NASHVILLE – If David Earl Miller dies in Tennessee’s electric chair next week as scheduled for the 1981 murder of Lee Standifer, the slain Knoxville woman’s mother won’t be there to witness it.
Helen Standifer won’t say exactly how she feels about the execution, but she knows she doesn’t need to see it.
“I’m not vengeful like that,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Chandler, Arizona, adding that her presence at the execution “won’t help my daughter at all.”
Court documents say little about Miller’s 23-year-old victim, other than noting she had “diffused brain damage when born” and was “mildly retarded.”
But her mother’s memory is far more nuanced, and she has wondered over the years whether that was the right diagnosis.