I’ve written about the death penalty several times before: here, here, here, here, here and here. So I won’t make this a long post.
It’ll be just long enough to ask why Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker serial killer, was given the death penalty then allowed to live another 24 years until he died yesterday of natural causes (and I thought there wouldn’t be any good news yesterday).
He'd been sentenced following his conviction for 13 murders, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries. During the entire 24 years after his conviction, while taxpayers were footing the bill to house, feed, clothe, educate, exercise, medicate, marry (yes, he got married in prison to a woman with very questionable taste in men) and fight appeals for this monster, ironically all 13 people he murdered remained dead.
Their due didn’t come until yesterday. And even at that it only came in the form of circumstance, not the justice they and their families waited for and were promised.
Ramirez, and people like him – Scott Peterson, the Menendez brothers – fade out of the headlines once their trials are over. It's easy to forget they continue to enjoy breathing the air for decades, while appeal after appeal slog through the overburdened court system. And their victims families have to live with the injury of the loss, and the insult that their tax dollars are supporting the killer years after they’ve been sentenced.
I've mentioned it in other posts, but it seems worth mentioning here again. The argument that somehow putting him to death as a punishment for his crime, and the murders he committed have some kind of moral equivalency is ridiculous by any civilized method of reasoning. It simply isn't the truth.
Richard Ramirez didn’t deserve to die of natural causes. He deserved to die shortly after his conviction, in a chamber filled with gas or with a needle in his arm and the families of his victims as witnesses.
He deserved to die younger than he ever thought he would, and terrified beyond words.
Just like his victims did.
