Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another’s control. If one does not forgive, then one is controlled by the other’s initiatives and is locked into a sequence of act and response. The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past. Forgiveness frees the forgiver. It extracts the forgiver from someone else’s nightmare. –Lance Morrow, from a 1984 essay
But the sentence brought Pelke neither comfort nor closure. At the time his life seemed to be coming apart. His marriage had ended in divorce several years before, he’d gone through a painful bankruptcy, and he and his girlfriend had just broken up. One night early in 1987 Pelke was pondering these things as he sat in the tiny cab of the crane mounted near the roof of the Bethlehem steel plant in Burns Harbor waiting for the crew to show up below. “I sat there for what seemed a very long time, wondering if anyone could be more miserable than me.”
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Then unexpectedly he recalled the image of Paula Cooper standing before the judge at her sentencing with tears coming down her face and staining her prison dress. And he heard the voice of Cooper’s grandfather in the rear of the courtroom when he said, “They gonna kill my baby!”
Pelke’s relatives were astonished and angry, and he says many of them, including his own father, are still upset about his change of heart. His ex-girlfriend thought at first that he’d lost his mind, but they later reconciled and were married in 1988.
In Pelke’s driveway sits a secondhand bus he just bought for $7,500. In the next year he plans to retire from the steel mill and organize Journeys of Hope full-time. “We’ve got to get the message around,” he says. “Vengeance is not the answer to anything. Compassion is. If folks would only understand how they’re hurting themselves by hanging on to their anger they’d be apt to change. I tell people, don’t forgive just for the sake of the one who did the wrong. I say, do it for yourself!”
In 1995 the Rockford Salvation Army announced that it was raising funds through the sale of paintings produced by Illinois death-row convicts, including Ray Lee Stewart. People wrote letters to the local paper, threatening to boycott the Salvation Army if anyone dared to purchase the paintings by Stewart. It was later announced in the paper that all the paintings had been sold except his.
But at the hearing Mitchell’s cousin described his continuing grief at the loss of his brother and urged the board to uphold the death sentence. It did, and Governor Jim Edgar concurred that death was the “absolutely appropriate punishment” for Stewart. He was executed by lethal injection on September 18.
