Last Monday, a few days after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted of helping his late brother, Tamerlan, plant and set off two bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon, a local cable station invited a man named Bob Curley on air to discuss whether Tsarnaev should be put to death. Curley was once a vocal proponent of capital punishment. In 1997, his ten-year-old son, Jeffrey, was kidnapped, murdered, and then raped. It was among the city’s most talked-about crimes since the days of the Boston Strangler, in the early nineteen-sixties, and Curley and his allies inundated state representatives with requests to reinstate the death penalty, which had been effectively banned in Massachusetts since 1984. And yet, when he appeared on television last week, Curley argued against Tsarnaev’s execution, a position that, according to recent polls, his fellow-Bostonians share by a factor of more than two to one. What made Bob Curley and the citizens of Massachusetts change their minds?
For those who were following the news in Greater Boston at the time, the Curley murder seemed like the crest of a wave of gruesome and high-profile crimes. In 1995, a local mother was stabbed ninety-eight times by her adolescent neighbor. In 1996, in a northern suburb, two men dragged a woman into some bushes and bludgeoned her to death with a rock. In the fall of 1997, a woman and her two young sons were strangled by her former boyfriend, who stuffed the boys’ bodies into his locker at the Air National Guard base on Cape Cod. And then came the murder of Jeffrey, the lively boy from a working-class neighborhood in Cambridge. Unbeknownst to his parents, he had been befriended by a twenty-three-year-old pedophile named Charles Jaynes. One day, Jaynes and another man, Salvatore Sicari, took Jeffrey to buy a bicycle. Later, in the car, Jaynes smothered him with a gasoline-soaked rag. Then the men put the boy’s body in a plastic tub, weighted it with concrete, and dumped it in a river in Maine.
In truth, 1997 was a peaceful time in Massachusetts, with the homicide rate at a thirty-four-year low. The state was heavily liberal and Catholic, as it remains today, and both groups were opposed to the death penalty. But the image of the freckle-faced boy in a Little League uniform, a Louisville Slugger perched on his shoulder, was everywhere in the press. His father, Bob, a fire-engine mechanic, became part of the coverage, too—at first reluctantly, as a stricken parent, and then passionately, as an advocate for the death penalty. Within days of the killing, some sixty thousand people had signed petitions demanding that executions be made legal again. One representative, from a liberal suburb, received two thousand phone calls urging the same. The issue split families. Tim Toomey, a state representative from Cambridge and a longtime death-penalty opponent, became the first of his colleagues to publicly reverse his position, much to the disappointment of his brother, a Catholic priest who had presided at Jeffrey’s funeral. The Massachusetts Senate easily passed a reinstatement bill, and the House of Representatives narrowly passed its own version, eighty-one votes to seventy-nine. All that was left was for the two houses to come up with a compromise bill and send it to Paul Cellucci, the state’s Republican governor, who had pledged to sign it.
The intervening nine days were among the most fraught in the history of the State House, as the Boston Globe reporter Brian MacQuarrie wrote in his book “The Ride: A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father’s Journey from Rage to Redemption.” No prisoners had been executed for half a century, and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of Italian-born anarchists who were sent to the electric chair under dubious circumstances in 1927, still held a place in the public mind. (In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis had declared Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial flawed and said that “any disgrace should be removed from their names.”) Members of the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty—one of its founders was Sarah Ehrmann, whose husband had been on Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense team—flocked to the State House to make a stand against a measure that they saw as useless and barbaric.
When the final vote was taken, on November 6th, it was not religious or moral arguments that held sway but a growing distrust of the American justice system. By the end of 1997, the Innocence Project had reversed the convictions of fifty people, thirteen of whom had been wrongfully convicted of murder. John Slattery, a Democratic representative from the northern coastal town of Peabody, cast the decisive vote. Though he had supported reinstatement when the House drew up its bill, he had subsequently spent several days interviewing legal experts and constituents, and what he learned about the fallibility of the legal system was enough to change his mind. Before the vote, he made a speech on the House floor. He explained that he did not want to be lying awake, fifteen years in the future, knowing that someone had been wrongfully executed because of a law that he had helped create. “I need to be able to look myself in the mirror the next day and like the person that I see,” he said.
The House split evenly on the bill, eighty to eighty, which under Massachusetts law effectively killed it. That vote was a tipping point: never again would the Commonwealth come close to reinstating capital punishment. In 2005, Governor Mitt Romney proposed a bill that would set a “gold standard for the death penalty in the modern scientific age.” Sentencing would require a “no doubt” standard of proof, reinforced by DNA and the most advanced forensic techniques. The bill lost in the House by nearly two to one. The truth is that, in a state with one of the lowest murder rates in the nation (tied with Oregon for eighth lowest), capital punishment has ceased to seem necessary. “There’s a self-reinforcing quality of these policies,” Phyllis Goldfarb, a George Washington University Law School professor who taught at Boston College at the time of the Curley hearings, told me. “If you haven’t had the death penalty for a long time, the appetite for it kind of dissipates.”
Two years after his son’s murder, Bob Curley appeared on a local talk show to debate Bud Welch, a death-penalty opponent whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. Later, in getting to know Welch and meeting other parents of murdered children, Curley began to change his mind. In 2001, at the first national conference of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, held at Boston College, Bob Curley “came out” as being against capital punishment. This stance, he told the television interviewer last week, “is solely based on the inequities of our criminal-justice system,” which he has witnessed firsthand. Jaynes, who could afford an excellent lawyer, was convicted of second-degree murder and kidnapping; his sentence included the possibility of parole. Sicari, whom Curley called “just a tag-along stooge,” had no financial resources; he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. “These guys are scum—the worst of the worst,” Curley said, including Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his comment. “But how do you decide which one is worth the death penalty and which one is not?”
Given capital punishment’s history in the state, it seems strange to many Bostonians that Tsarnaev could be executed. Yes, he was tried and found guilty under federal antiterrorism statutes, and as such legally faces the death penalty, which would likely be carried out at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. But, in order to make that punishment a possibility, the judge had to “death qualify” each member of the jury—that is, confirm that each person was prepared to vote in favor of lethal injection. In a state that made the death penalty illegal more than thirty years ago, and in a city whose citizens overwhelmingly oppose it, to what extent does that jury represent the community?
Several days after Curley’s TV appearance, the Boston Globe ran a front-page editorial by Bill and Denise Richard, the parents of Martin, an eight-year-old boy who died in the Marathon bombing. They urged the U.S. Department of Justice to “take the death penalty off the table” and sentence Tsarnaev to life without parole. To sentence him to death, they argued, would force them to relive the tragedy with each inevitable appeal. Curley, one of the few people in the state who can honestly claim to understand their feelings, agreed. “I could care less what happens to this kid,” he said of Tsarnaev. “He should just be gone, and that should be the end of it.” The next time people hear of him, he added, “should be when they read his obituary.”
