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….