I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

"I'M THE NEXT GUY UP - AM I GONNA GET ALL SCREWED UP HERE?"

How Do YOU Like It?

The death penalty. Legal/illegal, humane/inhumane - there are many laws and opinions. Maybe the name of the penalty should be changed. Maybe it should be called the 'See, How Do YOU Like It' penalty? This penalty would require that the circumstances of the murder(s) be re-enacted upon the one convicted of the crime. Sounds fair to me, how about you?

People kind of forget (or just don't want to think) why criminals are being put to death in the first place - they caused the death of someone else (in many cases multiple times). People freaked when the latest to be executed took a reported 43 minutes to die and 'looked like he was in pain'. Nobody seemed to be asking (at least no article that one can find easily): How long did his victim(s) suffer? Is anyone concerned about that?

Right now Rusty Bucklew awaits execution. In 1996 in Missouri he shot Michael Sanders dead, the new boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Pruitt (as she was known then), left four young children alone (no one seemed to want to mention that at one point in her house he saw a six-year-old and decided to shoot him - fortunately he missed) and handcuffed, kidnapped, and tortured Stephanie for over five hours before a shootout with police ended his fun. Now he's frightened that his death won't be instant and painless...

On April 29, 2014, Clayton Lockett was executed in the state of Oklahoma by lethal injection. Something went wrong however - no one is saying exactly, but it took Lockett 43 minutes from the time the procedure started before he died of a massive heart attack.

In 1999, Lockett kidnapped, beat, and shot nineteen-year-old Stephanie Neiman and ordered an accomplice to bury her while she was still breathing. She died from two wounds from a shotgun fired by Lockett. How long did that take? Minutes? Hours? From what she suffered before she was finally murdered, it was most likely hours. In 2000, he was convicted of murder, rape, forcible sodomy, kidnapping, assault and battery and sentenced to death.

Forty-three minutes lying on a bed before dying doesn't sound quite so extreme now, does it?

The death penalty is hotly debated in the United States. Here people are not executed because of their political affiliation, religion, or as a penalty for some infraction that the current leaders of that country decides deserves death. They are put to death for causing the death of someone else - more than a few are executed for killing multiple victims.

Whether the death penalty is 'moral' or even 'just' is something I will not debate - the simple truth here is these men died for causing the death of someone else.

So many plea bargain their way into life in prison to avoid the death penalty. When that happens, we pay for them to be taken care of for life. That's room and board, food, medical and dental care, and in a lot of cases psychiatric care. And that's a hell of a lot more than I can get - hell, veterans aren't treated nearly this well. 

Close to Miss Murder's home is the case of Whitney Heichel of Gresham, Oregon. She was 21, married, liked by everyone she knew and never did a thing to harm anyone. Yet her neighbor, 25-year-old Jonathan Holt, who, with his wife, was friends of the couple, took Whitney by force, raped her, shot her multiple times, and hid her body in a wooded area.

This case hit people hard in more places than just Oregon. Holt, who had been questioned and denied everything before finally confessing, at first pleaded not guilty and it looked as if the case would not go to trial until 2015. However, Holt changed his mind. In July of 2013, he changed his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. 

The family of Heichel weren't seeking any kind of revenge for their daughter, wife, sister, friend - their strong faith in Jehovah God helped them and continues to help them through the worse crisis in their lives. It was the state that sought the death penalty - and the state that accepted the plea bargain.

That's just one victim - no, scratch that. Holt killed one person and ruined the lives of and devastated so many others. And yet he gets to live in relative comfort, for now. He will not die - at least not by the state.

So back to the upcoming execution of Rusty Bucklew. Is executing him inhumane, making the justice system as bad as the killer? Well, they're not torturing him for hours before shooting him, are they? He also gets to lie in a bed and, whether it takes five minutes or an hour, he's still getting a lot more humane treatment than he ever showed his victims. "It scares me," he said. So?

Bucklew is taking narcotic pain medication three or four times a day. His medical condition 'gives him cause to fear'. Cavernous hemangioma, a medical condition with which he has suffered from birth, makes clumps of malformed blood vessels grow in his head. Seeking an injunction on the execution, his attorneys said in a court filing last week that a “massive” tumor had taken over much of Bucklew’s nose, throat and airway.

What they're trying to argue is that this congenital condition that makes his circulation compromised might cause him to experience more pain than 'normal' during the execution and that is 'cruel and unusual punishment'.

Are we really supposed to feel bad for him? Humane or inhumane, just or unjust, the bottom line is that those on Death Row committed the ultimate crime - stealing a life that did not belong to them. Are we really going to argue that their lives are being 'stolen' by having the penalty be the loss of their lives, even if it takes more than one minute, or five, or fifteen, or an hour to complete?

Many are blaming a new combination of drugs of which the source and ingredients has not been made public - there's an outcry that they're not sufficient or of the best quality and that is why the last execution was not immediate. Bucklew states that the United States is a 'liar' for not telling him exactly what is being used to kill him.

I am 100% sure that Bucklew didn't bother to tell Stephanie Pruitt the exact details of the death of her boyfriend and her subsequent hours of torture ahead of time either.

Oh and one more thing - he wants his execution videotaped as 'proof' that the execution takes too long and causes too much pain. Uh huh. We'll get right on that.