Tag Archives: Justice

News

Should convicted murderer Steven Hayes get the death penalty?

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WARNING: This story has graphic descriptions of evil and despicable acts.

Story from the Hartford Courant.

Excerpt:

A Superior Court jury today sentenced Steven Hayes to death for the murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley and Michaela, during a seven-hour home invasion, robbery and arson at their Cheshire home in July 2007.

Outside the courthouse after the verdicts, Hawke-Petit’s father, the Rev. Richard Hawke, said “There are some people who do not deserve to live in God’s world.”

Asked what he had in his heart, Dr. William Petit Jr. struggled with his answer. “….Probably many of you have kids,” he said, pausing to choke back tears. “Michaela was an 11-year-old little girl…tortured and killed in her own bedroom, surrounded by her stuffed animals….”

Petit then talked about his daughter Hayley’s bright future and her strength and the children that his wife, Jennifer, helped.

“So, I was really thinking of the tremendous loss” during the verdict, Petit said, adding that he was pleased with it, but “mostly I was sad for the loss we have all suffered.”

Asked if he thought there’d be closure now, Petit said, “There’s never closure. There’s a hole…. with jagged edges…that may smooth out with time, but the hole in your heart and the hole in your soul” remains.

“This isn’t about revenge,” Petit said. “Vengeance belongs to the Lord. This is about justice.”

[…]The jury sentenced Hayes to death on six counts: killing Hawke-Petit and Michaela and Hayley in the course of a single action; killing a child under the age of 16; killing Hawke-Petit in the course of a kidnapping; killing Hayley in the course of a kidnapping; killing Michaela in the course of a kidnapping; and killing Hawke-Petit in the course of a sexual assault.

[…]Hayes, 47, of Winsted, was convicted Oct. 5 of breaking into the Petit home, beating Petit, tying up and torturing the family as Hayes and another man ransacked the home for cash and valuables and tortured the family for seven hours. Testimony during Hayes’ trial showed that at one point in the break-in, Hayes forced Hawke-Petit to go to the bank to withdraw money. During that time, according to testimony, Komisarjevsky sexually assaulted Michaela Petit, 11.

When Hawke-Petit and Hayes returned from the bank, Hayes raped and strangled Hawke-Petit. The house was doused with gasoline and set on fire as the intruders fled, testimony showed. Hayley, 17, and Michaela died of smoke inhalation.

[…]Prosecutors used the words of Hayes’ younger brother Matthew to counter testimony that home-invasion crime was an aberration in Hayes otherwise troubled but basically nonviolent life.

Matthew Hayes portrayed his brother as a conniving, sadistic, violent thief who saw Matthew take countless beatings from his brutal father for Steven Hayes’ misdeeds. At one point, Steven Hayes held a gun to Matthew’s head, according to the statement, which was given to state police after the home invasion.

Examples of Hayes’ sadistic behavior toward his brother included hooking Matthew to the garage door by his belt and raising the door up and down, and holding Matthew’s hand to a red-hot burner. Matthew said his brother’s life of crime was not a result of bad parenting or poor childhood. He said Hayes never learned to take responsibility for his actions.

“Steven is what Steven is because he’s a coward,” Matthew Hayes wrote.

I know that some people are very pro-life and yet don’t support the death penalty, and then there are leftists who favor killing innocent babies, while letting guilty murderers live. I am just curious about whether any of my readers is willing to come out and explain why Hayes should not get the death penalty. I think he should.

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News

How to defend the Biblical view of capital punishment

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Here’s a Yahoo News story, and pay attention to the victims and their view of capital punishment.

Excerpt:

The leader of a former gang of Houston teenagers who raped and murdered two young girls walking home from a neighborhood party 17 years ago was executed Tuesday in Texas.

Peter Anthony Cantu, 35, was strapped to a gurney in the Huntsville Unit prison death chamber and administered a lethal injection at 6:09 p.m. CDT. He took a single deep breath before slipping into unconsciousness, then was pronounced dead eight minutes later as relatives of his victims, Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, looked stoically through a window a few feet from him.

Asked by the warden if he had any last statement, Cantu replied: “No.” He never looked at the witnesses, including his victims’ parents.

“Nothing he would have said to me would have made any difference,” Adolfo Pena, who lost his daughter in the attack, said after watching Cantu die. “He did a horrendous crime to these two girls. He deserved to die and 17 years later, he died. Not soon enough.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Pena, who wore a T-shirt bearing pictures of both girls.

I’ll leave out the brutal details of the crime, and jump to this:

Jennifer’s father, Randy Ertman, who witnessed all three executions, said before Cantu was put to death Tuesday that the apologies meant nothing to him, that it was too late for apologies.

[…]Ertman said if the death penalty was intended as a deterrent, all five members who had been sentenced to die should have been hanged from trees outside Houston City Hall years ago.

“That would be a deterrent,” he said.

Ok, now look at this Fox News article which talks about whether it works to deter more violent crimes.

Excerpt:

What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

[…]”Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”

Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).

That’s the only question we should be asking – does it work? Not “how does it makes us feel?”. I don’t care how it makes anyone feel except for the victims. I only care about the victims. If the conviction is good, and they accused admit their guilt, the death penalty should be on the table.

The Bible supports the idea of capital punishment, and if you want to explain to people why the Bible supports it, you need to give specific examples, talk from the point of the view of the victims, and reference the relevant research, keeping in mind that academics are vastly more likely to skew the results in favor of the liberal “murderers should not be punished because no one should be punished” view.

Videos

Obama’s attorney general has his head in the sand on national security

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Wow, this is just crazy.

Remember this one:

And this one:

Why is this guy attorney general?

UPDATE: Actually Investors Business Daily recounts his many failures in this editorial.

Excerpt:

An appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last week illustrates the problem. Holder told the panel that Justice Department decisions “are done in a political way.” Thanks for the honesty, but that’s not what the job requires.

This may explain why Holder could question whether Arizona’s new law on illegal immigrants is “unconstitutional” and imply that those who drafted the bill were racist, and, in the next breath, admit that he hadn’t even read the 17-page bill.

If he took the time to read it, he’d discover that Arizona’s measure basically takes existing U.S. federal law and makes it state law too. Is the federal law unconstitutional as well?

And an MP3 version is here.