The saddest thing about the death penalty in the
U.S. is that it is so rarely used...and so sickeningly sterile.
The death penalty IS "a deterrent." It deters THAT individual from ever committing so heinous an act again.
That's all the deterrence required.
It is also far too sterile, for a people far too
squeamish. Hanging breaks the neck and death is virtually instantaneous. The Guillotine
slices off the head in one felt swoop and even has a basket to catch the
severed noggin...no muss, no fuss and death is virtually instantaneous.
BOTH
are quick and relatively painless, although the latter SHOULD NOT be a concern for those who inflicted tremendous pain,
often even deliberate torture on their victims.
In the recent past a “Slip Knot Hanging” was often
employed to execute the condemned. THIS is the hanging that results in the
famous “rope dancing,” in which the condemned would usually urinate and
defecate all over themselves, before their eyes, under the exquisite pressure
of the tightening slip knot would bulge from the swollen, purple face and
eventually “pop out.” It could take as long as 50 minutes for someone to die
during that ordeal. Often the head would wind up severed from the body as the
weight below the rope (neck) would eventually exert enough force to separate
itself from the neck at the spinal cord.
Now THAT’S
an “execution”!
To paraphrase the late Phil "the Scooter" Rizzuto, "It's a great day for an execution. Let's do TWO!"
I don’t find such things disturbing.
I DON’T
find a “civilized” society condemning egregious offenders to death, to be at all disturbing.
What I DO find
disturbing is this misplaced sympathy for the condemned.
My ONLY
sympathy, in such cases, is for the victims of these predators, as witnessed by
the Rachel Maddow spectacle.
It would be different IF one could argue, “Our
society made these people what they are. They all sprang from us, and so we
each share some responsibility for what they’ve become.”
The ONLY
proper response to that is, “Go f*ck
yourself! These cretins weren’t “created” by any social forces. Poverty, a
dysfunctional home, an unfair economic system, poor education, etc. DID NOT “make them what they are. Most
likely, like gays and “little people”...they were just born that way.”
Sadder still, is how even such sterile executions
elicit such misplaced sympathies for the predators.
Last night Arkansas conducted a rare double
execution, putting to death Jack Jones and Marcel Williams on the same night. Jones
was administered the lethal injection at 8:06 p.m. ET Monday and pronounced
dead 14 minutes later. Williams was administered the injection at 11:16 ET p.m.
Here’s what Williams and Jones did to deserve to
die;
In Marcel Williams case, “On November 20, 1994, Stacy Errickson, the victim, on her way to work,
stopped at the Jacksonville Shellstop for gas. The time was approximately 6:45
a.m. Williams approached Errickson’s vehicle, drew a firearm, and forced her to
move from the driver’s seat to the passenger’s side. Williams then drove
Errickson’s car away from the convenience store. Williams then took Errickson
to several automated teller machines and coerced her to attempt withdrawals. A
total of eighteen transactions yielded the sum of $350. The last transaction
occurred at 7:37 a.m. These transactions were recorded by security cameras at
several banking facilities. Stacy Errickson did not make it to work that day,
nor did she pick up her child from the babysitter at the end of the day.”
“The decision continues:
“Police arrested Williams on an outstanding warrant on November 29, 1994, and
questioned him based on physical evidence linking him to two other assaults on
women. During the course of an intensive interrogation lasting some thirteen
hours, Williams admitted having abducted Errickson from the convenience store
and robbing her through ATM withdrawals. However, he denied any sexual assault
and assured the officers that to the best of his knowledge Errickson was alive.
Appellant attempted to implicate others as accomplices asserting that they were
the ones responsible for physically harming her.”
However, based upon
information Williams supplied, “the police recovered a sheet matching Williams
description as one he used in connection with the abduction and also recovered
a gold ring which Williams identified. On December 5, 1994, police discovered
Stacy Errickson’s body buried in a shallow grave. Other evidence adduced at trial indicated
that witnesses Tammy Victoria and Tammy Keenahan identified Williams as a man
they had seen on the morning of November 20, 1994, at the Shellstop. They also
testified that after they left the station he followed them in a car and
attempted to stop them until they sought refuge at the air force base. Williams
subsequently returned to the Shellstop and abducted Stacy Errickson.”
Errickson’s last moments
were horrific. The court decision described: “The State’s evidence reflected
Williams forcibly abducted Stacy Errikson, robbed her, raped her, and killed
her. It further showed Errikson had a significant period of time to contemplate
her fate. The physical evidence established a violent physical assault by
appellant against the victim. Injuries to her head indicated deep bruising to
her neck and to her face. he victim was bound with her hands behind her back.
The medical testimony further indicated her death was by asphyxiation from
strangulation.”
“In
the case of Jack Jones, “Jones “was convicted of killing bookkeeper Mary
Phillips in 1995 and trying to kill her daughter, Lacy, during a robbery at an
accounting office. Phillips was found naked from the waist down with a cord
from a nearby coffee pot tied around her neck. Lacy, left for dead, woke up as
police photographed her.”
“Lacy
was only 11.
“The
attack was horrific. A court
decision in the case
contains graphic details. Jones might never have been caught, except the child
survived the attack. In fact, law enforcement officers who showed up at the
scene were photographing what they thought was her dead body when they realized
she was still alive.
“The
court decision says, in part: “When he (Jones) returned, Lacy, now crying,
asked the man not to hurt her mother, to which he replied, ‘I’m not. I’m going
to hurt you.’ He began to choke Lacy until she passed out. After Lacy lost
consciousness, Jones struck her at least eight times in the head with the
barrel of a BB gun, causing severe lacerations and multiple skull fractures.”
“The
child clung to life. “When Lacy woke up, she saw blood and began to vomit. She
went back to sleep and awakened later when police, seeing her bloodied body and
thinking she was dead, were taking photographs of her,” court records say.
Police
found a gruesome scene: “Mary’s body nude from the waist down. A cord from a
nearby Mr. Coffee pot was wrapped around her neck and wire was tied around her
hands, which were positioned behind her back. Bruises on her arms and back
indicated that she had struggled with her attacker prior to her death.
According to autopsy results, Mary died from strangulation and blunt-force head
injuries. Rectal swabs indicated that she had been anally raped before she was
killed.”
Jones
confessed that “he had committed the crimes because he wanted to get revenge
against the police. He reasoned that his wife had been raped, and that the
police had done nothing about it.”
When Williams asked for clemency, he said, “to those I hurt, I’m sorry is not
enough."
Williams attacked several other women, including Dina Windle, who offered forgiveness, “This man has turned his life around and
he’s found God."
Well, such forgiveness is an individual thing, but
the people CANNOT forgive the unforgivable
actions of such predators. Those who demand vengeance are as justified as those
who completely forgive...at least on a personal level.
The better argument is that a civilization is more
course, unjust and horrific when it treats such predators well...seeks to
redress their past issues, seeks rehabilitative incarceration over punishment.
In doing so, such societies diminish and discount the victim.
As to “God,” just me, but I don’t believe this “God”/”Creator”
is the anthropomorphic entity that so many of us seem to envision God as.
Look at the works of Nikola Tesla, especially those concerning his view of the
importance of 3, 6 & 9. Tesla
claimed the numbers 1,2,4,5,7 & 8 represented our physical world and that
3,6 & 9 represented the ethereal, spiritual world of thought, spirit, etc.
that brought the physical world into being.
Tesla wrote nearly 1,000 pages of “notes” on all
this, so it can’t be adequately distilled here, suffice to say, his view
presupposed the modern quantum view that perhaps, “Consciousness is the building
block, or basis for our entire reality.”
It’s not such a bad thing to be returned to the bed
of consciousness and those who commit egregious crimes deserve that fate.
I would personally support a Bounty Hunting
position, in which licensed hunters would be incentivized to hunt down such
people, as we would a dangerous, or rabid animal and (1) verify the condemned’s
identity beyond a doubt. Humans, like all living things leave DNA wherever they
move and (2) eradicating the threat, usually by killing the predator. This
would create jobs, while administering justice.
The hunter would be able to collect his reward by
turning in proof of the kill (preferably the skull), so that the rest of the
carcass could be fully utilized, as hunters are wont to do. Bones can be used
to make knives, arrowheads, a good femur bone can be used as a strong axe
handle...and long pig (look it up) doesn’t “taste like chicken,” more like a
spicy pork.
