The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block the execution of a woman convicted in two killings, clearing the way for Virginia’s first execution of a woman in nearly a century.
Via FoxNews:
Teresa Lewis, 41, is scheduled to die by injection Thursday for providing sex and money to two men to kill her husband and stepson in October 2002 so she could collect on a $250,000 insurance pay out.
Two of the three women on the court, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, voted to stop the execution. The court did not otherwise comment on its order.
The court’s decision followed Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s refusal to reconsider a clemency request, which he rejected Friday.
“A good and decent person is about to lose her life because of a system that is broken,” said attorney James E. Rocap III, who represents Lewis. He said he was referring to the decision by the Supreme Court and McDonnell’s rejection of clemency.
And pause.
There are a lot of valid reasons to block the execution of this woman but it seems a foolish tactic to use “she’s a good and decent person” as a reason, when in fact she killed her husband and stepson. The tertiary reason – that she’s a woman – seems beside the point.
I remember almost the same appeals being heard from coast to coast when Karla Faye Tucker was executed here in Texas. George W. Bush was the governor at the time and every bleeding heart who could find a camera condemned him for being so cold and callous as to kill a woman who had killed a man with a pickaxe and later said she’d had orgasms doing it.
It was the fact that she was a woman that offended the liberals more than anything – a fact I find hilarious. If they want equality, well, isn’t that equality in action?
I support the death penalty. But my experience with the Enron cases have made me extremely wary of allowing the federal government to have that much control over a human being. The DOJ is made up of ambitious attorneys who crave success just like the rest of us. They are not above doing lowdown, illegal, unethical things to advance their cause. So it seems to me that we have to be extremely cautious about the death penalty.
Can you imagine if the Enron cases were death penalty cases? Can you imagine John Kroger deciding whether or not to pursue the death penalty? I think if that were the case, half of the executives that I write about and care about and admire so much would be dead.
And it’s not because they were guilty. It’s because John Kroger, Andy Weissman and others acted with ruthless disregard to the rules. The executives were going to be found guilty, no matter what.
So while I think we should definitely execute murderers and child abusers, I worry that there’s no entity who can actually carry it out with 100% accuracy.
I admit that I don’t care if we’re accurate with terrorists. I don’t care if they were just the moneyman, or if they weren’t planning to blow up anything but just shot at a few soldiers in Afghanistan. I want them dead. I realize this is not a foreign policy that most people can get behind, but I’m okay with that.
Mostly I just want to know for a stone-cold fact that when an American citizen is put to death, they’re actually guilty. All the other pleas, such as “she’s a nice person”, “she’s a woman”, “she had a bad childhood,” etc etc don’t faze me at all. If she’s guilty, execute her.
But knowing what I know about the DOJ, I wonder how I will ever know if they’re really, really guilty.
Things They Say