Notes on an Execution
By Danya Kukafka
Rating : 4.5/5
Genres : Execution, Murder Trial, Novel, 2022-read
I am very impressed with the crisp and short handed writing style of the author. This happens to be her second work and it doesn't feel amateurish at all. The plot is well developed and presented from different perspectives/angles with the narrative flying back and forth in time and space. The question mainly addressed is about choices a soul/person makes - what if one has no control over them and the person who does bad things yearns for a different reality where he is good, his life was good and he didn't have to bear the guilt of his impulsive actions? We should ask ourselves if we really want to punish a child for the mistakes his parents did and his future actions/behavior/violence is a product of such abuse which happened to him when he had no say/control over it?
Told from the point of the murderer who desperately wants to escape execution and is willing to go to any length for it - not because he wants to escape punishment but because he truly believes he could change and not repeat his past mistakes. But will life/law give him such a chance? And what about the families of his victims, his relatives - how do they look upon his execution? Do they want him dead and gone or feel pity because he happens to also have some good in him? Its a very thought provoking story that doesn't show the killer in the dark light of condemnation and justify his execution purely from the factual evidence. I loved this angle very much.
Coming to the story itself, Ansel Packer is on death row for murdering three girls when he was seventeen and his ex-wife in a latest act of rage. He is hunted down, shadowed and forced into confession by his childhood friend whom he troubled in their foster home. All the while that she has tried to get her hands on him and arrested him, she thought she was serving justice but she didn't know the cause for his tempestuous and cruel nature. Ansel and his brother were abandoned by his mother and abusive father when he was four years old and he is taken away to foster care. All his life he believed that his brother died that day when his mother ran away due to malnutrition and is haunted by his screaming memories. When the screaming takes over in his head, he cannot control himself and goes for a kill. It is like a release for him - for a while until it starts again. So through the narration, we get a holistic picture of his life from his mother,his sister in law, himself, the detective - why something happened, how it happened and it all falls into place at a level pace.
I felt sad for Ansel Packer - perhaps such people are many in the outside world and deserve a mental health treatment than a gurney execution - but they should seek help first or what? Is it a mistake to let bad intentions and influences guide them without making an effort to control them? I guess so but one can't help sympathize with a killer who himself happens to be a victim in this case.
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