This is my mom, Mary Ann, and this is the house where she was living when she was murdered almost 24 years ago. This is Jeremiah Manning, the man who killed her. He’s now on death row. For a long time, I wished terrible things for him. At one point, I wanted to torture Jeremiah. There were things that I wanted to do that were excruciatingly painful. I wanted to hear his voice screaming, like my voice screamed that night, like my family’s voices screaming. I wanted him to feel just as [EXPLETIVE] as we did. But not anymore. I want to save his life. My mom was cooking when Jeremiah showed up at her door the day she died. It was a week before Christmas, and my mom loved Christmas. Her tree was up, and the table was already set for Christmas dinner. The police found her body in these woods, her throat slit. Jeremiah was convicted and sentenced to death. He’s 43 now. He’s been waiting to die for more than half his life. I don’t know why Jeremiah killed my mom. I may never know, but I do know the rage I felt and the deep despair. I couldn’t escape what had happened. I could feel him at every family gathering, on every family vacation. I’d be up in the middle of the night talking to him in my head. My grandmother Mimi was the moral compass of our family. I asked her, “How did you deal with this?” And she said, “Well, I had to learn how to forgive.” I realized I needed to make peace with Jeremiah. My aunt was Jeremiah’s third-grade teacher. He had learning disabilities and was held back in school three times before he dropped out. I found photos online of his family and friends visiting him in prison. And it was like, “You know, he has a mom that loves him, too, just like I had a mom who loved me.” And I think it was that — the fact that even though this terrible thing happened — that he still had a mother and not only that but that she loved him and that she visited him. This is a little harder than I thought it was going to be. This would be about where it happened. [SOBBING] For there to be healing, there has to be mercy. Killing Jeremiah will not bring us any closure. It will not heal the wounds that were created. Rather, that action by the state will result in more harm and more pain and more suffering and not just for my family but for his family, which is something that people forget about. My family and I want the State of Louisiana to commute Jeremiah’s sentence to life without parole. I mean, essentially what the state is doing is they’re taking away any opportunity for repairing the damage that’s been done. We’re good about convicting and punishing people, but we’re not so good about repairing the damage that was done. The day that she died, we had talked on the phone earlier that morning, and she always ended the call with “I love you.” And so the last thing that I heard from her was, “I love you.” And as I’ve gotten older, I realize what a gift that was.