By Kelly Jasper

HARRISONBURG — SueZann Bosler is willing to go to jail to save the man who killed her father.

She fought for his life after he nearly took her own.

Even after her father’s murderer was removed from death row, Bosler and the advocacy group she co-founded continues to campaign for alternatives to the death penalty.

On Tuesday, she and other speakers from the organization Journey of Hope told 200 James Madison University students that they wanted to put a human face on the issue of capital punishment.

She started with her story.

SueZann’s Story

It was December 1986. Bosler’s father was a pastor in Miami, Fla.

“It was not odd for people to come to our door for help,” she recalled.

The door rang and her father, Billy Bosler, answered.

“I knew something wasn’t right,” SueZann Bosler said. She went to the door and watched as a man stabbed her father multiple times.

He stabbed her too, three times in the back. He attacked her father again, and then stabbed her in the head, shattering bone and mangling brain tissue on her left side.

Her father was stabbed 24 times; she was stabbed five.

She fell and held her breath to pretend she was dead as the man — who she later learned was James Bernard Campbell — ransacked the house.

Bosler told students she was thinking, “Is this for real? Please Lord, tell me this is a nightmare.”

And in a way, it was, she said. Her father had died and the next 10 and a half years became a nightmare as Bosler campaigned that Campbell be sentenced to life in prison, not death.

Bosler says it’s what her father would have wanted.

For more than five years, she said she struggled to forgive Campbell. She dreamed of hurting him. Then she remembered he couldn’t feel her pain as he sat in a distant prison cell. Her pain only hurt her. Bosler concluded he should live.

“I refuse to be like James Bernard Campbell…” she told the students. “I will not be like that.”

His life was saved and Bosler began campaigning for the lives of other death row inmates — for men like Shujaa Graham, who also spoke to students on Tuesday.

Shujaa’s Story

In 1973, Graham was charged and sentenced for the murder of a California prison guard. He was sent to death row.

In 1979, the state supreme court overturned his death sentence — the district attorney had systematically excluded black jurors in Graham’s trial, according to Graham.

“Think about a person being innocent and being told they’re not fit to live,” he said.

Two more trials later, Graham was found not guilty and released after spending 8 years in prison on those charges.

“I still suffer,” Graham said. “Everyday of my life, I suffer.”

He says others do, too. Graham and Journey of Hope advocates point to his story because it illustrates what they call one of the system’s greatest flaws: the application of the death penalty is subject to human error.

Journey of Hope wants to see that change.

The organization encouraged students to sign petitions that will be sent to Gov. Tim Kaine calling for a moratorium on executions.

Members of the organization will continue to participate in events on campus throughout the week. They spoke to students in Assistant Professor Ari Kohen’s class, sharing facts on capital punishment along with their personal stories.

Virginia, students learned, ranks second to Texas in death row executions.

“The students were crying,” said Kohen, a member of Journey of Hope’s board of directors. “After hearing and seeing this, it changes the conversation.”

That conversation, Bosler said, shouldn’t wait until the next inmate is about to be executed.

“If you’re not outraged,” she told students, “you’re not paying attention.”

For more information on Journey of Hope’s campaign for alternatives to the death penalty, log on to www.journeyofhope.org.