This week two psychopaths were given a well deserved dose of lethal injection after years of appeals . First was religious cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren(aka The Shame of Ohio) who in 1989 casually murdered a family of five followers because he felt they were not enthusiastic enough about his teachings (perhaps they didn't shout hallelujah loudly enough to please him as he spouted his warped religious profundities) .
During his trial, Lundgren unapologetically referred to the murders as "pruning the vineyard". He went on to tell the court (this'll floor you) that God had commanded him, through interpretation of Scriptures,to kill the family. So, in his defense, Lundgren trotted out that tired, old bromide that homicidal maniacs have spouted for decades in order to avoid the death penalty: God made him do it. Uh Huh. Happily, this didn't deter the jury from deciding that Lungren's claim of insanity simply did not cut the mustard and condemned him to lethal injection.
His wife Alice and son Jeffrey,who assisted Reverend Psycho with the murders, were spared the death penalty (how unfortunate) and instead received life sentences. If I had my way, Lundgren would have been strapped into old sparky(with his faithful wife and demented son sitting on his lap) and fed thousands of volts of electricity. No peaceful death for him, he didn't deserve to be treated with such kindness.
Next, we have the lethal injection of Florida serial killer Danny Harold Rolling, whom in 1990 savagely butchered five female college students. Rollings, of course, blamed his murder spree on abuse he suffered as a child and his treatment in prison. For good measure, he claimed to possess good and bad multiple personalities. Yeah. Right. Sorry Danny, that's fish three days old; I don't buy it.
When asked for a last statement, Rolling treated witnesses and prison officials for two minutes to something that resembled a hymn with the refrain," None greater than thee,O Lord, none greater than thee." I don't know about the rest of you, but right now the tears are welling up in my eyes as I'm writing this. And if you believe that, let me tell you about how I helped my great uncle Thomas Edison invent the light bulb.
As I see it, the fact that these two vermin were finally put out of society's misery is a good thing. I would have been totally pissed off if instead they had been handed down life in prison. Or as I refer to it as : three hots and a cot for life. The thing that really sticks in my craw is it took seventeen years for Lundgren and sixteen years for Rolling before their executed. You can thank the A.C.L.U and other criminal rights activist groups for that . It used to be when a person was convicted of murder, it took several months for them to meet their maker, not years. We used methods such as hanging, the gas chamber and the ever popular electric chair to rid the earth of the murderers in our society.
But somewhere along the line criminal rights groups began rallying around these psychopathic killers by saying that they were people who deserved their rights while the victims of their horrific deeds became merely faceless casualties to be cast aside . Add to the mix years of seemingly endless appeals by their lawyers and the wheels of justice are slowed down to a snails pace. The murderer continues his or her worthless existence while the victims family and friends wait for what must seem like an eternity for justice.
The rallying cry of these groups is the word rehabilitation with a capital R. Just how you go about rehabilitating a psychotic murderer or one who deliberately chooses to kill others as a way to earn a living is something I have difficulty in fathoming. Yet, psychologists for the past fifty years have been researching the psyche of the serial murderer to find out the reasons for their behavior, with the hope that this anti social conduct may be prevented in future generations.
The sad fact is that there will always be those in our society who kill others. I wish a pill could be invented or a psychological treatment program could be implemented that would eradicate the violent and murderous tendencies in human beings. However,those who willingly go down this path should be dealt with harshly and shown the same mercy they afforded to their victims . No lifetime of free room and board, food, medical care and counseling; which in the end becomes a burden on the taxpayer. Premeditated murder shouldn't be rewarded and the murderer be should not be allowed to excuse their actions with convenient finger pointing and cliched rationale("I had a bad childhood","the prison system made me this way"," I grew up in a bad neighborhood", ad nauseam).
We must return to the old fashioned way of shortening the period of time from conviction to execution and return to the gas chamber, the electric chair and the hanging gallows as forms of punishment for cold blooded murder. As for the A.C.L.U and all of the other boo hoo hoo for the criminal groups out there, you can all take turns kissing my ass.
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