Shortly after Nick Reiner pleaded not guilty Monday to charges that he murdered his parents, filmmaker Rob Reiner and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said he was still considering the death penalty.
“We will be looking at all aggravating and mitigating circumstances,” he said, “and we have invited defense counsel to present to us both in writing and orally in a meeting any arguments that they would like to make.”
Nick Reiner’s two siblings have said they do not want their brother put to death, if he’s convicted. Prosecutors in such cases of course work for the government, not for victims’ families, for whom the perpetrator’s death sentence can be yet another trauma on top of the loss of a loved one.
Consider a decades-old murder case from Columbia, South Carolina, that has recently resurfaced thanks to a victim’s sister who, after years of silent suffering, has become an anti-death penalty activist.
On Oct. 29, 1977, 14-year-old Carlotta Hartness and 17-year-old Tommy Taylor were in the wrong place at the wrong time — parked in a car when three males were on a drug-and-alcohol-fueled mission to “find a girl to rape,” as one of the suspects testified in court. Spotting the teenagers, they drove up and shot Tommy dead. Carlotta was kidnapped and taken to a nearby dirt road, where the trio repeatedly raped and tortured the teen before killing her. One of them returned later to mutilate her body. Two were sentenced to death and executed in 1985 and 1986. The third, who testified against the others, was sentenced to life and died in prison.
Carlotta’s parents and their son have died, leaving only Sherrerd Hartness, who was 19 when her sister was killed, to remember and tell what happened to her family during that time.
“My family disintegrated after Carlotta’s murder,” she told me. She has been coping through the decades ever since, with the anguish and physical toll of both her little sister’s murder and her family’s cloistered silence. Hartness’s father ordered the family never to mention Carlotta’s name.
That command and decades of isolated suffering led Hartness, now 68, to a surprising conclusion and advice for prosecutors: Don’t make it worse for the alleged perpetrator’s family by seeking the death penalty. It almost always leads to appeals and forces the victim’s family — who are called murder co-victims — to endure the agony of the killing again.
The death penalty “is the last thing that victim family members need,” she wrote in an article for the State newspaper in Columbia. “The months prior to the executions of my sister’s murderers were filled with relentless news coverage.”
Hartness said she still suffers extreme physical pain, diagnosed as fibromyalgia, related to Carlotta’s murder. This condition is not uncommon among victims of psychological or emotional trauma. Each time one of Carlotta’s killers was executed, aches and muscle cramps gripped Hartness’s body, a physical terror connected not only to the deaths but to the suffering of the perpetrators’ families.
For them, she thinks, it may be worse than for some victims’ families. Not only do families of death row inmates have to count down the minutes and seconds until their son, brother, uncle or father is executed but they have to walk into school the next day, or church, or work. This realization led Hartness to oppose the death penalty. “I cannot be a part of something that brings suffering to families like my family suffered,” she said.
Hartness’s empathy has offended some people, she told me, but she doesn’t care anymore. “Let them be offended.” While many friends celebrated the executions, she said, “no one was celebrating in my house. We had to relive every detail of my sister’s rape, torture and murder.”
Hartness said no one called to check on her for weeks before or after the executions. (One neighbor brought a loaf of bread.) Loneliness and lack of support were constants in her life, giving her time to think and contemplate vexing questions — how cycles of crime pass through generations, how childhoods of neglect and abuse create people filled with rage and bereft of coping mechanisms. She yearned to help, to stop the cycles, to interrupt the rage, but how?
Then, in 2015, she read a story about gun violence with an accompanying graphic showing murder victims as stick figures that triggered something deep inside her. “Murder victims are not stick figures,” she explained, tearing up. “I understand why they were used, but that day was when things really changed for me.”
After decades of silence, she found her voice and began talking — on college campuses, on panels and even to garden clubs. The more she talked, the less her body ached. Though sometimes lonely, Hartness is far from alone. The Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime reported in 2018 that 1 in 10 Americans will lose a loved one to homicide in their lifetime, co-victims whose suffering doesn’t end when a murderer’s heart stops.
Killing, whether by a renegade trio of rapists or by the government, isn’t the answer, it seems. Not even, Hartness would argue, for an alleged murderer such as Nick Reiner. A life sentence spent suffering for his slain parents surely would be a punishment worse than death.
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