Call it Justice

McClatchy newspapers looked at 'Rational standard' missing in capital punishment cases. And this is the best they can do.

Was he guilty? Beyond doubt. But his path to the death chamber was cleared by 11 judges who watered down a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that require lawyers to defend their clients' lives vigorously.

Vinson's attorneys had never looked into the iron-pipe beatings their client took from his mother, or how his drunken grandfather liked to wake him with a flurry of fists, or how his debilitating childhood seizures probably signaled that he had brain damage.

Do you suppose the ex-girlfriend who was killed and sexually mutilated should be denied the same justice as someone else because her killer had a sordid background?

It was a gruesome murder. And the bleeding hearts who want to abolish the death penalty proclaim, "But execution is neither a solution to violence nor a comfort to mourners. It is part of the problem and increases the cycle of violence." They don't know. They dont' speak for the families. They don't speak for the victims. And they are absolutely wrong that capital punishment increases the cycle of violence. It ends it.

For one.

The writer also asks us to have sympathy for a murderer who "wasn't toilet-trained until he was 10" yet was able to strangle and murder a retired school teacher.

The courts are doing their jobs - upholding the law. The left-of-Lenin newspapers would have it otherwise.