I'll admit it, I'm not a big fan of the death penalty. My main objections are that it's arbitrary, imperfect, and applied unequally to poor and minority defendants. There's also the chance of executing an innocent person and the general concept that the state should not have the power to put people to death. For all those reasons, I am generally opposed to the death penalty as it is currently constituted in the United States of America.Having said all that, if this BTK killer scumbag is not a candidate for the electric chair, I don't know who is. As Jeff Davis, the son of BTK killer Dennis Rader's last known victim says of the confessed psycopathic murderer, "There's the lowest form of human filth that ever crawled out of the gene pool masquerading as a human being."
What this case says to me is that my feelings about the death penalty are complicated. Obviously, when I listen to someone like Dennis Rader calmly and dispassionately describe his victims as "projects" or "potential hits," and when he talks matter-of-factly about how he tormented his victims, I want to throw the switch myself.
But, even in a case like this, I wonder: is state-sponsored execution the right answer? Is this the exception -- a white, middle class, respected member of the community confessing freely to his hideous crimes -- that proves the rule? Or not? And how can people like Jerry Kilgore be so certain about the death penalty, when "only 37 of the over 18,000 executions in this country's history involved a white person being punished for killing a black person?" Or when "African Americans are 12% of the U.S. population, but are 43% of prisoners on death row?" This stuff may not trouble Jerry Kilgore's conscience, but it bothers mine.
Still, I've got to be honest here. The fact that this evil BTK "human filth" will not face execution because Kansas did not have the death penalty on the books when he was busy "binding, torturing and killing" people really pisses me off. If there was ever a time and place for revving up the electric chair, it's in Wichita, Kansas right now.