Friday Firesmith – Execution

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Connecticut just became the seventeenth state to abolish the Death Penalty, but as I understand it there are two men they want dead first. Those two men may or may not be executed, but many people inside the legal system have given up on trying to beat the appeal process and tossed in
the towel not to moral or ethical issues, but that of red tape.

My support of execution is a personal issue. I lived in South Georgia during the Alday Murders and Kimberly Leach lived just over an hour from where I live now. A close friend of mine was murdered in the 80’s, and I cannot help but feel the world would be a safer place if there were fewer people out there who were willing to kill other people for the fun of it.

The “Deterrent Argument” states that the threat of execution does not deter crime. After his execution in 1986, Theodore Bundy did not kill or mutilate anyone else. He had escaped from prison to go on his last killing spree, but Old Sparky put an end to the threat of his escape, and the end to his killing.

I do think the way execution is handled in my home state of Georgia, and the United States is flawed, perhaps fatally flawed, and as such, it is more or less some sort of bizarre game of chance as to who we kill, why we kill them, and even sometimes, how we kill them. There are so many appeals people have died of old age waiting to be killed. Our recent Georgian adventure in the death penalty saw Troy Davis die with a tsunami of conflicted witnesses and last second appeals and drama than a high school girl’s bathroom.

We have to do better than that if we are to call execution justice. If we cannot, then we should not.

At this time there are a half dozen or so human beings that I would gladly see die. Charles Manson would be one of those people. Billy Isaacs would be another. Oddly enough, however, I do not think we did ourselves any favors by the execution of Timothy McVeigh. There are more to that bombing than just one man, and he went to the grave with that secret.

The legal system is broke. Execution is not helping any of the problems facing the justice system and we spend more money trying to kill people than we do keeping them alive forever. I think there are crimes so heinous the punishment ought to be death, swift and clean. But we cannot seem to be swift and the process cannot at all be called clean.

The crimes they commit preclude any act of humanity being offered to them but the sheer stupidity in how we wrangle our laws of punishment ought to preclude the presumption we know well enough when to pull the trigger, any more than they did.

If we cannot kill people in a more civilized fashion we ought to stop doing it altogether.

Take Care,
Mike

 

Mike writes regularly at his site:  The Hickory Head Hermit

Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the management of this site.

24 thoughts on “Friday Firesmith – Execution”

  1. I agree. The system is broken. Lazy DA’s use the death penalty as a bargaining chip rather doing their job.

    I actually support the death penalty, for the worst of the worst. I don’t think it is deterrent at all. I am confident that if you asked any of the inmates if they had doubt about what they were doing at the time, the possibility of being on death row was never there.

    I bothers me how Texas has made their executions all neat and clean, like putting down a cat. It shouldn’t be that way. It is a messy, ugly business. White washing it doesn’t hide that fact, nor should it. The gas chambers, electric chairs, needles, all that crap is absurd. Just chain the inmate to a wall and use a firing squad. If the inmate is truly the monster that deserves it, the state will have no problem finding executioners. And I have no problem letting other other inmates hear it.

    It bothers me how prosecutors throw the death penalty like a bargaining chip in order to negotiate a plea bargin. Capital punishment should be decided after conviction.

    It bothers me how politicians try to make some people more special than others. A recent law wanted to make the murder of a US Postal Service employee automatically a capital punishment case. It bothered me because how is that better than anyone else. What if an illegal alien cleaning toilets in office buildings all night to support her family was murdered? Why would her death be any less tragic than a postman being murdered? Yet one gets different treatment. It bothers me greatly how we have decided that some victims deserve more than others.

    And it bothers me how we can’t seem to carry out the sentences we do pass. The reason of course is that many should never have been capital cases in the first place.

    Capital punishment should be like abortion. Legal, but rare. And when needed, done right.

  2. This is the first blog [post] I’ve read of yours, and the reason I finally read it was your heading.

    I live in Connecticut, and I’m quite disappointed that the so-called leaders of this state has decided to abolish the death penalty. Yes, it is a flawed system of punishment and yes, it is a flawed system as a whole. Lethal injection has long been argued over it’s “humane” method of killing someone (I’m all for public execution on the town green, personally). With all the lengthy appeals process, someone could live their entire life on death row. You certainly get no argument from me on this.

    Public execution may or may not be a deterrent (bring the kids! Tell them this could be their fate if they don’t straighten up and fly right!). The way I look at it is: if you take a person’s life (denying them the most basic human right…to live!), then you’ve forfeited your right to live. These people on death row (while not having the freedom to come and go as they please, and not living the life of luxury), don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, don’t have to worry about house payments or how things are going at work. The main thing they’ve got to deal with is boredom. Oh, wait. They’ve got cable TV. They’ve got gyms. They’ve got libraries with internet access…I could go on. People are placed on death-row because they’ve killed. They are placed in seclusion…because we wouldn’t want any of the other inmates to harm these little angels, would we? Oh, that wouldn’t be civilized!

    These killers should be killed. They don’t deserve the right to live the moment they decided that someone else shouldn’t live. I’m well aware of all the people who cry that only god can take another person’s life…well, these murderers aren’t gods to anybody. They should be removed from society because they broke the highest rule of a society.

    (stepping down from my soap box and walking away…)

    • Eyeball,

      Those two you have up there I could put a bullet to tomorrow and sleep well tomorrow night.

      There are some people I would like to see punished and perhaps released.

      But there are others…

      • The trial took way too long for something everybody already knew what the outcome would be.

        The defense lawyers had the audacity to try to say that one of the killers “had been abused as a boy”…oh, boo hoo. I’d still shoot the bastard. Maybe just wing him first – telling him the first shot was “practice”.

        • You could always ask him if it was okay for you to shoot him because you once didn’t get a fortune in your cookie.

          Then shoot him again because once you did.

          I know from dealing with abused animals they never truly get over serious abuse, but dogs can’t seek out help or reason it out like people can.

  5. There was a smart man that said you could stop all crime with super glue. take what ever the perp used in doing the crime and glue it to there hand then throw that object off the tallest building in town. this solves a lot of issues like repeat offenders and all those expensive appeals.

  7. I know there are folks who are not fans of G.W. One thing I’ll give him, he let them execute Karla Faye Tucker. Her lawyers begged for stays of execution for her when he was our governor, because she had found Jesus. (Another converted Christian who found Jesus after being sent to prison)They did not convince him-good on him.
    Anyone, man or woman, who can bury a pickaxe in someones chest, needs to be executed. She confessed to it, she also stated it gave her multiple orgasms. I literally cheered the day they executed her, I was not alone.

      • I’ve always felt that was where he was hiding, that seems to be where he’s “found” by the folks who’ve done time there. Sort of a Where’s Waldo for the criminals.

    • No, you were not alone.

      I really though he would cave on that one. I thought her cute little girl going to Sunday school would save her life. They even had her teeth fixed.

      I have no idea why GW did it, but I do know it was risky, politically.

      And if you ever heard her orgasm testimony, you know, I think I do know why he signed off on her.

  8. Talk about a broken system…. Here in Ohio two years ago, an inmate tried to commit suicide by taking a lethal drug overdose on the morning of his execution day. He was saved by the guards and sent to the hospital to recover, so he could be executed with lethal drugs a week later. Our tax dollars at work.

    Read about his crime. It’s been sanitized quite a bit in this article. Don’t ever talk to me about “humane” execution of vermin like this p.o.s. He probably should have gotten the same treatment he gave that 64 yr old woman.

    http://www.correctionsone.com/capital-punishment/articles/2016639-Inmate-tries-suicide-on-execution-day-Ohio-saves-him/

    • I say, if a person is convicted of murder, rape and child molestation they should be sentenced to death (immediately, if the evidence is strong enough). And when we strap convict down in the electric chair, have their lawyer sit on their lap. Obviously, the lawyer wasn’t good enough to beat a conviction for murder, so…

      Just putting that out there.

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