There are valid considerations about whether the death penalty as practiced is effective or desirable as a criminal-justice policy matter. But the crowd that doesn't need to try and weigh in on the issue are the murderers who, through their own acts, created their destinies.
It's conceivable in decades/centuries/millennia past that any criminal facing capital punishment could complain that their death might not be painless enough: The soldiers might miss, or the rope might break, or the executioner's axe might be dull.
It only seems a recent phenomenon, however, that the opinion of monstrous murderers about their self-selected fate is given much credence.
The penalty being applied is, after all, death, and not some medical treatment in which the patient is sought to be made as comfortable as possible. And the criminals being punished typically inflicted much more pain than they ever have to worry about while being executed.
For zealots opposing the death penalty, however, nothing matters except its abolition.
They will happily accept whatever means justifies their end, even if the undoing of the death penalty also undoes justice--which when delayed is denied, spoke luminaries from Gladstone to MLK Jr. Zealotry is never reasonable. It's fanatical.
That's why the zealots seem completely and cruelly indifferent to the all-too-infrequently-mentioned victims in high-profile capital punishment debates.
It's understandable why they don't want to talk about the victims, or the details of the murders, or the pain (and often unspeakable terror) inflicted during the crimes. The juries in every capital case heard all that and more. And then rendered unanimous verdicts accordingly.
Statistical analysis tells us that most violent criminals commit multiple crimes before they are caught. Historical records tell us that capital defendants almost always have a prior record, and most of the time prior incarceration.
Over the 40 years from 1976 to 2015, there were 748,569 murders, but only 1,422 executions. A ratio of one execution for every 526 murders--roughly the same odds as being born with 11 fingers or toes--is not a runaway capital punishment problem to anyone but a zealot.
Rather than contemplating the death penalty from some disinformed political perch, capital-case juries consider it up close, at ground zero. In light of the nittiest-grittiest details, and in the context of horrific inhumanity and indescribably tragic loss to victim families.
Jurors fully understand the nature of the death penalty. They comprise citizens who all value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and who also soberly realize the irrevocable nature of handing down a sentence of death.
Some of the most vocal opponents of death penalties know virtually nothing about individual cases. Whatever they might know is a speck of sand against the beach of evidence from which jurors drew their judgments.
The eight murderers now in the sights of the state's executioner gave no mercy, but desperately want it now for themselves. They all knew the rules, risks and penalties for what they were doing when they chose to take life rather than spare it. And when laid bare, to a dozen citizens, the evidence in each case demonstrated guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Several death row inmates have also since confessed, removing all doubt.
It's shameful, but many of those carping for clemency for these eight condemned murderers don't even know their victims' names.
Rebecca Lynn Doss, 18, was raped and strangled in the convenience store at which she worked in 1989, with her open Bible, which she read during her overnight shifts, still on the counter.
Jane Daniel, 62, of Rogers was shot in the head with a stolen .44 magnum while she fearfully tried to accommodate the man robbing her in 1990.
Debra Reese, 26, died in 1993 while trying to fend off 36 blows with a heavy tire iron by her home-invasion assailant.
At home with her two young children, Carol Heath, 25, was beaten, strangled and had her throat slit in 1993.
Stacy Errickson, 22, was abducted at gunpoint when she stopped for gas in 1994. A young mother of two with a husband deployed overseas, she was robbed, raped and strangled.
Mary Phillips, 34, was raped and strangled in her office in 1995.
John Melbourne Jr., only 15, was tortured and killed in 1996 by his criminal cohorts after confessing to police about some petty thefts.
College cheerleader Dominique Hurd, 18, was shot and killed after she and a friend were abducted in a parking lot. Her murderer thought he killed them both, but the friend survived to testify.
At trial, her killer taunted her family because he dodged the death penalty. He earned that punishment less than a year later after escaping prison and taking two more lives--farmer Cecil Boren, 57, and delivery driver Michael Greenwood, 24.
These victims cannot participate in this debate over the death sentence of their murderers, or its timing. Jurors spoke for them in issuing due process justice at trial, which the fanatical opposition would have us all forget.
In any fair discussion of the death penalty, the first thing to unilaterally discount is zealotry about the issue.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 03/31/2017