Is God your steering wheel?
Or your spare tire?
I’m bad at analogies. I’m not sure how I’d answer this. A steering wheel implies “direction” whereas a spare tire implies “shoulder of the road, tire-jack in hand.”
The other day an inmate left his overdue library book in my classroom—the title: “Karla Faye Tucker, Set Free.” In case you’ve forgotten (or didn’t know), in 1983, Karla Faye and her boyfriend at the time, Danny Garrett, snuck into her ex-boyfriend’s apartment to steal his motorcycle. High on heroin, cocaine, and what-not, they murdered Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton with, of all things, a pickax. Linda Strom, the author, said this should not be Karla Faye’s defining moment, that she became a born-again Christian.
Maybe. Maybe not.
As for sincerity, Karla Faye did what no other Death-Row inmate had ever done: In 1984, without a request for leniency or a plea deal, she testified against Danny Garrett. Fourteen years later, with her execution date closing in, she wrote Governor Bush & the Texas Board of Pardon & Paroles:
I know that justice and law demand my life for the two innocent lives I brutally murdered that night. If my execution is the only thing, the final act that can fulfill the demand for restitution & justice, then I accept that … I will pay the price for what I did in any way our law demands it.
I’m probably oversimplifying a rather complex issue but it looked to me as if Karla Faye Tucker accepted her fate. She had run out of spare tires. The author says she gave her life to God, that He became her steering wheel. All I know is she died by lethal injection.
I’ve often wondered why prisoners doing life bits are generally easier to work with than the short timers. Probably for the same reason that Death-Row inmates like Karla Faye Tucker take their religion seriously—they’re no longer in control of their destiny here on earth.
What are your thoughts regarding the death penalty?
9 comments:
Depends on the mitigating circumstances some of the shit you can read about on the linked page make me definitely in favor of it.
Other days my rational mind know that life no parole in a non death penalty state is longer punishment but allows the convict to murder within prison walls without regard to there being further punishment, other than years of isolation.
I believed Karla Faye Tucker could have been successfully commuted to life no parole and she would have been a model prisoner like Susan Atkins (Manson Girl denied parole 20 times)but GW wasn't buying it in his Christian soul that she really had changed.
I think DR inmates are calmer because they know they already face the final act of man on earth...deth and to get a bunch of write ups would hinder their years long appeal process, making them look bad before any board of clemency.
Some of the people sentenced to death deserve to not live, child rapists and killers of defenseless old folks for example I feel should die.
But then I also believe deeply that death is a temporary state of being and when they live again God will sort it all out. Because as sure as I am that some of these convicts deserve to die I am just as certain innocent men have been executed over the years,
In cases where the crime is heinous and guilt is assured, I have no problem with the death penalty.
When a person is convicted and confesses to their crime, swift fulfillment of the sentence is appropriate. For these individuals to sit for years or even decades is wrong. The cost of housing those individuals for that length of time could be better utilized in funding education.
I'm old school and believe in an "eye for an eye." You take a life you give up yours bottom line. Easier said then done. MW
Detroit Free Press: "Man who killed 2 at pet supply executed"
An Ohio man asked for forgiveness Tuesday before he was executed by lethal injection for killing two men and wounding another at a Youngstown-area pet supply company in 1991.
Roderick Davie, 38, had confessed to shooting two men and beating a third to death with a metal chair. One of the gunshot victims survived and witnessed the execution.
JR- didn't I see a Lifetime movie about Carla Faye? She was a very cold character...
I saw that movie about Karla, and what I gathered was that she could have got a lifetime instead of the lethal injection. After all the fact remained that the gory crime was committed under the influence of drugs...
It depends what sort of crime it is, whether a manslaughter, or cold calculated murder or genocide.
I feel, that the criminals of terrorist activities like bombings etc, should be accorded a death penalty. There has got to be exemplary penalty for such activities.
Someone said that America is a lot like classical Greece,
Believiing nothing,including religion, quesioning everthiing.
But way before that, there was the great Solon, still barely out of the Greek dark ages, who said capital punishment was wrong because the innocent are almost as frequently executed as the guilty.
To be honest, I'd be a lot harsher on crime, myself. I'd be using the death penalty far too much for society's likes, I know. <:\
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