ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how capital punishment affects two seemingly different groups of people: capital murder victims' families and the family members of offenders who commit capital crimes. In addition to emotional and social issues associated with the murder of a loved one, some family members have physical symptoms that begin after the murder or that, whether correctly or not, they attribute to the stress of the murder. Death penalty supporters often cite the victims of murder and their survivors as a defense against abolitionists. The chapter discusses the concept of closure in more detail. Despite the difficulty in defining closure, the concept is used as a means of demonstrating public support for the death penalty. There are many sources of emotional harm for family members of capital offenders, and the accumulation of these effects can result in mental health problems such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
