Sentenced

Last week, family members of two dead women sat in silence as a judge sentenced their loved ones’ convicted killer to die in prison.

The hearing held few surprises. Michigan law dictates a lifetime sentence without possibility of parole for people who deliberately kill other people. And Brad Srebnik had been found guilty of strangling a 17-year-old to death and burying her body in his friend’s Alpena, Michigan back yard, then executing his girlfriend in the woods to keep her from going to police.

Several family members spoke or asked the prosecutor to read a statement on their behalf. The life sentence was not justice, they said. It didn’t bring their loved ones back. It wasn’t enough.

Even the judge said it felt unfair that someone who took two lives should get to keep his own. Even if that life would be spent in a cage.

Recent efforts and decisions at the state level ― including a Michigan Supreme Court ruling banning life-without-parole sentences for anyone 18 or younger ― have experts and legislators debating the purposes of long-term incarceration. 

In 2022, Michigan judges sentenced 56 people to life sentences following a murder conviction. Of the 32,000 people currently incarcerated in Michigan prisons, more than 4,000 are serving life sentences because they killed someone, according to the most recent data available from the Michigan Department of Corrections.

More than 4,000 people serving life sentences for murder means more than 4,000 people shot, strangled, stabbed, poisoned, struck by vehicles, or otherwise violently wrenched from this life by someone who wanted them dead.

Does life in prison adequately punish the intentional taking of a life? Does it satisfy our need for vengeance, reform the wrongdoer, or deter the next would-be killer?

A few days ago, The Detroit News put out a fascinating story about five convicted murderers asking the state parole board to commute their sentences to allow them to leave prison. That includes Lawrence DeLisle, who made national headlines in the 1980s when he drove his station wagon into the Detroit River, drowning his four small children.

DeLisle told police his leg cramped, jamming his foot against the accelerator while he drove into the river at 55 miles per hour in a vehicle in which, a few months before, his father had committed suicide, according to the Detroit News story.

A prosecutor opposed to the commutation says that, no matter how well DeLisle may have behaved in prison, he shouldn’t be released, now at age 63, because he is a danger to society.

After three decades locked up with the people we consider the most dangerous in the state ― and more than 30 years in a system where, despite efforts of well-intentioned people, drugs run rampant and inmates get raped and gang members kill one another, according to the experts and inmates I’ve interviewed ― DeLisle might well be more dangerous now than when he entered prison.

But I don’t buy the argument that we cannot release him because he is a public danger. He may have killed, but it doesn’t follow that we should expect him to emerge from prison raging and murderous.

If we want him to stay in prison, we should be honest about the reason. It’s because we burn with anger at what he did and are not done punishing him for it.

I’m not calling that an unjust reason. Horrible crime deserves severe punishment. If he deliberately killed his kids ― I don’t know if that’s the case, but if he did ― we absolutely should be mad.

We should be furious at the person who put hands around the throat of an Alpena girl and stopped her breath. We should rage at the hands that pulled the trigger and took life from a woman in the woods. We should abhor the dark acts of cowardice that make women victims of men’s lust and the hands raised against children and the greed-fueled drug sales that leave people dead on the sidewalk.

I don’t know if DeLisle should stay in prison. I don’t know if the death penalty, if Michigan offered it as an option, would make those left behind feel they had gotten justice. I do know that if all we do is pour our anger on convicted killers, people are going to keep getting killed.

We catch and convict a murderer. Good. We put them in prison. Good. We feel a little better. Good.

But the environment in which that killer came to be still exists.

The factors that led that victim to be dead still lie at the feet of other potential victims, ready to ensnare them.

If our fury burns hot at unjust death, maybe we should turn that anger toward the systems that impede justice and exploit the vulnerable and make people desperate. Maybe we should fight to keep kids safe and to help people out of poverty. Maybe we should study for ourselves what best stops violence and support with our time, money, and votes the efforts we believe will make change.

Maybe, if we truly want the to understand what paves the road to murder, we should examine our own weaknesses, our own prejudices and preconceptions, our propensity to excuse away our own bad behavior that contributes, even if ever so slightly, to a world that looks the other way until someone is dead.

On Sunday morning, standing next to my son and surrounded by fellow churchgoers, I dropped my head into my hands and sobbed as the words of the first song of the worship service stung my heart.

“All my life, You have been faithful,” the music leader sang, her eyes closed, leaning into the lyrics. “All my life, You have been so, so good.”

I cannot point to the 1.2 million people in U.S. prisons and say they, they are the bad ones. No, I have not murdered anyone. But I have hated. I have wanted to wound. I have turned my eyes where they should not go and my hands to unwholesome things. I have seen bad in the world and shrugged, saying it’s someone else’s problem.

All my life, I have been inadequate. All my life, I have made excuses for not trying harder to capture my errant thoughts, for not working harder to stop bad things I see in the world.

And still God’s goodness runs after me, wrapping me in forgiveness and acceptance I can never, ever deserve. His arms spread wide, my Jesus accepted the death penalty in my place and sentenced me to life, imprisoned not in condemnation but by gratitude and awe that even one such as I could be loved by the One who knows how little I deserve it.

We can’t live under grace like that and not want to get off our rear ends and give life to someone else. You may be a literal lifesaver who yanks people from fires or stands between them and bullets ― and I know some of my readers are ― or you may be someone who can volunteer at a soup kitchen or donate to the Boys and Girls Club or ask a sad coworker to coffee. It all adds up. It all matters.

It all saves lives, one tiny bit at a time.

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