Legal System Is Perverted
by
Charley
Reese
by Charley Reese
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America's
court system has been broken, abused and perverted by lawyers, judges
and legislators.
You would
think that at least the lawyers and judges, who use the system to
make a comfortable living, would have an interest in preserving
it. Instead, they are the main abusers of it.
These thoughts
are prompted by the execution of Mark Dean Schwab, a 39-year-old
psychopathic monster who kidnapped, raped and murdered an 11-year-old
boy. The problem is that it took 16 years after his conviction to
execute this piece of human dung thanks to laws, lawyers and judges.
It's not justice. Neither is lethal injection. How in God's name
did we become so squeamish that we have to provide a peaceful, painless
death to vile and vicious criminals?
Schwab wasn't
so kind to his victim, Junny Rios-Martinez, a little boy who would
have made any parent proud. I'm very proud of this boy's father,
who attended the execution. The boy's father said he had vowed that
his would be the last face Schwab would ever see.
Schwab was
released from prison early in 1991 after serving half a sentence
for raping another boy at knifepoint. Within a month, he was stalking
little Junny. At the time of his trial, he boasted that he would
gladly go to the electric chair if he could have a famous child
actor sit on his lap. When the end finally came, he wasn't boasting
about anything.
"Finally"
is the key word. It shouldn't take years and even decades to execute
a criminal. Two years from the day of sentencing should be the final
day of the perp's life. Virtually all of the appeals in capital
cases are frivolous, filed by opponents of the death penalty who
simply are trying to wreck the system.
Let's get
our thoughts in order concerning the death sentence. Everybody dies.
Everybody is condemned to death from the day of his or her birth.
Thus, executing a criminal isn't doing anything to him that won't
happen anyway. Good and decent people get death sentences every
day from their doctors, and there are no appeals or stays.
When the Founding
Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights and prohibited cruel and unusual
punishment, it was an era when people were burned alive, torn apart,
drawn and quartered or slowly killed by any number of torture devices.
Certainly, they did not consider hanging or shooting to be cruel
and inhuman punishment.
We should
be neither hesitant nor squeamish about executing people who take
the lives of innocent people, especially children. God knows, if
we don't have enough juice to protect and, failing that, avenge
the death of children, then we are a poor excuse for a society.
We could provide
university education to 10 children for the cost of keeping one
of these dysfunctional human slimeballs alive for his natural life.
I'd support a return to public hanging in the county where the crime
was committed. Let the public come and see justice done. I'd even
favor hiring a Saudi with a good, sharp sword to take the man's
head off. If beheading was good enough for English royalty, it should
be good enough for American animals with two legs.
As
for convicting the wrong person, that's a problem with a community's
police and prosecutors and sometimes incompetent defense lawyers.
Clean house. Fix that problem. Don't use it as an excuse to stop
the death penalty. Lawyers, who claim to be professionals, do a
lousy job of policing their own ranks. Incompetent lawyers often
end up as judges with nice vacations and pensions they don't deserve.
One day, the
American people may get fed up enough to vow to never elect a single
lawyer to a legislative post. Then we might get some clear laws
that protect the people rather than provide a lucrative living for
lawyers and judges.
July
5, 2008
Charley
Reese [send
him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.
©
2008 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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