Sara Weir of Los Angeles had her whole life ahead of her at 19.Then she was raped and stabbed 29 times with a pair of scissors and left to bleed to death.
The perpetrator, Douglas Kelly was convicted of this brutal murder back in 1993. After he was convicted but before he was sentenced, Weir's family were allowed to show a video to the court made by Weir's adoptive mother, filled with images of Weir from infancy through her high school graduation and set to music by Enya:
You can see the Weir video on YouTube here (part 1) and here (part 2).
In a separate case brought before the Court today, Samuel Zamudio was convicted in 1997 of robbing and murdering Elmer and Gladys Benson, an elderly couple. The prosecution played a video made by the Benson's daughter containing 118 photographs of the couple, including the last three showing the couple's graves.
The videos were shown under the law that permits 'victim impact evidence' to be shown to juries by family members to show the effect the loss of their loved ones has had on their lives. Due to a SCOTUS interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment (Payne v. Tennessee) such videos are admissible but cannot call for vengeance or be 'unduly emotional' and the California State Supreme Court had already ruled that they weren't.
In Kelly's case, the irony is that he shouldn't have been out of jail at all. A day or so before he raped and murdered Sara Weir, he was imprisoned on a domestic violence for a violent attack on an ex-girlfriend. But because the police neglected to check the computer system to find that he was already wanted for rape in Florida, he was allowed to make bail.
Both Kelly and Zamudio are on death row, and had their lawyers appeal to the Supreme court to set aside their death sentences on the grounds the videos unduly influenced their sentencing and they did not receive a fair trial.
The Supreme Court rejected the appeals, but here's the kicker..would you believe that three Justices dissented?
Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Stephen Breyer all dissented. Stevens said that "Their primary, if not sole, effect was to rouse jurors' sympathy for the victims and increase jurors' antipathy for the capital defendants. The videos added nothing relevant to the jury's deliberations and invited a verdict based on sentiment, rather than reasoned judgment."
Pray tell, Justice Stevens..this piece of walking garbage had already been convicted before the video was shown, so how did it 'invite a verdict based on sentiment rather than reasoned judgment?' And exactly what's wrong with normal human beings having sympathy for a young girl who's life was callously snuffed out at 19, and for the grieving family she left behind? Is it sympathy, or simple human decency and a sense of justice?
These two murders have been sitting on death row enjoying something they denied their victims..the right to life. In Sara Weir's case, her rapist and murderer has been sitting on death row and milking the appeals process for 15 years, almost as long as his victim's life. And if he and Zamudio actually do get the death penalty for casually snuffing out the lives of three human beings who had every right to live in peace, they'll go with a lethal injection designed to minimize any of the kind of pain they doled out to their victims.
Or, like the old civil rights saying went, 'Justice deferred is justice denied' something I'm sure Stevens, Bryer and Souter would agree with unless it concerned a murder victim and her family.
They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
When you have one third of the highest court in the land with such a perverted view of justice, it explains a great deal about why this sort of thing keeps occurring, especially when they have judicial brethren with like-minded views on the lower benches.
They all oppose any notion of capital punishment, but haven't quite got the votes to outlaw it. So instead, they'll attempt to neuter it as a deterrent, creating endless appeals and delays that allow murderers and their lawyers to game the system and drag the process out for years. And in the event an execution is actually performed, they'll make sure that it's a pain free nod off, to make killers like Kelly and Zamudio even less fearful of facing justice.
If we still used the gallows and the electric chair, do you think it might just save a few lives, make a murderer think twice before slaughtering someone? But that kind of simple justice is something these three justices and others like them turned their backs on a long time ago.Because to them, someone like Sara Weir is just an abstract statistic, not a human being.
Which of course is why we need to use tools like these videos..to remind us, so we don't become like them and forget that.
1 comment:
Execution is the only way to prevent recidivism by premeditated murderers in cases wherein there are no mitigating circumstances (eg, against a blackmailer). If you don't execute them, you are playing Russian Roulette. You might luck out & get someone too stupid to escape, like Manson ; however, you'll get a Bundy also. Bundy escaped successfully more than once. On 1 occasion, Bundy murdered 3 more people in Florida. Those 3 lives are the responsibility of the anti-capital-punishment activists : a quick trial & quick execution of Bundy would've saved their lives. Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court Legislature keeps erecting barriers to this necessary procedure by continually legislating groups of people out of the penalty's reach : anyone under 18, anyone declared to be not smart enough (even though they were smart enough to plan & execute a murder plot), extreme non-murder violent offences, &c. The current US Supreme Court Legislature is particularly susceptible because, even though these are mostly Republican appointees, they are, by a 5-4 majority, also from the Roman Catholic denomination, which has become hostile & abolitionistic towards the death penalty (but only after the Roman Catholic Popes no longer had their own country, the Papal States, to govern). It stacks the odds terribly against the survival of the death penalty & also explains their efforts to slowly, covertly kill it by a death of a thousand cuts as they continually strangle any effort at implementation. It's important to pressure the Senators to examine new judicial nominations (particularly for the US Supreme Court Legislature) for bias against the death penalty.
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