Alex Quinn's Japan Journal

7/13/2005, Death penalty and gruesome crimes

Not really Japan-related.  Just some stuff I've been thinking about...

A week ago, I read an article in the Seattle P-I. It was about a notorious killer in Canada, a woman named Karla Homolka, who killed some teenage girls in unthinkably cruel and disgusting ways. The article was a little bit graphic, probably so you'd understand the degree of cruelty and the reason why so many people were angry about it. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it out of my head.  It really bothered me. If you don't mind being disturbed for a while, you can read the article yourself. If it's no longer available, you could also search for it.

What bothered me almost as much as the crimes was the lack of justice in the situation. Karla had worked together with her husband.  Because she agreed to testify against her husband, and apparently lied about the circumstances as well, she received a light 12 year sentence.  To me, this is what the death penalty is for.  Since it was in Canada, neither Karla nor her husband received the death penalty.  It made me feel a certain sense of pride about being an American.  While our system has its share of problems, including those with the death penalty, we do have a death penalty and it would probably be applied to a case like this.  Still, ignoring national boundaries, I had to see another level of injustice.  In the United States, if a bank robber gets scared and kills a police officer, he might be given the death penalty. However, on the other side of the border, you can commit unthinkable crimes and possibly be out in 12 years.  It just doesn't seem right.

Well, today I read a similar article yesterday, but with a different twist.  This was an American, a Washington State resident named Cal Coburn Brown, convicted of similar crimes.  This article was thankfully less graphic.  Also, based on these two newspaper articles, some might say that this guy was not quite as terrible as Karla Homolka and her husband.  But, I felt a sense of pride because this guy is set to be executed.

I've got mixed feelings about the death penalty. While it runs counter to my faith as a Christian, in my mind, I can't justify anything else for certain crimes I hear about.  One way or another, I'm glad we've got a system that can, at least some of the time, take people like this and either kill them or put them away permanently. It's not a perfect system, but it does work some of the time.  In some countries, notorious killers can get free by all kinds of means, including bargaining, lenient sentences, and maybe even bribery.  Besides being injust, that doesn't seem to suit the best interests of the public.

Although I'll probably always be a staunch Democrat, I do have a couple right-leaning tendencies, a couple of which run counter to my faith.  The death penalty is one.  On gun control, I think the far right and far left are both hopelessly impractical and too entrenched in their dogma to move toward moderate solutions that would put the United States in a safer, more stable.  But, I guess some people might say I lean right on that, too.

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