Remember that Virginia coal miner who, having been found guilty of raping and murdering his sister-in-law, went to his 1992 execution insisting upon his innocence?
Turns out that, along with being a rapist and a murderer, he was a also a liar:
A new round of DNA tests that death penalty opponents believed might finally prove that an innocent man was executed in the United States confirmed instead that Roger Keith Coleman was guilty when he went to the electric chair in 1992.
In a case closely watched by both sides in the death penalty debate, Gov. Mark Warner announced that genetic testing on semen proved Coleman committed the 1981 rape and murder of his sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy.
I’m a death penalty supporter myself, although not the kind of guy that carries signs or marches for it – It’s not that I believe so much that capital punishment might in and of itself forestall horrible crimes, nor yet in the kind of cold blooded cost/benefit accounting of execution versus paying for lifelong incarceration but rather that some classes of crime are so brutal that society itself is owed a reckoning – we have the right to express our outrage in terms which fit the horror of the crime. Some acts remove from the actor the presumption of shared humanity – they may look like us and talk like us, they may even seem sympathetic, but they are not human in the way that we have come to understand the term – they are monsters.
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Coleman’s cause had been trumpeted by Centurion Ministries, a group of folks that feel rather differently about capital punishment than does your correspondent. Their hope in convincing out-going Virginia Governor Mark Warner (a potential Democratic presidential candidate) to do a post-mortem DNA analysis was to conclusively prove that an innocent man was wrongly executed, thereby changing the public’s view on the death penalty. In this they were disappointed:
Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey organization that investigated Coleman’s case and became convinced of his innocence, sought a court order to have the evidence retested. The Virginia Supreme Court declined to order the testing in 2002, so Centurion Ministries asked Warner to intervene.
James McCloskey, executive director of Centurion Ministries, had been fighting to prove Coleman’s innocence since 1988. The two shared Coleman’s final meal together _ cold slices of pizza _ just a few hours before Coleman was executed.
“I now know that I was wrong. Indeed, this is a bitter pill to swallow,” McCloskey said, describing Thursday’s findings as “a kick in the stomach” and adding that he felt betrayed by Coleman.
Well, you have to be careful to whom you give your trust, I suppose.
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Perhaps in time they will even find some one who has been wrongly executed, and then we’ll have to have us all a good long chat about what that means. Philosophically we tend to believe that it is better that 100 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed, and that’s a noble way to think. But at some point, given the predisposition of psychopaths to repeated violence (these are not crimes of passion, but premeditated as a general rule, i.e. “lying in wait” or otherwise horrific) the math of nobility no longer makes sense: Shall we set free a thousand guilty psychopaths? Ten thousand? And there will be cases, horrible cases, in which the defendant’s guilt is unmistakable.
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Some will argue that the state should not be involved in violence against its citizens. To that I can only respond that owning the monopoly on organized violence is a hallmark of a successful state.
“…the state should not be involved in violence against its citizens.”
And who gives a voice to the violence against the victim? The one who can’t speak anymore because someone else decided it was their responsibility to silence them.
This is what death penalty opponents miss – the true victim. It’s not the criminal that’s for sure. And the silent victim never gets their own day in court, so-to-speak.
These psychopaths deserve the same fate they consigned their victims to – silence. I also don’t believe that their “passing” should be in the news, except as a minor footnote.
I live in CT, and the media circus that surrounded the execution of Michael Ross in 2005 was just disgusting. This man stalked, tortured, raped & murdered 11 young women – most under the age of 25 – including 2 at one time, making one of them watch. And he was suspected of at least 5 more killings, but the victims’ bodies were never found. He was an egomaniacal sociopath who deserved to be executed for his crimes. But it took 20 years after his conviction for that to happen – that’s the true travesty. Add that to the fact that at some point – unimaginable as it may be – he became a media darling. Interviewed by 60 Minutes, by all sorts of newspapers around the country – he was front page news in CT for months. And where were his victims and their families in the hoopla? Given no voice at all.
The fact is that executions will never give the families of the victims any closure, because there is no such thing when a loved one is taken from you so brutally. But society demands justice and the families deserve to know that their community cares more about them than about the rights of the accused.
Oo – soapbox, sorry.
Kris,
I’m pretty sure Lex didn’t mind that rant one bit, and I’m about to add my own.
Damn straight, and spot on. Both of you.
The first fatal fire I ever went to as a Red Cross volunteer was a murder case. This lady was hosting a sleepover for her kids, and she fell and broke her ankle. It was the middle of the night, and the kids were all asleep, so rather than send them all home at 1am, she woke her oldest (who was about 12, I believe), and told him she broke her ankle and was going to the ER- and that if she wasn’t home by the time everyone got up in the morning to go to her sister’s house, one building over. (Her sister’s child was one of the kids sleeping over, btw). While in the ER, a man took her purse. He took a taxi to the house, robbed it, and in the process, the oldest woke up. He went downstairs, found the man robbing the house. The man told him he was “a friend of your Mom’s- I saw her in the hospital and told her I would go check on you kids”. He got the kid a drink of water, and sent him back upstairs to bed.
Then the guy freaked out, because he knew the kid could ID him. SO… he set a fire at the base of the stairs, and then left. 6 of the 7 kids died in the fire. The only survivor was the oldest child. He jumped out of a window, since he couldn’t get down the stairs, but none of the other kids would follow him.
Luckily, the guy was stupid enough to have the taxi driver wait for him outside as he was robbing the place, and then drive him home. To his *real* address… The cabbie knew right away who started the fire. The guy was in custody before I even got home. He was eventually tried and sentenced to death.
Yeah.
I believe in the death penalty.
Sister – I also believe in the same method of execution as the original crime, though that will never happen because it’s always going to be “inhumane”. Imagine that.
Course, I also believe in castration for rapists, so maybe it’s a good thing I’m not in a position to make that decision….
Still ranting…sorry.
I don’t support the death penalty on the basis that we, as humans, are falible.
And our justice system seems bent on enhancing that falibility.
OTOH, I think that death row and “life sentence” inmates are treated entirely too well.
I understand they have occasional access to sunlight, for instance.
I have always thought that “minor” offenders should be sentenced to educational achievements like, “you will be incarcerated until you can master engineering calculus and third year english” Does anyone think we would live in a better country if we DEMANDED that the criminals be educated to a societal norm?
Crouching to shield myself against the flames…
I’m with SGT Jeff on this.
For a long time I was against the death penalty. I didn’t feel that when we elected our government we were bestowing that body with the right to kill fellow citizens.
However, the case of Timothy McVeigh changed my mind. In that case, what he did just seemed so inhuman, monstrous as lex said, that I could not justify allowing him to live. Certainly, there should be undeniable proof, and DNA testing now gives us that ability.
At first I thought we’d had an earthquake out here, but no: Lex and Eric just agreed on something, which caused the earth to move.
“I understand they have occasional access to sunlight, for instance.”
While Sgt. Jeff (not to be confused with, well, me) diagree for the most part (I support the death penalty), I couldn’t agree more with the above sentence. I don’t think that every jaywalker and every guy with an unpaid parking ticket should be thrown in a dark pit, but it seems wrong on many levels that some of the worst, most violent offenders have a roof over their heads, three hot meals a day, cable TV, internet access… things that many completely honest and law-abiding people in this country don’t have… not to mention the victims (who do have roofs over their heads.. roofs made of pine and buried far beyond the reach of sunlight).
I prison should be exactly that: dark, stone walls, manacles…The constitution prohibits “cruel and inhumane punishment”, not “just desserts”.