After Execution, Killer's Loved Ones Are Left in 'Moral Exile'

The day her parents took her to a funeral home, 7-year-old Traci Carr realized that the big brother who made her feel safe in the dark was now lying in a coffin—and was known to everyone else as a murderer. In a long, layered piece for the Guardian, Masha Hamilton revisits the case of Indiana serial offender Steven Judy, executed in 1981 for killing a young mother and her three children, and the little-told story of the foster family that loved him. Hamilton, who covered Judy's execution as a young AP reporter and had herself lost a friend to murder, tracks how the Carr siblings grew up in the shadow of a man they remembered as a protector and jokester, then had to absorb that he was also a violent predator who chose the electric chair.

"Traci would not fully grasp [Judy's execution] for years," Hamilton writes, describing the confusion of having a "brother whose grave drew hate-filled handwritten notes decades after his death." The article explores the psychological wreckage for Judy's foster parents and siblings and situates them within a rarely examined group: families of the condemned, whom scholars say the death penalty quietly punishes, too. As described by sociologist Susan Sharp, that experience is akin to "living in a kind of moral exile," notes Hamilton. "To outsiders, it can seem inexplicable that a family member can feel both horror for the victims and heartache for someone who has done monstrous harm." She then once more quotes Sharp: "We treat those family members as if they don't have a right to grieve. We take away their right to be human." For the full, haunting account, read the original piece here.