ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 29, 1996 TAG: 9601290093
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
HO-HUM. Another week, another series of executions. This is, after all, modern America, leader of the Free World.
On Tuesday night of last week, the great state of Virginia - representing us, the citizenry - bloodlessly offed Richard Townes Jr., 45, via the sanitary marvel of lethal injection. Just didn't have the snap a few hours later in Delaware, where Billy Bailey, 49, was hanged; or the zing early Friday in Utah, where they shot John Albert Taylor, 36.
Unlike the cases of too many who are executed, these were thankfully free of efforts by do-gooder, anti-execution crusaders to cast doubt on whether these men in fact committed the crimes for which they were convicted. Nor was there any doubt that the crimes themselves were vile.
Townes died for the 1985 execution-style killing of a 32-year-old Virginia Beach convenience store clerk and mother of two during an armed robbery; his apparent purpose was to prevent her from identifying him. Bailey, after a liquor store robbery and a day of drinking nearly 17 years ago, had shot to death an elderly couple in their Delaware farmhouse. Taylor was convicted in 1989 of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl who lived in an apartment next door to his sister's.
These men were monsters, but they weren't executed solely for their crimes. They were executed also because they had lost the wild, wacky game of death-penalty roulette.
Just a week before in Illinois, Gov. Jim Edgar commuted the death sentence of Guinevere Garcia to life imprisonment - even though she had murdered not only her estranged husband during an armed robbery, the crime for which she had been sentenced to death, but also, in 1981, had killed her own 11-month-old daughter.
By contrast, Jesse Dewayne Jacobs, the first American executed in 1995, didn't shoot anyone or even know that his co-defendant had a gun. One winner, one loser.
Here in Virginia, Townes lost when he decided to act as his own attorney at the sentencing phase of his trial. Bad decision. His lawyer probably would have remembered to tell the jury that, as a career criminal, Townes would not be eligible for parole if sentenced to life imprisonment. If the jurors had known that, several since have said, they wouldn't have voted for the death penalty.
No longer is it an issue whether the death penalty is necessary to keep violent killers from returning to the streets to kill again. Genuine life-without-parole sentencing options, such as those Virginia now has, can fulfill that objective.
Nor is the issue whether the condemned deserve their fate. Usually (Jacobs is an exception), they do.
The issue, rather, is whether the state ought to be in the business of killing people, especially so arbitrarily. It is also whether America will continue with each execution to ratchet up the level at which violence is yawningly accepted; will continue with each execution to narrow rather than widen the gap between social norms and the behavior of the pathologically lethal.
Throw the killers in prison. Keep them there the rest of their days. But don't let them manipulate the rest of us into becoming more like them.
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