In light of world-wide*condemnation of Utah’s execution of a convicted killer, Smitty of The Other McCain makes a reasoned case for both federalism and the Establishment Clause.
What no one has pointed out is that Gardner elected to use the firing squad. According to the anti-capital-punishment Death Penalty Information Center, before May of 2004, death row inmates in Utah could elect the firing squad in lieu of lethal injection. Get that? Gardner decided, of his own volition, that he would rather be shot than to be strapped down to a gurney, paralysed and numbed before doctors induced a heart attack to end his life. Maybe he wanted to go out in style. Maybe he wanted to go out on his own two feet, upright, and not like a rabid animal**. Either way, it was Gardner’s decision, and it’s more than a little paternalistic of people to scream about how horrible it is.
Then again, paternalism beats sheer idiocy. Take, for example, this little sweetheart who protested Gardner’s execution:
Ogden resident Victoria Sethunya, a native of Lesotho, said she was stunned to learn that Utah still executes killers.
“This is a sacred place,” she said. “I grew up thinking only God takes life.”
So is Gardner God? He was sentenced to death not because twelve men were hell-bent on establishing dominion over life and death, but because he’s a two-time murderer who shot attorney Michael Burndell dead while trying to escape justice for another murder charge. Melvyn Otterstrom was a 37-year-old married dad who worked two jobs to help support his family when Gardner shot him. Bundell was not involved in the Otterstrom murder; he was an engineer who earned a law degree at night and committed himself to public-interest lawyering, and did almost all of his legal work for free. In addition, a bailiff who was shot during the attempted court escape died eight months later from complications. So, at the end of the day, you’ve got a vegetable-growing pro-bono attorney, bailiff George Kirk, and an Eagle Scout father of a three-year-old who are dead because Ronnie Gardner is a selfish SOB, and we’re talking about the wrongness of Utah taking someone’s life?
How stupid do you have to be to qualify as a liberal?
*A name that has a tendency to mean “The socialist countries in Europe”, because I can’t really see a bunch of people who use stoning as a method of execution caring about the firing squad, but that’s a totally different rant….
**that, of course, being the one decent argument against firing squads: too much dignity for the murderer.
How stupid?
Remember, if the killer’s mother had killed him in the womb, then it would have been a Good Thing.
Great rant.
And Smitty is right. I’ll be that 99% of these anti-capital punishment folks completely support unrestricted abortion.
The state can take a great many things away with little noise from the left. Taking a man’s life should not be done without significant consideration. Certainly that was done here, and I am in no way troubled by it.
There are a number of areas that the state is inserting itself into, stealing away freedoms and taking away responsibilities that strike me as more deleterious to the public than the loss of the life of this man who was convicted of three separate murderers.
Victoria Sethunya has as much to offer as might Dwight Schrute.
nicholas’s last blog post..David Warren On The Money
Re: abortions. We know that in several states, the same people who protest the death penalty are trying to make it a crime to give life-affirming information to women outside of abortion clinics. The hypocrisy runs rather deep.
nicholas: good point… and we haven’t been convicted of heinous crimes.
Yes. You. Rant. And thank God for it.
Bob Belvedere’s last blog post..The Spot-On Quote Of The Day?
I find this execution outrageous and disgusting only because it took a ridiculous, absurd, incomprehensible QUARTER CENTURY for his victims to receive justice. I fully understand that justice must take enough time to get things right, but in as much as there was no question whatsoever of his guilt in the second murder (I don’t know the specifics of the first) the firing squad should have taken no more than 25 minutes after the murderer was apprehended to complete its task, not 25 years.
You ask if Gardner is God, but you fail to ask the same question of those who pointed the guns at him: Are they Gods?
You call me “little sweeetheart”. That is sweet.