Is it just me? Or are you, too, getting tired of listening to the moaning, groaning, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over the grimly botched execution of an animal named Clayton Lockwood, down in Oklahoma? It’s all over the front page again, with a jump to a page filled with sidebars on the subject.
How rarely in all this tearing of hair and rending of clothes do we hear any empathy for the young woman this creep raped and murdered, in front of a man, a nine-month-old infant, and another woman (whom he also raped), by filling her with shotgun pellets and burying her alive?
Nor do we seem to be hearing much about his colleague, one Charles Warner. That would be the guy who raped an 11-month-old infant and then beat the child to death.
Maybe I’m not a nice lady, but this strikes me as a kind of karma: what goes around comes around.
No. I don’t think craven murderers should be tortured to death. But — here’s the personal finance angle, at last — neither do I care, as a taxpayer, to support monsters like these two in prison for the rest of their natural lives.
These are men who should be removed from this world. Now, not later.
If we want to remove them quickly and with relatively little suffering, we should quit messing around with pharmaceuticals and do what the Chinese do: take the creep out and apply the business end of a pistol to the side of his head.
I don’t have a problem with capitol punishment when there’s undeniable proof that the convicted person committed the crime. As for the best way to carry out the punishment, why don’t we go back to the gas chamber? Also, if we are going to put someone on death row, they shouldn’t stay there for years and decades. Carry out the sentence within a year’s time, period. Of course, this is for cases where there’s certain knowledge of the criminal’s guilt.
If we want to incarcerate more criminals for life, we need to release the ones who are there for relatively petty drug offenses. I don’t want my tax dollars going to build more prisons.
Therein lies the problem with the hard line: a day or two ago I read that 4.1% of prisoners on death row are wrongfully convicted. Now, who came to this conclusion and how, I could not tell you. But of course the problem with state-sanctioned murder is that it turns us all into murderers.
We certainly do, as a nation, get carried away with the project of incarcerating everybody in sight. I remember when that plan arose — it was first advocated in these parts around 30 years ago, the theory being that rehabilitation doesn’t work, and so the only way to lower crime rates is to lock up criminals on a very large scale.
Ya hafta say…crime is down compared the levels we had back then. Whether it’s worth it…I suppose that’s another story. Still another story is the aging of the population, given that crime is generally a young man’s game.
From a purely financial perspective, I remember some vague statistics from when we were having formal debates on this topic in high school. Don’t quote me 100% on accuracy, but the gist was thus… Life in prison with limited appeals cost ~ 1/10th as much as an exhaustive appeals process and execution. For some reason the figures $250K and $2.5M are sticking out in my mind, but those might be outdated by now. (Or inaccurate? It was a while ago.).
The expense of the court system complicates the cost equation, more than the “simple” matter of life or death.
I’m a little old-fashioned on this, and completely against capital punishment carried out by the state… Animals like this should be turned over to the victims’ families, and them have at it.
heh heh heh…. 😉
I have been having the same thought! Assuming he was guilty, I can’t summon sympathy or see it as cruel and unusual considering what he did to his victim.
Unless I’m mistaken (who, me?), the guy confessed.
An eye for an eye
I am for capitol punishment. I have issues with the numbers of people
“proven” innocent after year/decades in prison. So I have become somewhat ambivalent about capitol punishment.
That said, it seems to me that our culture has jumped from being on the side of the victim to being on the side of the criminal.
No, I have not lost any sleep over the man’s heart attack instead of lethal injection or whatever it was supposed to be. His sentence was carried out,
Guess that puts me in the camp with you as a not always so nice lady.
And I am content to be there with you.
Okay, I am not a nice lady, either! Who is to say that they guy was not putting on an act to garner sympathy. Some people would love to reach beyond the grave to cause problems. Of course, this is probably not the case, but one bullet is really cheap.
Next time, just give more drugs to put his lights out sooner. When I had a colonoscopy, I was talking, then I awoke. Maybe that is something that might work to subdue a person. If I were hurting, I never knew it or remembered. So, who is to say he suffered?
Heinous and odious are the adjectives that come to mind: the first with respect to the crimes for which the man was executed, and the second with respect to your glib response to the circumstances of his execution.
Judgmental much? :LOL: 🙄 :LOL:
I thought the title of your diatribe invited judgment. You asked whether you were “altogether too savage”.
Am I judgmental much? I hope not, but clearly I offered a judgment here. After rereading your post, I wonder if you shouldn’t ask yourself the same question.
True, my friend. It’s hard not to be judgmental, though, about someone who buries a young woman alive and another someone who rapes an 11-month-old baby.
Well, the way I see it is this:
State-sanctioned murder of people is an act of barbarism. It places our country and each of the states that countenance it in the same category with certain Middle-Eastern countries that indulge the practice with abandon.
If we ourselves are going to execute people, we might as well be frank about it. I don’t think we should try to gloss it over with pharmaceuticals or any other technology that we imagine imbues the practice with an air of “humaneness.” If barbaric is what we are to be as a culture, then let us be barbaric, just like the Chinese who summarily put a gun to a convict’s head or the Arabs who decapitate offenders or the Egyptians who order huge mass executions.
It doesn’t do to pretend that we are something we are not while continuing to practice what we do practice. If that’s glib and odious, I’m sorry. But it’s the way things are. IMHO.
That is a reasonable argument. Thank you for clarifying.
I’m glad you commented. Sometimes I write in a kind of shorthand, assuming everyone else reads my mind…or 😉 just to see what will happen next! Not what you’d call a good writerly habit.
Amen….But only one bullet as Society has spent more than enough on these creeps already. The whole argument of “undo suffering” to these animals is a little bit more than I can bear. It seems the perps have more rights then the victims…..
Have heard that the mainland Chinese bill the family of the executed criminal for the cost of the bullet. Don’t know if it’s actually true, but it’s certainly ironic.
I wonder how many of those against capitol punishment have had a loved one raped, and/or disfigured, and/or beaten with lifelong side effects, and/or murdered.
I see state sanctioned capitol punishment, mostly, as a way to combat vigilantism and chaos in the general population, not as barbarism.
I, also, have wondered, since college arguments, why is capitol punishment considered cruel or unusual when used against those who have done just that to others who did nothing to them.
I further wonder how is it that so many people seem to never have seen any of the programs with serial pedophiles and serial rapists and murderers who pretty consistently state that they do not commit these crimes in prison because their preferred prey are not available, but they will happily recidivate when their prey is available.
Just curious.
On an emotional level, all those things feel, intuitively, very true.
On the other hand, two wrongs don’t make a right. Whether it’s a state-employed executioner or a posse of enraged neighbors doing the job, killing is still killing. Too, countries that don’t practice capital punishment don’t seem to experience a lot of vigilantism.
Then, from a purely practical point of view…hmm. The insane lengths we go to in this country, at the kind of expense and waste of time described by Mrs. POP, by way of trying to be sure the condemned is really guilty…is that really what we should be doing? Wouldn’t it make more sense to lock these critters up permanently? Then if the person someday is found to be innocent, we don’t have his blood on our communal hands. If he’s guilty or a dangerous psychopath, he’s off the streets one way or the other.
BUT they don’t get locked up permanently. They get life…which is then reduced for good behavior and/or the fact that he wet the bed til second grade which then reduced further because a new trial is demanded years later and then finally the creep is released simply because the “powers that be” don’t have the money to keep them incarcerated. This JUST happened hear in Maryland and the family of the victims weren’t even notified the perp was being released. The State claimed they couldn’t find the victims’ family despite the fact they had not moved and whose phone numbers were listed on line as well as in the phone book. Sorry, you kill someone…death penalty should be on the table….
I agree with jestjack.
It is reality that pedophiles, rapists, and murderers, along with others convicted of crimes do not always spend their full sentence behind bars. They get out for good behavior.
What may not be as well known, is that the same holds true for people sent to mental facilities. Some people are not sent to prison, but go to some mental facility, where a “professional” or committee determine if someone is now “sane enough” to go back into society – often on meds they will stop taking once they are no longer required to take them.
Don’t here much about that on the news.
I do know that where I lived we had a woman who killed her children, was judged insane, went to a mental facility for a short time, was deemed sane after therapy, went back to her home, had more children and killed them. Makes one pause, or should.