What Heals After Harm?

On September 23rd, the State of Texas is scheduled to execute a man named Ker'Sean Ramey. Ker'Sean has been a friend of Lior Laskowski, a member of our Zen community. He was twenty years old when he was alleged and convicted of killing three humans — Sam Roberts, Tiffani Peacock, and Celso Lopez during a robbery that went wrong in 2005. Loss of human life is a grave, irreversible, and cruel loss for the families. And Ker'Sean has now spent almost half his life on death row.

I want to write about Ker'Sean, and I want to ask for your help before September 18th. But first I want to sit with a harder question, one that outlasts any single case: when someone has hurt us — hurt us badly, irreversibly — what actually heals that wound? And does killing the person who caused it ever get us there?

The question I keep returning to

Let's set aside, for a moment, every legal problem with how Ker'Sean was convicted — and there are significant ones, which I'll come back to. Let's imagine the allegations are simply true, exactly as charged.

Even then: does his execution bring healing to the families of Sam, Tiffani, and Celso? Does it give them back a single morning with the people they lost? Does it soften the twenty years of grief they have already carried, or does it just add one more death to a story that already has three?

I don't think justice and vengeance are the same word, even though our legal system sometimes treats them as synonyms. Justice, to me, has something to do with restoration — with the world becoming a little more whole than it was after the harm occurred. Vengeance ends a life. I have not yet seen it end a grief.

What actually restores broken hearts

I don't say this from a place of easy forgiveness, and I am not asking anyone to forget what was done to them or to perform forgiveness before they're ready. Healing is not the same as absolution, and it is not the same as pretending the harm didn't happen.

What I have seen restore something — in my own life, in the grief-rage ceremonies, in the people I've mentored spiritually — tends to have three ingredients:

  1. The person who caused harm actually grieves it. Not a legal apology, not a performance for a parole board, but a real, embodied “in every cell” sorrow for what they did and who it broke.

  2. They get real support to make sure it never happens again — the therapy, the education, the community, the material stability that was often missing the first time around.

  3. They turn around and spend their power protecting others from making the same mistake — mentoring, teaching, intervening, using exactly the credibility their own past gives them.

When those three things happen, something in me settles that "forgiveness" alone never quite reaches. It isn't about letting the person off the hook. It's about the harm stopping — really stopping — and something usable being built out of the wreckage.

Ker'Sean's story

Lior tells me Ker'Sean has spent his years on death row doing exactly this: facing what happened, participating in personal-development and faith-based programs, and expressing real remorse for his past actions. Lior had begun writing with Ker'Sean through a prison pen pal program, Wires Of Hope, two years ago.  Lior told me "We initially connected on our interests in spirituality and authenticity. As we continued to write, I came to know him as a deeply curious and reflective man. Our backgrounds couldn't be more different yet we always found ways to relate in our shared humanity. The person I have come to I know is creative, kind, and vulnerable. He takes accountability for who he was in his past and has used his time during incarceration to try and be a role model to the younger men inside. He is a father, a son, a brother, and a friend. He is loved. Losing him will be a great loss."

And separately from all of that, there are serious constitutional problems with how he ended up on death row at all. According to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Ker'Sean's trial attorney had never handled a capital case before — he was a dentist who practiced law on the side in the evenings. He didn't investigate the case himself, didn't call a single witness during the guilt phase, and failed to present easily available evidence of Ker'Sean's childhood abuse, poverty, and cognitive impairment during sentencing. The jury that convicted him was nearly all white in a county with a documented history of excluding Black jurors, and they deliberated for only fourteen minutes before sentencing a twenty-year-old to death. No physical evidence ever tied him to the crime scene or the weapons, which the state later lost.

Ker'Sean has now filed for clemency, asking the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Abbott to commute his sentence, or at minimum grant a 180-day reprieve so these claims can be fully heard.

Take action before September 18th

If any part of this moved you, here is what actually helps, according to his legal team:

Please do this by Friday, September 18th — that's the deadline his legal team has given for the Board to act.

And now, a question for you

I don't want this to end as a post only about Ker'Sean, because the question underneath his story is really a question about all of us.

Somewhere in your life, or in the life of someone you love deeply, harm happened. Maybe it was small — a broken trust, a careless cruelty. Maybe it was enormous — abuse, violence, the death of someone you loved at another person's hands. I'm not asking you to compare wounds or rank them. I'm asking something quieter:

  • Was there ever a time you healed — not just moved on, not just numbed out, but actually became more whole — after someone hurt you? What made that possible?

  • How do you hold the people in your life accountable when they cause harm, in a way that leaves room for them to actually change?

  • How do you hold yourself accountable, lovingly, when you're the one who caused the harm? What lets you grieve what you did without collapsing into shame that helps no one?

  • When you've made a mistake that hurt someone, what actually healed it — for them, and for you?

I don't think there's one right answer to any of these. But I think the answers we find, in our own small lives, are the same answers that should be shaping how we treat people like Ker'Sean. Not because harm doesn't matter. Because it matters enough that we should want it to actually stop — not just be avenged.

Kritee (Kanko)