A Texas man who unsuccessfully challenged the safety of the state’s lethal injection drugs and raised questions about evidence used to persuade a jury to sentence him to death for killing an elderly woman decades ago was executed late Tuesday.
Jedidiah Murphy, 48, was pronounced dead after an injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the October 2000 fatal shooting of 80-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham of the Dallas suburb of Garland. Cunningham was killed during a carjacking.
“To the family of the victim, I sincerely apologize for all of it,” Murphy said while strapped to a gurney in the Texas death chamber and after a Christian pastor, his right hand on Murphy’s chest, prayed for the victim’s family, Murphy’s family and friends and the inmate.
“I hope this helps, if possible, give you closure,” Murphy said.
Man, just imagine being 48 and getting the punishment for something your 25-year-old self did.
I’m in my mid 40s, mid 20s feels like a lifetime and a few different versions of myself in the past. A shame there’s no way to give us this perspective when we’re young, maybe some hallucinogens could help but I’d doubt it’d be the same. I couldn’t even imagine myself at 40 when I was in my early 20s but that’s how life goes for now.
Thankfully, we don’t need that perspective to know at 25 years of age that murdering and stealing cars is wrong.
No of course not, but the impact on life (themselves, others) and the fact this will haunt someone for as long or longer than they’ve have solid memories (you remember from about 5ish with better clarity?) just means the person being executed is not really the same person who did the crimes, in a growing maturity way. I’m not saying they don’t deserve their sentence but if they could see with a mid life perspective before the crime I bet many minds would change from commiting many crimes. It’s one thing to know it’s wrong it’s another thing to have an understanding of the long lasting impact their actions have. Maybe it wouldn’t mean much to many criminals but I think some perspective would help before they did something that altered many people’s lives.
Yes, I understand: hindsight is 20/20. But I object to this notion that a person is “a different person” simply because they’ve grown and matured and wouldn’t make the same decision anymore. They only got to have that growth because no one murdered them. They are still responsible for their past actions, and I’m sure you realize that. I’m a therapist–I help people make better decisions in their lives, and I’ve helped criminals and would-be criminals alike. I’m all for more therapy for at-risk people early in their lives, as well as more humane prison systems that reduce recidivism through in-prison treatment and personal development; but I still think people need to be held accountable for their misdeeds and punished accordingly. One can acknowledge a person’s growth and maturation without forgiving them for their past crimes.
If we’re on the same page with all that, great. I don’t mean to stoke an illusory disagreement.
I think we’re saying a similar thing, your first reply was a bit flippant is all. I didn’t mean to give the impression that people shouldn’t be punished after years of growth, it was just a comment on how long it can take to give the final punishment, seems a bit cruel.
Fair enough. Your first comment seemed like it was implying that the guy shouldn’t receive said final punishment simply because he’d matured by that point. As for the length of time it takes to hand down a sentence of execution…I know what you mean when you say it seems cruel, but for reasons I think are pretty obvious, I don’t feel bad for the guy. The longer it takes, the more of his life he can at least live, if not enjoy. Also, when the sentence is death, I’m kind of glad it takes such a laborious process to implement–we shouldn’t be executing people unless there’s a clear consensus among several judges that it’s the appropriate sentence. As for the death penalty itself, I have mixed feelings.
Man. Just imagine being 25 and shooting anyone to steal their car, let alone an 80 year old lady.
Carjackers are a big enough scurge to society, there’s no room for the degenerates that stoop even lower and do it violently
As orbitz said, my comment is mostly about how much of a different person you are at that point.
There is an ethical argument to be had. After such a long time, the more noble purposes of punishment fade out (e.g. protection of society, correction of the offender), and then especially with death penalty, this looks rather barbaric.
But we would need a lot of details for this to be anything but a theoretical exercise, so I did intend to formulate it in a fashion that even if someone thinks eye-for-an-eye is peak morality, they could still be onboard with it.
I took the comment you replied to as a topic of how we change as people rather than not wanting criminals to be punished. I do agree people who murder and commit other violent crimes should be punished but doing it nearly double the age you committed the crime at is like punishing a different person, assuming they grow like most people.
Again I want to state I don’t think they should have been let off or treated lightly, murdering anyone let alone the more vulnerable is a heinous act and deserves stiff punishment if we want to remain a just society. Just wanted to comment on a more philosophical side where we mature and are rarely the same person 20 years later so there seems to be a bit of a gap in justice being done timely. I’d rather die sooner than living in prison for a couple decades but I say that who has never been so maybe my opinion doesn’t meant much.
Calling people degenerates is a degenerate thing to do.
Car thieves, home invaders, etc. All contribute NOTHING of value to society, and actively take from it. They are degenerate criminals
You seem to think that, if a person is a theif, that is 100% of what they do with their time. Or that somehow stealing property invalidates anything good they might do.
You have certainly broken at least one law (everyone has). Do you judge yourself as a worthless degenerate because of it?
Man, just imagine carjacking and murdering an old lady.
Absolute fucking barbarism. We live in the future, we shouldn’t be putting people to death. I pray that he isn’t among the 1-5% of people executed by the State who turn out to be innocent.
Executions are never the answer. We need to find better ways to deal with people who can’t manage themselves in society. Especially with the goal of reintegration. It may not be possible with everyone, but execution is just giving up, and giving in to barbaric methods.
Playing devil’s advocate here, but what is the answer to a violent criminal that cannot be rehabilitated?
Life in prison.
Why should everyone else pay to support the person who wants to hurt them?
I mean, assuming we had really good rehabilitation services instead of prisons, such that most people were successfully rehabilitated, and that this criminal was one of very few who couldn’t be. Someone who had repeateadly refused any form of rehabilitation, or even any sort of productive work. We would basically need a whole prison with multiple staff just for one person. At some point, the cost of keeping them alive just isn’t worth the trouble.
The bottom line is that any law that can be used to rightfully execute a guilty person can be abused to wrongfully execute an innocent. It isn’t that expensive to house criminals, and you should be happy to pay for it on the off chance that you end up as one of those few innocent people wrongfully convicted.
It’s only inexpensive to house criminals because we house so many of them, when we should be rehabilitating them and having a minimal long term prison population. However, that would also be leaving the worst of the worst criminals, people who cannot be rehabilitated, people who continually harm others. Sure, it’s possible for a person to be convicted of one crime, get the death penalty and then later be exhonerated and proven innocent, but if someone has been convicted for 3 or more different serious offenses and failed multiple attempts at rehabilitation that worked for almost everyone else, that continually and sometimes successfully violently attacks the guards? They’re clearly guilty.
At some point, at some extreme limit of the most deplorable a human can be, killing them would be better than keeping them.
But we can’t even say anyone has got to that point, because we don’t try and rehabilitate.
It’s only inexpensive to house criminals because we house so many of them, when we should be rehabilitating them and having a minimal long term prison population.
True as this is, reducing the length of sentences won’t reduce the number. There’ll always be people in prison serving a year or two, even in a perfect world of rehabilitation-focused incarceration.
Sure, it’s possible for a person to be convicted of one crime, get the death penalty and then later be exhonerated and proven innocent, but if someone has been convicted for 3 or more different serious offenses and failed multiple attempts at rehabilitation that worked for almost everyone else, that continually and sometimes successfully violently attacks the guards? They’re clearly guilty.
And killing them remains barbaric, especially when our methods of execution are all as torturous as lethal injection and electrocution. We should be better than that.
There is no such thing. You have the resources of an entire state, a single human no longer poses a threat.
Someday, we may develop a technique to rehab even the worst of the worst.
Sometimes it is. Child molesters should be ran through a wood chipper.
Oops, I guess that wasn’t the child molester, it was the person trying to help the kid and got incorrectly accused. Guess we should clean up the wood chipper again for the next one.
I didn’t say wrongly accused child molesters.
Oh, you’re right, we should only execute people when we’re double secret sure with a pinky swear.
Like that one guy that several firefighters testified had to have set the fire that killed his family. Guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt, that fire wouldn’t have spread the way it did without accelerant.
When a child has been sexually assaulted and they scrape the dudes DNA out of her you can be pretty goddamned sure he did it.
Why just ‘her’? You know little boys can be raped too… by both females and males… what about them?
And not every victim comes forward right away for many reasons, what about them?
What if they can’t actually identify the attacker because they were inebriated for various reasons and a person is incorrectly accused, has no DNA tying them to the attack and the victim can’t really say it was them?
Too many variables to indefinitely say kill all offenders of children when too many mistakes have been made before
🥱
