Victims, "Closure," and the Sociology of Emotion

I INTRODUCTION For the families of murder victims, the grief, anger, and pain a murder leaves in its wake must to some degree unfold in public, institutional settings. Grieving is rarely an entirely private, internal experience. In every culture, grief is experienced and expressed against a background of social expectations and, ideally, within a network of social support. The expectations facing murder survivors (1) include the grim task of cooperating with the criminal justice system, a task that may include a public trial and intense media scrutiny. Over the last couple of decades, this grim task has undergone a "symbolic transformation," (2) particularly in the death penalty context. Every aspect of the capital system has been recast as serving therapeutic goals--specifically, helping survivors heal and attain closure. This incursion of the language of emotion and healing into the legal realm has been insufficiently examined, especially given its enormous practical and symbolic consequences for the operation of the death penalty. Closure is a term with no accepted psychological meaning. It is, in fact, an unacknowledged umbrella term for a host of loosely related and often empirically dubious concepts. Nevertheless, it is a concept that has had a meteoric rise, both in the public consciousness and in the legal arena. (3) Virtually unmentioned only two decades ago, closure has been enthusiastically embraced not only as a legitimate psychological state but as one that the legal system ought to help victims and survivors attain. In the death penalty context, its rapid embrace has changed the way we talk about the rationale for capital punishment; it has changed the shape of the legal process; it has even changed what both survivors and jurors within the capital system expect to feel. The term closure has come to connote several different and poorly differentiated concepts, each with separate and quite serious implications for the conduct of the capital trial. Closure is sometimes used to refer to the sense of catharsis that comes of speaking publicly about one's loss. Advocates of victim impact statements argue that the statements assist with healing and closure because they permit victims and survivors to give voice to their pain and sense of loss in a public setting. (4) Closure has also come to stand for the constellation of feelings--peace, relief, a sense of justice, the ability to move on--that comes with finality. The term sometimes refers to the ability to find answers to the terrible questions a murder may leave open--for example, the circumstances of the murder or the identity of the killer. (5) This sort of closure might require solving an open crime, but it might also involve some sort of interaction with the killer in an attempt to learn more. (6) It might require a verdict and imposition of a sentence. In the capital context, it might require a sentence of death. (7) The logical outgrowth of this argument is that only an execution can provide closure, and that delays and impediments to execution deprive survivors of the closure they need. (8) Each of the above meanings of the term closure has been offered as the rationale for various initiatives that have helped transform the capital system. The need for closure has become the predominant argument for victim impact testimony. It has become an effective argument for limiting procedural protections that delay conviction, sentencing, final judgment, or execution. It has taken on the authoritative ring of a clinically accepted reason for execution itself. In short, it has transformed expectations about the purposes of a capital trial, offering a promise to survivors and society at large that the legal system may be ill-equipped to keep. And, at the most basic theoretical level, closure has recast the traditional debate about the purposes of capital punishment, suggesting that support for the death penalty can be premised on the urge to offer solace and healing to survivors of murder. …