›› Opinion    Nashville Eye

The Tennessean, Nashville, TN    Thursday, 03/23/06

Advocate against execution finds healing in family circle of life

By ANN CHARVAT

Six years ago, Tennessee executed Robert Glen Coe over spring break. I sent my 15-year-old daughter to Atlanta for vacation to spare her the trauma of the execution. This year, we're spending spring break awaiting the arrival of her first child.

The circle of life and death and birth takes center stage as her baby stubbornly chooses his birthday. In the meantime, I cannot help but relive and release the trauma caused by that execution.


As it turns out, sending my daughter away didn't really help. She returned to a traumatized family and community. We struggled to process and heal and regroup. She returned to people with glazed eyes and hollow expressions. Some people who had been a part of her life were strangely absent. Everything changed, and none of us really knew why.

Should children even have to think about the death penalty? Probably not. Could I have kept them from exposure? Probably. Exposure happens, though, and our household contains four children spanning a 20-year period. Honesty has been more than a good policy here. It's how we've survived.

My children have always known that I worked to spare the lives of defendants facing death. The other thing they've always known is that people facing death penalties come from families with hard realities and far less privilege than we enjoy. They know that these people are caring and fragile and far more forgiving than many of the people in their own lives.

Over the years, they struggled to grasp the inconsistencies and the angry phone calls that sometimes came to our house when I'd write a letter to the editor suggesting compassion. The execution, however, really threw us. Being that closely exposed to abuse, it's just impossible to stay neutral.

What happened to Robert Glen Coe might have been deserved. What happened to his family clearly was not. It was horrible, and it has colored every spring break since.

"So what do you think about abortion or war, Mom? Do you think it's always wrong to kill?"

And here's what I think. I think that murder in self-defense is justified. The law supports it. I think it's murder, but I think it's right to preserve your own life. I don't support the death penalty because those folks are locked away and do not present a threat to society. I do support choice and war, although I hate the necessity of both. Still, I embrace the right to protect your own life and the lives of your family and neighbors.

I believe abortion is a murder in self-defense. I believe that killing in war is too and that the rest of us should not judge harshly those who do it. I look forward to a world in which neither is necessary, but that world currently exists only for some of us.

I am awed and delighted that my own daughter has embraced her power and makes room for her son. I am mindful, however, of the privilege awaiting her child as two large families celebrate his arrival and humbled by the gift that choice has provided not only her child but my children as well.

I pray that mothers do not lose the right to defend themselves through choice and that current soldiers are received with far more dignity than the soldiers of my generation. Finally, I'm praying for a healthy birth, grateful that spring break, from this day forward, will be a different kind of anniversary for our family — one that celebrates the whole circle of life. •

Ann Charvat of Nashville is a sociologist in private practice. E-mail: ann@inserviceinc.net.
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WPLN News
CHILDREN OF THE INCARCERATED
PART ONE: NO SECRETS
8/14/06

By Adelyn Jones

About two million children in the United States have a parent in prison. According to a U.S. Senate report these children are seventy percent more likely to end up behind bars themselves.

These kids often withdraw from society because they’re either not told the truth about their parent in prison, or they’re sworn to secrecy.

In the first of our two-part series on children of the incarcerated, Adelyn Jones reports on one Nashville family who is breaking the silence and hoping to beat the odds.
divider(SOUND: Marilyn and Jackson Cavagnaro at the trampoline.)

ADELYN JONES: It’s a sunny afternoon in the Nashville neighborhood of Green Hills. Blonde-headed, eight-year old Jackson Cavagnaro bounces sock footed on a trampoline, kicking a ball that his mother, Marilyn, retrieves and tosses back to him. They’re trying to adapt to a life that turned upside down when Marilyn’s husband and Jackson’s father, Eddie, was arrested.

JACKSON CAVAGNARO: “He left to his job and then that was it.”

MARILYN CAVAGNARO: “Essentially, Jackson went to bed one night with a father he thought, and he got up the next day and dad just kept not coming home.”

ADELYN JONES: In January of 2004, Eddie was arrested and sentenced to twenty years without parole for a sexual offense. Eddie only had time to tell his wife, kiss his son and call his minister before detectives arrived.

MARILYN CAVAGNARO: “Early Friday morning, I got a call from my minister, and she said, ‘I tried to call Eddie. He couldn’t talk. He said to just call you – it was very important.’ In doing that, he gave Jackson and I our lifeline. Had it not been that early on, it would have been very tempting to do what the majority of people do which is hide it, keep secrets. So, about a week into it, my minister Mary Catherine convinced me that the truth had to be told and Jackson had to know it.”

JACKSON: “A couple of days passed and, you know, I was getting a little worried and Jason and Mary Catherine came – they’re people from my church.”

MARILYN CAVAGNARO: “We sat in the living room and we told Jackson that his dad was in jail and gave him an idea of why and he just curled into me… They left us very different because we now had the truth to share.”

ADELYN JONES: Marilyn says that the last thing she had wanted to do was to tell Jackson, but she was determined to give him the best possible chance of dealing with his father’s imprisonment

ANN CHARVAT: “Children will always find out.”

ADELYN JONES: Ann Charvat was one of the people the Cavagnaro’s turned to for help. Charvat has spent twenty years working with prisoners and their families.

ANN CHARVAT: “The reason you tell your child at the earliest possible opportunity is that if they find out from someplace else then your relationship with them will be damaged, possibly beyond repair. So you could end up with a child severed from both parental relationships and that’s a very serious thing.”

ADELYN JONES: Charvat says if and what children are told and whether or not they have to keep that secret can have long-term effects.

ANN CHARVAT: “Depending on the age of the child, it’s very difficult to make the distinction between this is not acceptable versus you are not acceptable. …And the problem with that is that the more the child believes that they’re not acceptable, the more they will withdraw and not be known.”

ADELYN JONES: A U-S Senate report five years ago, said as many as seventy percent of the children of prisoners are likely to end up behind bars themselves. Marilyn says she wanted to run away, to start over somewhere no one knew them, but Jackson’s counselor and her minister told her the best thing for him was to maintain his relationship with his father and to be able to talk about the situation.

MARILYN CAVAGNARO: “Especially the first year, it was like walking on glass, trying to figure out how to tell him that we were open and honest with our story and yet try to help him use his intuition to let him know when it wouldn’t be good to tell, because it’s dangerous. You don’t know how people are going to react.”

ANN CHARVAT: “You have a tendency not to anybody know and you really have to fight that.”

ADELYN JONES: Again, Ann Charvat.

ANN CHARVAT: “People need to know what you’re going through and then a lot of people will be turned off by it so it’s a real double-edged sword.”

ADELYN JONES: Marilyn says one example is Jackson’s school, where many of the parents and teachers know what happened. She and Eddie used to be very involved with their parent-teacher organization. Now, she doesn’t even receive PTO emails. Even those who are more understanding, such as Jackson’ teachers, don’t ask him about his father. Marilyn says the same people who would console a child in the case of divorce or family death tend to ignore the fact that Jackson grieves over the loss of his father.

MARILYN CAVAGNARO: “This kind of trauma can define a child, if you allow it to happen. And I don’t see how without counseling and community and openness that you can ever have that child succeed. The statistics are against you.”

ADELYN JONES: For Nashville Public Radio, I’m Adelyn Jones.