House of Eratosthenes

Every time I’m reminded of what decent people some of our anti-death-penalty folks are — and many of them are kind-hearted, lovable people — I think of one of Christ’s last seven words, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” Yeah, THEM. They who oppose the death penalty. I put them on the same level as those who killed Christ. I know they’d rather be compared to whoever did something to stop the Crucifixion…but what they want has nothing to do with it. They are delusional, misinformed people. Just like the Romans who were led to believe, or chose to present themselves as believing, that Jesus Christ was stopping people from paying their taxes to Caesar, our anti-death-penalty people labor under the mistaken presumption that everybody is good.

Yeah sure, they don’t get anyone crucified. But they make for some very dangerous situations which pose the greatest threat towards people who are absolutely innocent; and for the most part, they are blissfully unaware of the culpability they bear in such things.

They need to be reminded, again and again, that everybody is not necessarily good. You find a thousand people on death row, you do NOT have an automatic guarantee that these are a thousand wrongful convictions. Nothing of the sort. The fact is, people are capable of being rotten. Some people are simply evil. So much so, that as long as they draw breath, “civilization” cannot exist in their proximity whether they are free or not.

Case in point, James Fogone and Larissa Schuster, who seem to have murdered Schuster’s estranged husband by pouring acid all over him.

Fagone testified last week that Larissa Schuster poured gallons of hydrochloric acid over her husband’s body after they knocked him out with chloroform and a stun gun.

Fagone had worked at Larissa Schuster’s lab in Fresno in late 2001 and most of 2002. He said he quit after Schuster became controlling and manipulative, but was later intimidated by her into kidnapping and burglarizing her husband.

“The jury rejected the defense we presented, but I think that they may have felt that Larissa Schuster manipulated Mr. Fagone,” [defense attorney Peter] Jones said.

During the two-week murder trial, prosecutors painted Fagone as a motivated, eager participant in the crime who accepted $2,000 from Larissa Schuster in exchange for help with the slaying.

There really aren’t too many ways I can conceive of to word this creatively. Some people are twisted pukes. They have narcissistic personality disorders, and they want what they want when they want it. Other people, and God love this second group of people, they don’t believe that first group of people can possibly exist. The people in that second group, unfortunately, sometimes end up having a say in what’s going to happen. They get on juries. They hold candlelight vigils and sometimes get executions postponed. Executions that really do need to take place.

The prosecution dropped torture charges and lying-in-wait circumstances against Fogone, so the lucky bastard is up to be LWOP’d instead of fried. It’s all but a sure thing that the witch isn’t going to be hung either…we don’t like to drop the hammer on the fairer sex. And so, once again, it becomes the duty of the justice system to show compassion — to she who demonstrated absolutely none of her own, and no capacity for appreciating it coming from anybody else.

I have this theory. Let’s just say, we bring the scaffold back. Not forever, just 48 hours. Drop the Eighth Amendment, or at least just some of the more outlandishly extravagant legal interpretations of it, during those 48 hours. Automatic appeals for death sentences, the “don’t execute the retarded” rule, the “aw gee, lethal injection might hurt” thing, all of it — pitch it out for 48 hours.

And I’m not even talking about everybody on “Death Row” — just the folks where, we can all sit down and say, yeah, I agree. He did it. Nobody who’s in the know, is even pretending for an instant, that this guy might be innocent. Just the cases where guilt is undisputed. Just mow through those fuckers like milk duds, for forty-eight hours. Hanging. Decapitation. Gas chamber. Or, just through the donation of vital organs…lie back on the operating table, go under, don’t come back up again. All of it in a public square, or on pay-per-view, or both. At the end of which, we go back to doing things the pansy-ass, crybaby, pants-pissing way we do them now.

My theory is, violent crime would drop — HARD. And stay down there at bargain-basement levels. Not just for two days; for decades.

Lives saved? Probably in the millions.

How many executions would we have to do in those two days? Maybe not even that many. Just the repeated viewing of the consequences of outrageous disrespect for human life…that would bring the whole thing to a halt. Or slow it down considerably, for a long time.

To try to refute my theory, you’d have to assert that all sociopaths are suicidal. Or that logically, they all must be. For better or for worse, they are not even inclined in that direction, let alone fitting exclusively into it. People who live just for their own benefit and for their own amusement — guess what? They want to live. They’ve got their things they want to do, and dying just gets in the way.

If my theory is correct, and I see no reason to doubt it…we have settled into a habit of disrespecting human life, for real — for the purpose of respecting human life elsewhere cosmetically. Worse yet, the lives we disrespect aren’t any ol’ lives, they’re innocent lives. And the lives to whom we show greater respect, aren’t just any ol’ lives either. They’re scum. They’re guilty and everybody knows it. Not even worth the skin they wear. And to suppose that by allowing them to live, we’re settng some kind of an example that will inspire someone, anyone, anywhere, in any kind of positive way — well, that’s just stupid.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types VIIIWednesday, December 13th, 2006

For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types VIII
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006