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.
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.
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.
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.
FUCKING OOPS.
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
Because it’s just an example and I thought using “them” instead would make the sentence sound weird.
My point is we can kill the ones we know for sure did it. We can stop at imprisoning the rest.