiatric literature would say those who forgive have a better chance of letting go of it. Some people can find it in themselves to forgive, and they do the best. I don't know if I would be capable, but if I were to advise myself on what I needed to do to survive if something like that happened to me, that's the strategy I would try to follow. It's the only one that works."

And, of course, it's a strategy that the death penalty precludes. Welch says it was "very important" to his own healing process that he was able to make his peace with McVeigh. Had he watched McVeigh's execution hoping to find comfort in it, he believes he might never have transcended his own fury. "God didn't make normal human beings to feel good out of watching another human being take his last breath," he says.

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