Death sentences do not serve victims’ families or the public. Kansas governor should commute them.

Death penalty protesters gather outside the gates of the prison complex in Columbia, S.C., ahead of Stephen Bryant’s execution Friday, Nov. 14, 2025. (Photo by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)

It has been nearly 40 years since my mother, Marguerite, was murdered in a small town near Houston. It has been almost 19 years since the man who murdered her was executed. His death did not heal my pain — I still miss my mother every day — and it did not feel like “justice.”

Instead, my personal experience with the death penalty left me firmly convinced that it is both a false promise to the families of murder victims and a failed public policy. That is why, as a current Kansas resident, I urge Gov. Laura Kelly to commute the death sentences of the nine men on Kansas’ death row to life without parole.

I was only 22 when my mother was killed. At the time, I was serving my country in the Navy. When prosecutors assured my family we “deserved” a death sentence, I believed them. Over time, however, I came to understand that the death penalty only piles suffering and loss upon the already unimaginable suffering and loss of murder. It neither heals that pain nor prevents future violence, but leaves yet another family in mourning.

Marguerite Dixon was murdered in Texas, and her killer subsequently executed. (Photo from Celeste Dixon)

My first realization of this came a year or two after my mother’s murder. One night, I dreamed I had witnessed her killer’s execution. Even in a dream, the experience of watching someone die was horrific. I began to understand that the death penalty demanded that I actively wish for another human being’s death. To do that, I would have to stay rooted in a place of anger and hatred, focused on the perpetrator instead of on processing my loss, remembering my mother, and learning how to live without her.

I also found myself grappling with an awareness that the death penalty creates a hierarchy of victims. My mother’s murder took place in Harris County, Texas, the home of Houston and known as the “capital of capital punishment.” If the crime had taken place just a few miles away in rural Waller County, would the district attorney have sought the death penalty?

My mother was a middle-age white woman killed by a Black man. Did this racial dynamic influence prosecutors’ decision to seek a death sentence in his case? Was my mother’s life more important than someone else’s parent, sibling, spouse, or child because her death warranted a capital prosecution? Did the families whose cases didn’t end in a death sentence receive a lesser class of “justice”?

Over the years, questions like this led me to conclude that the death penalty causes lasting harm to the families of homicide victims while serving no valid public policy objective. It also drains vast resources that could instead be used to provide trauma-informed services to survivors of violent crime and actually prevent violence, something the death penalty has never been shown to do.

I have testified before the Kansas Legislature to urge an end to the death penalty, and I continue to hope it will take action to abolish it once and for all. I also believe that the sentences of those on death row today are the product of a failed system.

By commuting their sentences to life without parole, Kelly could open the door for Kansas to take a clean, close look at whether we want that system to remain on the books. I hope she will display the strong leadership and moral clarity to do so. I know that in the long run, crime victims and all Kansans will be better served.

Celeste Dixon, a retired U.S. Navy reservist and retired National Park Service employee, lives in Pawnee County. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.