In a room of fifty MU students, Jeff Stack, Columbia coordinator for Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation, began to tell the story of how he watched his friend be executed.

“When I was living in Alaska, I had a friend who came from an abusive past and never had very much trust in women,” he said. “I did not know that when I met him. I got to know him as a person. I knew he had abused his wife and begged him to get help, but I still knew inside he was a good person. A few years went by and I learned from his wife that he was on death row for killing three women in California.”

Stack said that at his friend’s execution, he wanted his friend to know that someone was there for him.

“I was there so I could look him in the eye from across the glass and let him know that someone there knew him for who he was, not for the crime he committed,” Stack said.

Stack was one of three presenters who spoke at MU’s chapter of Amnesty International’s death penalty panel discussion Thursday night. The club was first established in November and is in its first full semester as an organization. The club works with other organizations to abolish the death penalty.

Each presenter had different arguments, but all agreed that the death penalty shouldn’t be an option for convicted killers.

“What’s interested is that these are voices that don’t get much attention,” Greg Perreault, a doctoral student who is researching last words spoken by executed criminals, said. “Often there is one person from the media at the execution who reports on what occurs and they generally don’t report on the last words the inmates said. These are voices being silenced so I think it’s very important to see what they have to say.”

MU law professor Paul Litton discussed the monetary problems that arise in death penalty cases.

“The main reason death penalty cases are more expensive to taxpayers is because of the trial costs,” Litton said. “A study was done in Maryland that found that if the prosecutor could have sought death, but decided against it, the trial would cost the state $1.1 million. If the prosecutor in the case sought the death penalty and won that case, the cost to the state would be $3 million. Almost 70 percent of the extra costs were because of the extra things that had to be done at trial.”

Litton, Perreault and Stack agreed that the underlying solution to extra time, money and pain of people affected by the death penalty is to stop implementing it completely.

Perreault said a main reason for implementing the death penalty is to help victims’ families.

“If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s mainly about revenge,” he said. “We want to get revenge for the victims.”

Stack argued that this revenge doesn’t necessarily get the desired revenge and closure for families of victims.

“What can we do to help heal our society?” Stack said. “I know a woman whose husband was murdered and she was left to raise five children. She had a difficult time paying to bury her husband. We have these horrible crimes happen and we don’t focus on healing families. For all the talk of caring about victims, we don’t tend to fund the basic needs of victims’ families.”

Litton said he is on a committee that gives recommendations to state legislature. One recommendation they recently made was abolishing the death penalty.

“Currently, there are 16 states that have completely gotten rid of the death penalty,” he said. “My hope is that Missouri joins those states very soon.”