This sure is a subject I could get really lengthy on having two brothers both on death sentences. One who I lived in mortal fear of and the other not so much. The later got the life sentence when it was a twenty year stretch. He shot someone once under the influence of drugs which he wasn't use to, she did live through it, and he was shot that night by the cops. Before his sentence was up they changed the law that life was life and they didn't grandfather the law. They got sued and years way beyond his release it was ordered they couldn't deny them parole opportunities. It's been thirty some years now and they keep denying him parole but they've let people out who have killed people. He's been up for parole three times and they just keep denying him. I use to think he deserved life because that lady's life was never going to be the same, she'd always be in that wheelchair than he should always be in that prison.

On the other hand the other brother he shot someone in the leg and he spent seventeen years in prison for it. I use to always excuse him for the thing he did because he was the one who got the blunt of my mom's beatings when we were kids because he was so hyper active. But there was actions over the years on his behalf that made me realize there was never going to be any hope for him, no recovery despite what happened to him as a child. After those seventeen years unbeknownst to me he showed up at my door one day. My sister, who'd had barely lived with us during her childhood, in foster care most her life, agreed to take him if he was paroled. She had no idea what she was dealing with. After he left my house that day I ran into the attic and started putting a attic door on the opening. It was ninety degrees that day. I was sweating like crazy, probably seeming crazy to my sons and their friends who asked what I thought I was doing. I looked them straight in the eye and I told them that from that day forward if I ever yell get into the attic you run for this attic, you close this door, you pile everything on top of it, don't look back for me, don't wait, if I tell you to run you run. Once you get that door closed you go over to that window and start yelling for help and to tell people to call the police. Because I knew what could happen. My sister not so much but she did find out. It wasn't long before she was wiring alarms to her house and buying a gun. When things went south I told her to tell him to come live in the basement of my salon to get him away from her and her kids, it was the only thing I could think of to keep her out of harms way yet not angering him by her telling he had to go or me telling him he couldn't stay with us. One day the sheriff shows up from the township she lives in. He asked if my brother was there and I said yeah I can get him. I yelled downstairs for him, I was working on someone's hair and his back was turn away from me talking to the sheriff. The sheriff said "your sister said..." I looked at that sheriff, terrified so badly shaking my head no while I couldn't even control my legs from shaking...because god knows what my sister said because quite frankly she just plain didn't know any better. He asked my bother to step outside to talk. I guess he went over there and mowed down her mailbox because he thought she was keeping his mail. I got on the phone to his parole officer and said look he's breaking all his conditions of his parole. He said it still wasn't enough. I told him like it was, I told him if he harms one hair on my kids heads and whatever else he may do, if I live through it I am coming down there and I am going to do the exact same thing to you. He told me don't call there threatening him. Finally my brother got sent into rehab a couple times though it didn't do much good but coming out of rehab they made him go stay in a rehab release center. He's just go out the window at night and show up at our house. My kids would say mom you just got it wrong about him so I was always hoping he never misled my kids off someplace and did something terrible to them. I tried several times trying to talk to his girlfriend, even putting my own life at stake taking a chance telling her to leave town. Their relationship was falling apart and I could only see this getting worse. I begged her not to tell him but you never know if she would have or not that only added to the anxiety. I mean really you are only trying to save her life and hoping she won't out of regard that you even cared like that. Than one night a knock came at the door. It was the cops, they asked if my brother was there and I said no. They asked if they could search the house and I told them I wouldn't let him in this late I'd go talk to him outside if he showed up here because I am terrified he'd go on a nut. They just looked at me and said well he went on a nut. So I let them in and they searched the house and put a guard outside. Seems he stabbed her seven times and when her brother in law came to her rescue he killed him. We lived in fear for seven days until they finally found him though I knew we were closely guarded.

But here's the thing about that story. I knew what he was capable of. It would be another three years before I realized that he was never capable of admitting what he was capable of. Within that three years he had committed another murder while in prison. He was tired of his bunkie and they wouldn't move him so he took a piece of tar loose from a sidewalk outside and beat his brains in. He was in solitary confinement when the subject of that night came up, I mean in a number of incidences where he showed up he knew I was in fear of him and he relished in that but he was going to sit there and tell me I was a crazy bitch thinking he'd actually ever harm me or my kids. Long before that, long before he ever committed his first serious crime there was actions that told me differently. That told me don't ever go up against him unless I knew one hundred percent I was in a situation where I'd come out the winner.

There's not a whole lot of individuals who can sit on both sides that fence, two people serving life sentences, two with underlying circumstances to abuse, one lived more violently than the other, you can have a whole array of different emotions because you want to understand the other side of the people who were hurt but understand how they were hurt also but in some cases, having lived though both sides the aisle, some people just aren't redeemable, as such, if one had ended up getting a death sentence that resulted in death, and believe me the majority of those whom Trump put to death, I just plain can't argue there was no redeeming value left in those types of individuals and even in prison people have to live in constant fear of them. Because as I lived and learned their are those who will convey no harm to those who need to hear it but whose actions when not around who needs to hear tell a different story. He changed the course of many lives he touched, not just in regard to his girlfriend but his girlfriend whom he had kids by, whom it was her boyfriend who he originally shot in the leg that got him the first seventeen years. What I would have to put behind me if they had had a death penalty and what they could put behind them if he had been executed are totally two different things but you have to live the one to feel the other. It changes the mechanism of how the mind works, as long as their alive, for them it can never go away, there will always be that very minute chance of escape, that's how their minds will always work in that regard. Can that ever happen? Well that goes back to the other brother, when he did that to that lady he was an escapee from prison, a level two inmate, and that's exactly where my other brother has worked his way from that maximum security in solitary confinement to a level four back down to a level two at another prison. Not that I think he's planning an escape but what matters is what the others who survived him are thinking.