“The world is a dangerous place to live;
not because of the people who are evil,
but because of the people who don't do
anything about it.”
– Albert Einstein
Chapter One
And
Now…for the Rest of the Story – Paul Harvey, radio commentator
THROUGHOUT THESE
PAGES, a single question is asked: How can it be that a nine-year-old girl can
be raped and buried alive, that 168 people – including nineteen children – can
be blown away by an angry bomber, that almost 3,000 souls can be murdered by terrorists
on 9/11, that police officers can be executed gangland style on city streets by
drug lords, and still have the anti-death penalty advocates piously preach that
the death penalty is not warranted for these heinous killers?
The death penalty
dissenters, as personified by Sister Helen Prejean, C. S. J., via her two
shameful books – Dead Man Walking and
The Death of Innocents – tell us that
nobody, absolutely nobody deserves to die for crimes they commit, no matter how
brutal, no matter how heinous, no matter the victim. Let’s talk about that.
Jessica Lunsford,
a nine-year-old little girl, was kidnapped on February 24, 2005. She was raped
repeatedly over several days, and then buried alive by forty-six-year-old
convicted and registered sex offender, John Evander Couey, who confessed to the
killing.
John Evander Couey
was one of those odious killers who the death penalty objectors wanted spared
and merely sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. On August 24, 2007,
Couey was sentenced to death by a jury of his peers for his heinous crime. That
sentence was never carried out because Couey further beat the system by dying
in relative comfort in his cell two years later. But, think about the
“sentence” Jessica’s loved ones are still serving. Can you imagine how they are
still waking up in the middle of so many nights with nightmares about how Couey
spent days committing vile sex acts on their sobbing baby girl? Can you imagine
the dashed hope and the grinding hurt her family must feel every day as they try
to wake from their nightmare wishing desperately to find little Jessica coming
through their front door and their bad dream is over? And then she doesn’t walk
through the door – and the nightmare never ends.
Can you imagine
Jessica’s struggle for life as she lay trapped in that dark, shallow grave,
encased in two plastic bags knotted around her head and her feet and clutching
her stuffed dolphin while each breath became more labored – until finally she
could breathe no more? Can the death penalty objectors hear her screams? Can
they hear her gasping? Can they hear her crying?
In sentencing
Couey to death for the brutal murder of Jessica Lunsford, Judge Ric Howard
said, “Jessica futilely poked two fingers out in the inner bag indicating that
she was trying to dig her way out of what would become her grave. Her last
thoughts,” concluded the judge “cannot be fathomed.”
Can you imagine
how Jessica’s devastated parents and grand-parents and other family members are
going to feel every time Jessica’s birthday rolls around; each Christmas, each
Thanksgiving, each and every February 24, the anniversary of their daughter’s
abduction? Can you imagine how many appeals and perhaps re-trials those people
may have had to suffer through while defense attorneys beg for the mercy Couey
never showed Jessica and as prosecutors again and again have to try to bring
justice to John Evander Couey? How many times might Jessica’s mother and father
have had to cover their eyes when prosecutors have to show the coroner’s
pictures of their baby’s body mutilated and savaged by John Evander Couey?
If the law of
averages had held up, it would have been something like ten years before
Couey’s death sentence would be carried out, assuming some hot-shot lawyer
didn’t get it overturned. With an average of more than 16,000 murders committed
every year in the U. S., that means 160,000 innocent people would be killed in
the decade before John Evander Couey would have been given his eye-for-an-eye
retribution. By the time justice would have been administered to John Evander
Couey, the equivalent of the entire population of the city of Dayton, Ohio
would have been murdered. Where is the outrage about that from the death
penalty opponents?
Is there no
compassion, abolitionists, in your bleeding hearts, for Jessica? For her
family? Are you so wrapped up in your self-righteous zeal for her killer, for
his “dignity,” for his “humanity,” that you can’t feel Jessica’s pain through
rape and suffocation? Are you so concerned that those like John Evander Couey might
cough and gasp and be somewhat uncomfortable for the five minutes it takes for
lethal injection chemicals to course through the body – finally bringing some
form, in Couey’s case, of Justice for Jessica?
It undoubtedly
took a lot more than only six or seven or eight minutes for frightened little
Jessica to die a horrible, painful, suffocating death buried in that makeshift
grave, in something not nearly as sanitary as a white-sheeted gurney in a
Florida prison death house. Wrapped in a plastic sack, Jessica didn’t have the
comfort of loved ones standing by as she died as grotesque killers do when they
pay the price. Can’t you feel her pain? How can you say savage killers such as
John Evander Couey don’t deserve retribution? Why should these animals be
exempt from euthanasia?
No, executing John
Evander Couey wouldn’t bring back Jessica Lunsford. Neither would
Life-Without-Parole. Nothing would. But, considering all the possibilities that
garbage such as Couey could be out on the curbside again – as have others of
his ilk via bleeding-heart judges and parole boards and changing sentencing
guidelines and escaping convicted killers and Hollywood’s glitterati, the
international interference, and poor-mouthing of people of the cloth – the
death penalty makes sure the Coueys of the world will never victimize another
like Jessica Lunsford. Can you hear her screams? Can you feel her panic? Can
you suffer her last breath? Sister Prejean, if there’s a God in Heaven, how can
you death penalty opponents plead for life sentences for the likes of John
Evander Couey after he so brutally and cowardly took the life of Jessica
Lunsford?
*
* *
On Thursday,
December 2, 2004, at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, Sister
Helen Prejean (PRAY-john), author of the best-selling book, Dead Man Walking (which became an
Academy Award-winning movie for actress Susan Sarandon), spent forty-five
minutes in an impassioned (and sometimes amusing) speech advocating the death
penalty’s elimination with:
·
accusations
about racial imbalance in death sentences among races (eighty-percent she said,
were assessed against blacks)
·
castigation
of “cruel and unusual punishment” of prisoners – such as that “inflicted on
prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison” by the U. S. military. (She did not
compare those “humiliations” with beheadings of enemies by Al Qaeda), and
·
assorted
and sundry similar comments on what would usually be called socially liberal
causes.
“While the O. J.’s
walk out the door,” said the nun (referencing the infamous O.J. Simpson murder
trial in 1995) at Sam Houston State University’s forum, “the No-J’s get the
death penalty.” If she’s right, then her campaign should be directed at that
inequity in the system. Absent traditional black garb that used to make Sisters
of the Church look like “angels” and dressed, she said, like “normal people,”
she joked with her audience: “Capital punishment means them without the capital
get the punishment.”
The thing that is most obnoxious
about the Huntsville presentation for those who have lost a loved one to a
vicious killer in a heinous crime (dictionary-defined as a shockingly brutal,
monstrous, cruel, atrocious act), was that not a single iota of counter-balance
to the nun’s exhortations came forth, despite the fact that most in the
audience were impressionable college undergrads. It was like teaching them the
history of the War Between the States from Ulysses S. Grant’s viewpoint without
mentioning Robert E. Lee’s. An Eye for An Eye is an attempt to offer
that counter-balance. It is a defense of the validity of the death penalty.
This work you are
reading will most assuredly be attacked by death penalty abolitionists who will
proclaim An Eye for An Eye is an all-out attack on, among other things,
a Sister of the Church, Helen Prejean, C.S.J. It is not. While we respect
dissenters’ defense of their position in this matter and commend their zeal,
ours is no less passionate – and we don’t have any hidden agenda. Since Sister
Prejean and her two books now appear to be the gospel and a hymnal for
anti-death penalty choirs, it is right and proper that this pro-death penalty
stand be directed in large part at its opponents’ arguments as preached from Sister
Prejean’s bully pulpit….
[The author goes on to refute all of the abolitionists’ arguments – up to and including their most outrageous and undocumented claim that innocents have been executed for crimes they did not commit. As of January 12, 2016, no one – repeat NO ONE – has been executed for a murder they did not commit. A further charge by the death penalty revisionists is (laughingly) that capital punishment does not deter further murders. Documentation of that supreme fallacy is undeniably proven via a segment ending on page 76 of An Eye for an Eye.]