"Death has a life of its own" said Rudy Gerber, former superior court judge, in a dramatic flourish to his second speech during question time. His point was that it is so expensive to put people to death because every case is different. You may think you've defined some essential element of the death penalty, but it keeps coming back over and over again with a new subtlety to ponder.

"Death is different" is another saying that opened the conference on the death penalty on Saturday. Meaning that when the state decides to kill someone, it must be given more consideration than when it decides to send someone to prison. And yet different deaths are different from each other, claimed Bill Montgomery from the Arizona Voice for Victims Enforcement Project. He claimed that there is "a fundamental difference" between the murder of an innocent victim and the state executing a murderer. That fundamental difference is that Bill wouldn't be able to sleep at night if he thought otherwise. He claims that his clients believe that death is a just punishment for the killing of their loved one. He stared straight ahead and a bit down while listening to the other victims' perspectives that he was sandwiched between. Two women, one of whom lost her daughter to a violent crime, and another whose son had committed murder and was now on death row. Both of them said that killing a killer doesn't help to heal the pain of loss, and in some cases can even make it worse. If the executed person turns out to be innocent, the family now has innocent blood on their hands. Even if they were guilty beyond any doubt, many families say that it's not fair that the killer is now at peace, whereas they still have to live with their pain.

I'd wager that Bill Montgomery has never lost a loved one. I'd bet that he thinks revenge can lessen the pain of loss. He makes his living off of convincing people that they have a right to that revenge. He drags the victims families through endless appeals and forces them to relive the horror over and over again. He beats the drum of vengance, until victims' families are frothing at the mouth. He beats the drum for years, increasing the pace, dangling the bloody carrot until finally, they get to watch the final ecstatic moment when they lay out the body on a bed that looks like a cross, but with straps instead of nails, and inject the poison that is supposed to make the horror more tolerable.

Then the drum beats stop, Bill is no longer there with them, counselling them, they are alone again, and their loved one is still dead. But now there is another sound... the sound of another family wailing their grief, but that family knows they will never get revenge.