Yesterday, rapist and murderer Bill Benefiel, 48, was put to death in Indiana by lethal injection. Benefiel was convicted of kidnapping and raping two teenage girls one of whom he held captive for 12 days before her murder. The second escaped after being raped and tortured for 4 months. She lived to testify against him.
As reported by Ireland on-line, about 25 protesters gathered outside the prison for the requisite candlelight vigil and march. “Our hope is to bring awareness to the atrocities of executions,” said the Reverend Tom Mischler of St Mary of the Lake in Gary, Indiana. This author hopes to bring awareness to the lily-livered eunuchs who oppose the death penalty and make all of our lives miserable.
What is wrong with these people? How do you explain these professional hand-wringers who are so separated from their species being that they can’t muster the natural human empathy and outrage reserved for the victims of heinous crimes? Instead, they pine for the “humanity” of the perpetrator. You have to wonder if they're as sociopathic as those they sulk away at their “candlelight vigils” to save. Who among us after hearing of such an outrage turns their attention and empathy to the monster who created it? The answer: The quintessentially morally and emotionally emasculated. To feel no outrage and only compassion for the murderer is not an act of compassion, it’s a sign of moral malady.
The death penalty has brought amazing results: According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, the government repository for crime and statistics, violent crime is down over 57% since 1973.[1] Why do I use the 1973 benchmark? Because that was the year after the Supreme Court decided Furman v. Georgia which reinstated the death penalty for heinous crimes.
Anyone who doesn’t believe the death penalty works hasn’t looked at the statistics- or doesn’t live in the real world. Since Furman violent crime is down from 49 victims per thousand to about 21.[2] Contrary to the tripe fed by the anti-death penalty media, it is not demographical trends or an aging populations that has contributed to this decline it is the death penalty and tough incarceration policies. Despite popular belief the number of males, aged 18-24, that dreaded “predator” population, has remained constant at an average of about 13,000 males. There is no accounting for this merciful drop in violent crime other than the reinstatement of the death penalty and the escalation of the number of adults in the correctional system. From 1980 to 2003 the rate of incarcerated adults has increased from 1 million to 4 million. [3] The numbers are astounding. Over half of the increases in the prison population since 1995 can be attributed to an increase in prisoners convicted of violent crimes and, in case anyone thinks racism is at play, since the death penalty was reinstated more than half of those under sentence of death have been white. [4] The death penalty works, and we know it. That is why the pre-Furman days are such a travesty and the post-Furman world is such a blatant endorsement of its use.
The 1970's was such a heady time for serial killers having spawned the likes of Henry John Lucas, Richard Ramirez, Theodore Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, David Berkowitz, to name just a few. The reason is because they were never stopped after their first homocide. All of these killers were known to the system but "soft on crime policies" let these recidivists go. Time and again. Some even begged for re-incarceration: consider Henry Lee Lucas who told the parole board he was going to kill, again, and did so on the road from the prison the very day he was released. Today, our statutes and policies are tougher, we deal with predators, sometimes it’s even “three strike you’re out.” Lucky us, how about one felony? After all, what violent felon can "have just one"?
Today we contend with child sexual predators because their sentences have been so alarmingly light. You wonder if even hand-wringing liberals have begun to see the correlation between returning a convicted criminal to the streets and the rate of crime and recidivism. But anyone who has lived through these times knows, empirically, tougher sentences, the death penalty and harsh quality of life laws have made for a much more civilized world. Gone are the days of Kitty Genovese and “wilding”. The super predator class has been largely wiped out (read: imprisoned) and while gangs and drug violence are still a problem you can thank that trend on lax immigration enforcement and politically correct policing that refuses to acknowledge the racial component behind gang warfare, car jacking and drive by shootings.
What is it that drives the anti-death penalty zealots or is it just that they have no drive? To be so morally flabby must have a genetic component of which science is not yet aware. Could it just be the result of misguided compassion, religious beliefs, an inane adherance to anti-death penalty propaganda or is something more insidious at play? What causes a fellow human being to, upon news of an execution or the call for the death penalty for some murderer, take to the streets to pine for the predator instead of his prey? I suspect a smug empathy and moral bankruptcy and, for this, society can no longer pay. The result of our tolerance for these intolerables isn't compassion, it is simply more crime.
Anti–death penalty zealots have a number of justifications at their disposal but moral clarity and statistics aren’t any of them. Some invoke the bible and a “turn the other cheek” philosophy, that may be fine for philosophers and ideologues but in the real world “an eye for an eye” breeds results.
Just remember, Jesus may have turned the other cheek but, in the end, he still died on the cross.
[2] http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/EST90INTERCENSAL/US-EST90INT-04.html
[3] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/corr2.htm.
[4] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm