Death as a Margin of Error
Death as a Margin of Error
A family friend posted on Facebook the other day about how she was safe. She added that she lived down in a tiny town in southern Utah part of the year, and wanted to let people know she was okay. I did a quick search online and saw that there had been a homicide in southern Utah, a woman. I dismissed it as another tragedy and moved about my day. It was almost a year ago that I stopped trying to post a video for every single person who was illegally detained by ICE. When I posted the first few videos, it was mostly tourists who were getting stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. Plausible error, though I knew better. But then, the number of people being illegally detained, the number of people disappearing, and the number of people dying began to be rising too fast for me to reasonably count and follow. That woman’s death in southern Utah couldn’t take my inner peace, so I moved along.
Then, a few days later, I went to dinner at my aunt’s house. I overhear my aunt and my dad bantering about a guy; it had just been announced they’d be seeking the death penalty for him. I’m playing with my toddler son on the floor as I hear the adults in the kitchen: it was three murders, one suspect. My dad blames the family. My aunt thinks there’s something seriously wrong with the guy.
At the time, I stood up, holding my son at my hip, waiting for a moment to insert myself into the conversation. I already understand this specific social dynamic from decades of practice. The family debate never ended or began but rather is an ongoing, evolving, living entity that exists within the family. It comes with us on vacations, it eats with us for Sunday dinner, it’s on every long-distance call. The debate is less a debate and more a vacuum for frustrations. My family all more or less aligns politically, so it’s not like the debate ever centers around core principles. It’s more rhetorical pandering about how some senator needs to push harder or how one group in Congress or another is ruining better plans. I understand that it’s less conversation and more emotional process, so it’s not so much about being heard as it is a loose game of current news trivia. I also understand, in my family of passionate, vocal voices, if I want to be heard in the debate, I’ve got to invest and get my elbows on the table. Holding a toddler, I know I’m not in a position to fully invest, so I’m not expecting my dad and aunt to hold their breath for me to talk, but I did find it strange that, as they talked about blaming the true cause of homicide, they didn’t so much as use me as an example for the sake of comparison and contrasting.
The moment is small and it passes by. On my drive home that night, I reflected on the moment and how strange it felt to feel so invisible in front of my dad and aunt, and the other family members all surrounding that debate. I give them grace, knowing that, to them, me becoming a killer was not a main event. It was one of mine. It was a reminder to never take things personally, because people are usually so wrapped up in their own world that the world of another person is rarely considered, let alone explored. I found it funny that, to my dad, I was just there, being his daughter. And that’s how I’ll always be to him: daughter, a role etched with permanence. I am his daughter, so it’s an accurate description, but his wide blanket of that identity covers a lot, and I wonder how much I can truly be his daughter if he doesn’t even know who I am. At the time, I was driving down a windy canyon in the dark, so I let the moment pass, and moved about my life.
It’s now a few days later, and the moment with my dad and aunt talking about the guy who’s going to die by the hands of the State is still on my mind. They both seemed to support Utah’s decision to apply the death penalty in the case of this guy they talked about the other night, which sits incongruent with the rest of their progressive politics, but I’m used to people’s ethics being paradoxical. I find myself wondering what a person has to do to not only deserve the death penalty but also the support of my dad and aunt.
The death penalty was never legitimately on the table during my criminal case. I was charged with the same crime that I was sentenced with; I did not negotiate or take a plea deal. I pled guilty to a crime I knew I was guilty of. During my incarceration, I would come to understand all the ways the criminal justice system was crooked and, poignantly, saw the huge sentencing discrepancy. No two people are charged the same way. Their skin color matters. Their last job matters. The way the judge woke up that morning, and whether or not he got the blow job and coffee he hoped for or not matters. All of these countless little things matter when it comes to how a person is sentenced. Some technicalities. Some because of scores and points on rubrics strangers designed.
After hearing hundreds of stories and seeing the full picture, it’s hard to take any of it seriously. It’s also hard to not be terrified. People legitimately spend decades behind bars wrongfully accused. People are legitimately killed by the death penalty and later exonerated. Found innocent. Not all, no. But when dealing with death, the margin of error I’m willing to accept is zero. Anything higher than that is negligent.
As an inmate, I was not treated as someone who “accidentally” did anything. My file said I was guilty of homicide, so the guards called me a killer. A murderer. The technicalities and details didn’t matter. I was in prison because someone was dead because of me. I was a killer.
At one point, I was in a class specifically for people whose crimes involved a death. I sat in a classroom with a dozen or so other women, all of us convicted killers. The charges all slightly different. Some first-degree crimes, some second, some third degree like mine. I’ve met people who were convicted of homicide charges and spent no time behind bars. I’ve met other people, also convicted of homicide charges, who will never again walk free.
The wide range of killers I spent time with because I too am a killer gave me an interesting vantage point. In hearing the stories that led up to the crimes, I came to understand the real stories of what actually happened. Those stories, the real ones, are always more heartbreaking and less frightening than the media lets on. One woman spent four years in prison for the death she was responsible for. Another woman, eight years. Another, ten years. I spent twenty-six months in prison for my DUI Negligent Homicide.
In that class I took, we learned about the impact of crime on victims. We went through each chapter, which was organized by crime, and read out loud about how the victims were impacted. One of the chapters focused on domestic violence, and it was one of the first times I had the fortune of holding a book that literally gave me the terms to describe what I had been feeling in my body for years. The anxiety, the stress, the shame, the isolation, the sense that I was losing my mind. There it was, all written out in a neat little grid of data points, explaining and legitimizing the impacts I had felt but couldn’t name.
Then, a few chapters later, we got to homicide. It was the last chapter of the book. I sat in a room of women, all killers, sobbing that day. We read stories of profound loss, of worlds being turned upside down and never again being the same. I thought of my own victim’s wife, and a comment she had made at my sentencing. She had said that she no longer had anyone to reach the things on the top shelf in the kitchen, and she didn’t know who would mow the lawn.
It was through those two chapters together that I was truly able to comprehend the impact of what I had done. It’s there where I cultivated true accountability, and not the kind that can be punished or persuaded in. It is the kind that is radically human and rich with love. I had to love myself as a victim, to give myself grace for all that ways I acted poorly because of trauma, so that I could let my heart break for my victim and his family.
It was there that I merged our lives, my victim and myself, so that I could see him. I could see him as the grandfather who was lost because I imagined what it would’ve been like, had I killed my own grandfather that day instead of a stranger who was someone else’s grandfather. I imagined what it would feel like if it had been my brother. My father. My spouse. Or if it had been me. Or my daughter. All could have been possible. But the one that happened is the one that is real.
That book and class emphasize the importance of impact over intent. We watched one interview where a guy who had sexually assaulted a woman explained how he didn’t mean to cause her any harm, he just needed her to cooperate, so he helped her. In his eyes, he was helping her, not assaulting her. Her interview, of course, told a different version. It was in her version, the one where she talked about having trouble trusting people, that I understood the long-lasting impact of trauma. It becomes a thing of its own, that lives beyond the day that the horrible thing happened. My abuser gave that to me, and I gave that to the family of my victim. Their lives, forever turned upside down, never to be the same again.
In that space, it doesn’t matter that I was going three miles an hour. It doesn’t matter that I had been losing my mind that morning because my abuser had been infiltrating my life in ways I couldn’t control and I felt trapped like I would never escape. It didn’t matter that I had come to a full and complete stop. It didn’t matter that I stayed at the scene of the crime. What mattered, and what still matters, is that my victim is gone forever, and his family was forced to restructure their worlds to make way for the trauma and grief I forced onto them. I caused that. The impact matters more than the intent.
But because I had come to understand that I had been a victim first, and because I came to understand that it was precisely the trauma that I had endured that led to me becoming a criminal, and because I heard the same story among all the women I was incarcerated with, where they had become victims before they had become criminals, I couldn’t just honor the weight of the impact of my own actions.
It wasn’t just a story about me doing something horrible to someone else. That is true; I did do something horrible that led to the death of a man. And also, it was a completely preventable death. I can look back on my own life and see all of the places where my path started turning toward crime and prison. I knew if I wanted to be worthy of the freedom I would get after prison, I’d need to understand all the things that got me to prison so I wouldn’t repeat them.
Since I was released from prison in 2018, I’ve talked with hundreds of people who have played a role in the “killer-victim” relationship. Sometimes, I talk to the killers. Other times, I talk to victims or their family members. What I hear is a universal story. For the victims, they are usually so overwhelmed with grief that disbelief, doubt, and shock shatter their sense of reality. They don’t understand, not because they’re stupid, but because a broken heart cannot comprehend intent. Time only dulls pain so much; it never takes it to absolute zero. Grief is never linear. No amount of money changes grief.
Some of us killers feel the same. Some do not. One woman shot her abuser dead after he did all the horrible things horrible husbands do to their wives. She finally had enough. She threatened him one day, told him to either stop the abuse or she’d kill him. He got drunk the next day and went after her like he planned to beat on her the same way he always had. She was done. He had been arrested a few dozen times, thrown in jail for a night or two before the sheriff, who he went to high school with, let him out without charges. She didn’t feel bad.
When I first learned of Luigi Mangione’s arrest as the suspect for Brian Thompson’s death, I invited people on social media to write to him. I explained how letters were foundational for me during my own incarceration, and how whether or not he was guilty, he was still deserving of support as he existed in a place of dehumanizing and degrading conditions.
A lot of reporters thought I was celebrating a killer. The choice of words was funny to me. It was never a question of celebrating a crime, but rather of humanizing the experience. The media was making Brian Thompson out to sound like some fallen angel and Mangione as if he were some cold-blooded, dangerous villain. The storyline sounded familiar, like how I was painted in the articles about me. A monster. I knew the dichotomy couldn’t be so clean.
Stripping all the smoke and mirrors away, Brian Thompson was a human being. He was a father, just like my victim was. A husband. That pain, the absence the children grow up with, is real and substantial. So is the grief of whatever brought Mangione to that morning. The media wanted a clean villain and a clean victim. That’s never how it is. I know because I’ve been on both sides of that storyline, and neither version they told about me was the whole truth.
So I finally look up the killer my dad and aunt were arguing about the other night. It’s not hard to find; a quick search for “three murdered death penalty Utah” brings it up. Ivan Miller, 22, from Iowa, killed three people in the small town where my family has a home. We spent Thanksgiving there.
Miller was in Wayne County when his truck broke down. While it was being repaired, he apparently broke into the home of an 86-year-old-woman and killed her. He stole her car, and then later went to the Cocks Comb Trail head and killed two more women, one in her sixties and another in her thirties. He then took one of their cars and made a dash to Colorado, where he was apprehended. He’s now being held in Colorado; Utah wants him for the death penalty but Miller is fighting the extradition.
My dad and aunt were yelling NIMBY the other night. They didn’t want killers in their backyard. Not in our peaceful little town that we go to when we want to escape the city. Not there. Killers belong elsewhere. Not in their backyard. But apparently, at the dinner table is fine. So to think that this Ivan kid will face the death penalty and I did not is a perfect example of the very discrepancy I’m describing. It isn’t justice. It’s theater. It’s the criminal justice system doing what it’s always done: making decisions about whose death counts more, whose grief is louder, whose killer deserves to die. If grief is the equalizer, if a death is a death is a death, then the punishment can’t be a moving target based on circumstance and optics. Either human life has fixed value or it doesn’t. Both can’t be true depending on which killer is sitting at the dinner table.
