Sultan Knish
Twenty years ago, Nathan Dunlap walked into a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora,
Colorado. Holmes, the future mass killer who would go on to make Aurora
briefly famous after opening fire in a movie theater, was six years old
at the time. Just old enough to patronize a Chuck E. Cheese.
Dunlap had been fired from the restaurant in the spring of that year and
told a friend that he wanted to get even, go in and take all the money.
One cold wintry evening he walked in, put a gun to the head of a
19-year-old girl at the salad bar and pulled the trigger. Then he killed
three others and stole $1,591 before being arrested by the police.
Over the next twenty years, Dunlap and his lawyers did everything
possible to get their client off. They claimed that his trial lawyers
were incompetent, that he was abused as a child and that he had mental
problems. That same claim is made by the defenders of nearly every
murderer on death row. There has yet to be an inmate on death row who
isn't a mentally ill child who was sexually abused by his incompetent
lawyers.
Dunlap's case went to the Colorado Supreme Court three times and once to
the Supreme Court. And that means that after twenty years, he may
finally be executed. The taxpayers of Colorado have spent millions
fighting Dunlap's lawyers. Aside from the usual attempts to keep Dunlap
from facing the death penalty, the ACLU sued Colorado over exercise
privileges for the Chuck E. Cheese killer.
"Depriving Mr. Dunlap of fresh air, sunshine, and outdoor exercise for
15 years is cruel and unusual punishment," the ACLU legal director said
last year.
In Georgia, the murderer sympathy vote is swarming around Warren Lee Hill.
Like Dunlap, Hill is a multiple murderer. In 1986, Hill shot his
girlfriend 11 times. Four years later he beat another inmate to death in
prison with a nail-studded board. Hill was finally on the verge on
being executed, but his defenders had one last gimmick arguing that
Georgia can't kill Hill, because he only has an IQ of 70.
America's greatest mentally retarded president, Jimmy Carter, came out
in Hill's defense and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals stepped in a
half hour before Hill would have faced justice. The 11th Circuit Court
of Appeals is not supposed to handle death penalty cases, but activist
judges know no boundaries and the court has stepped in to halt two of
Georgia's executions in two days.
Hill only began claiming that he was retarded in 1996, ten years after
his original murder, at which point his IQ scores, formerly in the
mid-70s, dropped down to a more appropriately low level. Despite
supposedly being retarded, Hill had managed to serve in the military and
hold down steady jobs, not to mention murder two people. But no one has
established whether Hill is mentally retarded within a reasonable
doubt.
Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or
Arbitrary Executions, who has also claimed that drone strikes are a war
crime, declared that "the world community is again watching Georgia with
great concern as it prepares to carry out another grotesque and unjust
execution." The South African Heyns did not say whether he would be
willing to be locked in a cell for 24 hours with Hill and a nail-studded
board.
Andrew Cook, the other death row inmate on whose behalf the 11th Circuit
intervened, came up with an even better gimmick. Cook claimed that he
couldn't be lethally injected with pentobarbital without a doctor's
prescription. What should have been a punchline to a standup comedian's
joke is an actual tactic that pro-murderer death penalty opponents are
using to stop Georgia from killing murderers.
European drug companies are refusing to supply drugs that can be used
for lethal injections to the United States leading to a shortage of
pentobarbital. Lethal injection however is only the most painless way to
kill murderers. There are other less cleaner ways that states will have
to resort to if the drugs aren't available. The electric chair is used
in nine states, the gas chamber in four states and the firing squad in
two states. If we ever run out of bullets, gas and electricity, New
Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, authorizes an old-fashioned rope
hanging if the drugs run out.
Cook, who can't be killed without a doctor's prescription, murdered a
young couple by a lakeshore lover's lane 18 years ago. There is no word
on whether he got a doctor's note before killing Grant Henderson and
Michele Cartagena. Cook didn't know the young couple, he just wanted to
see if he could kill someone and get away with it. Now he wants to see
if he can get away with murder by demanding that a doctor write a
prescription for his lethal injection.
In Florida, the battle is on over Paul Augustus Howell. Howell tried to
murder another member in the Jamaican Posse drug ring with a pipe bomb
because she could tie him to the murder of another drug dealer over a
kilo of cocaine. The bomb was put inside a microwave oven which was
gift-wrapped and driven to her in a stolen car by a member of the gang.
The car was stopped along the way and Jimmy Fulford, a state trooper,
unwrapped the booby-trapped oven suspecting that there were drugs
inside. Instead the bomb exploded in his hands. That was over twenty
years ago.
Howell's defenders are making the usual arguments about unqualified
lawyers. And the lawyers are always unqualified. Each set of lawyers
claims that the previous set was unqualified and neglected to provide a
proper defense by exploiting every possible gimmick. The gimmick in the
Howell case is that his lawyer's wife apparently received a death threat
from one of Howell's associates back when he was defending him in a
previous drug case.
Apparently getting a death threat from the associates of the man you are
defending in a previous case represents a conflict of interest.
Like every other murderer out there, Howell's lawyers have also claimed
that he was abused as a child and might be mentally ill, if not mentally
retarded. With that kind of legal obstacle course, it's a wonder that
any murderer ever makes it to the end of the line. But you can always
count on Texas to deliver the goods.
In 1994, Carl Blue filled up a Big Gulp cup with gasoline, threw it at
his girlfriend and then set her on fire with a lighter. Carmen
Richards-Sanders died horribly after clinging to life for 19 days with
burns over 40 percent of her body. Even in Texas it took 19 years to get
Blue, who had been smoking crack before the attack, to his final end.
Along the way, Blue's lawyers claimed that he was also retarded because
he had been born premature and had to be kept in an incubator and that
the attack had only been a prank, even though Blue told his girlfriend,
"I told you I was gonna get you" as she was burning up.
Blue said that he didn't feel that he was guilty of murder, but that he
still expected to go to heaven and wanted to be buried in a cowboy hat
and cowboy boots. There's no telling whether he will get his wish, but
the cowboy state did execute the Big Gulp killer, making him the first
Texas killer to die this year. And the second killer in the United
States to be sent beyond the reach of any living ACLU lawyer and into
the jurisdiction of the dead ACLU lawyers in the underworld.
In Tennessee, Christa Gail Pike, the only woman on death row, is also
pleading mental illness and mental retardation. In 1995, Pike lured
another girl whom she suspected of trying to steal her boyfriend into
the woods, stabbed her with a meat cleaver and carved a pentagram on her
chest. The torture went on for 30 minutes until the victim's skull was
finally smashed in with a chunk of asphalt. Pike even kept a piece of
her victim's skull in her jacket as a souvenir, despite claiming that
the brutal murder had just been another prank that got out of control.
At her sentencing, the prosecutor read a letter that she had written to
her boyfriend. "Ya see what I get for tryin' to be nice to that hoe? I
went ahead and bashed her brains out so she'd die quickly instead of
letting her bleed to death and they f***ing fry me!"
Like Hill, Pike didn't stay idle in prison. Instead she tried to murder
another inmate with a shoelace over yet another romantic triangle. And
she filed numerous appeals. Her original lawyers were incompetent and
she suffered from PTSD and all sorts of mental problems. The latest
filings claim that Pike should have gotten a change of venue, a fairer
jury and a gag order on the media. It claims that death by electrocution
is cruel and unusual punishment and that the victim's skull should not
have been submitted into evidence. Finally the claim claims that Pike's
original lawyers were incompetent because they failed to argue that the
death penalty was illegal under international law.
As February fades, these are just a few of the battles being fought for
decades by prosecutors against the murderers and their defenders. It is a
long slow war that costs millions and that ends only when the needle
goes in and the life of a murderer ends.
The details of each battle remain mostly the same. Each murderer is a
victim. Each one was abused as a child and suffers from mental illness
and diminished intelligence. Each one was denied a fair trial. There is
little point in paying attention to these monotonous defenses of evil.
What is interesting is the motivation behind them.
The Pro-Murderer Anti-Death Penalty lobby is very wealthy and very
active. The rights of criminals have always been more protected than
those of victims and the war being waged on the death penalty is an
international campaign.
While the parents of victims wait decades for closure, the international left wages a ceaseless war against them.
In Tennessee, the mother of Pike's victim has been waiting nearly twenty
years to bury that piece of her daughter's skull. As long as Pike
lives, the State of Tennessee has to hang on to it as a piece of
evidence in the legal war between Pike's defenders and the People of
Tennessee. Only when Pike is dead, will her victim finally be buried at
last.
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