The Case for Mercy: Some of the Unlikeliest People Oppose the Death Penalty.

• Author: Gunn, Erik

Late one afternoon in February 2014, ten-year-old Hailey Owens was abducted from a street near her home in Springfield, Missouri. Police say her abductor raped her, then shot her, then wrapped her body in garbage bags and stuffed it in a plastic tote.

A few hours later, Craig Wood, a stocky football coach and bluegrass musician, was arrested after police found Hailey's body in the tote in his basement. Witnesses, local news media reported, had seen someone matching Wood's description abduct Hailey.

In October, Wood is scheduled to go on trial. But at least one person would prefer that trial never happen: Hailey Owens's mother, Stacey Barfield.

This past April, Barfield wrote to the prosecuting attorney in Greene County, Missouri, asking him to accept a plea agreement in which Wood would plead guilty in return for a sentence of life in prison instead of execution.

"I am writing to request your mercy," Barfield wrote. "Mercy for me, for my family, and for the memory of my daughter, Hailey Owens."

Sparing Wood's life with a plea agreement, she told the local newspaper, would also spare her family the ordeal of having to "relive the nightmare" of her daughter's brutal killing.

The prosecutor, Dan Patterson, did not respond to a request from The Progressive for comment about the case. He has told local news media he cannot comment on possible plea negotiations for ethical reasons, and must consider many factors in deciding whether to seek the death penalty for Wood.

Stacey Barfield's story is not unique. Many people who have lost a loved one to violent crime have, for various reasons, pleaded with authorities to forgo the death penalty for the accused authors of their grief.

Some act out of spiritual principles. Some, like Barfield, are motivated by practical concerns. Whatever their reasons, these crime-victim survivors often find themselves marginalized by prosecutors and the legal system--both otherwise quick to appeal to public sympathies on the part of victims and their survivors as they seek the ultimate punishment. Their stories have in large part been muted beyond their own network of shared tragedy.

It's a group Christian activist Shane Claiborne encountered when he began researching his recent book Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It's Killing Us, a spiritually grounded polemic that urges his fellow evangelicals to support the abolition of capital punishment.

"Many of them are compelled by their faith to find alternatives, convinced that it doesn't actually bring closure, it just extends the trauma and creates a whole new set of victims," Claiborne tells The Progressive. " [These] are folks who have used their deep pain and trauma to try to heal the wounds rather than exacerbate resentments and violence."

This group of opponents to state-sponsored killing in the name of justice may prove crucial in turning the broader culture away from the death penalty in the more than half of the fifty states where it is still practiced.

According to the human rights group Amnesty International, the number of known executions around the world in 2016 declined to 1,032. But that figure omits countries such as China, which keep secret the number of people sentenced to death, potentially in the thousands.

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