In 1965, two cousins abducted two fifteen year old girls, brutally raped them, blew them away; at close range, with a shotgun, and then dumped their bodies in a ravine. For 51 years this bizzare autrocity languished in the cold files of the California Police Department. Recently, a detective, with time on his hands, decided to look into the case. He found DNA evidence, still preserved, after all this time. He has the evidence analyized and low and behold, the cousins are unmasked. One is still in Callifornia and the other is living somewhere in the southeast. Both are immediately jailed, and are now awaiting arraignment.
Today’s headlines read; “Cold Case Killers Escape Death Penalty”. This really peaked my curiosity, because they haven’t even been tried, and the media is already headlining the penalty, or lack thereof. The article went on to say that the reason they won’t receive the Death Penalty is because they committed the crime during a period in California when the Death Penalty was abolished. Hmmmmmmm.
Okay. Two guys commit a heinous crime; languish in obscurity for 51 years, living la vida loca; and then are further rewarded by avoiding the death penalty; which seems to make perfectly good sense to our judicial system, media, and the public in general. Well I don’t get it.
In my humble opinion, a criminal should be punished in the milieu of prosecution, not of committment. Punishment should fit the mindset of the accusers, not the victims. But then I wonder, if the situation were reversed, would the victim feel cheated. It is really confusing. In reality, if those two filthy bastards got the Death Penalty today, they would again languish in a broken judicial system that takes 25 years to carry out the final punishment.
All we really want, as a society, is a safe place for our fifteen year olds to grow up. A place where we can go to bed at night and not worry that our grand parents will be home invaded, that or our children will be abducted from their beds, that our wives and daughters will be preyed upon on a jogging trail. The bottom line is that heinous crimes require serious and timely capital punishment which can only be accomplished through a reformed criminal appeals system and a mindset that rape, murder and physical abuse are heinous.
