Nov 15 2008
EVIL knows no sex
I’ve said before that the only reason I don’t support the death penalty is that we know for a fact that too many innocent people would end up killed due to incompetent or evil police, judges, juries, crown attorneys, and witnesses. But there are always people like these two who are true, Indisputable EVIL Arguments for the Death Penalty. Pure EVIL. The only problem is that he says he’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail. Not likely. Maybe a few years, at that. But the only good thing is that people like him definitely get their karma in jail, so he will finally learn a little of what that poor girl suffered through. This is one of the hardest things you can read. The original story the day before is even harder and breaks your heart even worse:
Stepfather ‘didn’t want to kill the little kid’
WINNIPEG–The Manitoba man accused of killing his 5-year-old stepdaughter after months of horrific abuse told police her death will “haunt” him for the rest of his life and sobbed at the prospect of going to jail, court heard yesterday. In a videotaped interview with police played at his murder trial in Winnipeg, Karl McKay said he tried to perform CPR on Phoenix Sinclair when he found her lifeless body in the family’s basement in June 2005. “I tried to save her. I tried CPR,” he told an RCMP officer in March 2006. “We were scared. I didn’t know what the hell to do.” McKay and his common-law wife Samantha Kematch are accused of first-degree murder in Phoenix’s death. The couple is also accused of trying to pass off another child as Phoenix to convince welfare investigators and the RCMP that their daughter was still with the family.
McKay’s sons have testified both Kematch and McKay used to beat Phoenix regularly, sometimes with a metal rod or a broken fridge handle. They said McKay also shot Phoenix with a pellet gun “just for the hell of it” and used to choke her until she lost consciousness. “She was always crying and whining about something,” McKay said in the interview, denying he ever choked or shot Phoenix. The day she died, McKay told police he told Phoenix to “shut up” and threw her about “three or four feet” on the basement floor. But he said she landed on a pile of clothes and was still breathing when the couple left to visit McKay’s father nearby.
Although McKay’s son said his dad “stomped” on Phoenix and beat her before leaving her on the basement floor that day, McKay said he did not recall doing that. The day before she died, McKay said Kematch hit Phoenix over the head although he said he did not witness that. “I didn’t want to kill the little kid,” McKay said. “Once in a while, I would give her a licking. I didn’t intend to do serious harm.” After five minutes of performing CPR, McKay said the couple took Phoenix upstairs and gave her a bath to try to revive her. When it didn’t work, he said they took her back downstairs and wrapped her in plastic. They drove her out beyond the Fisher River garbage dump and buried her in a shallow grave, he said.
“I wish it had never happened,” a crying McKay said. “Maybe now she can rest in peace.” It was Kematch who used to beat up Phoenix, McKay said. She had a lot of “anger in her” which she took out on her daughter, he said. Kematch would say “I wish I could just give her back to her dad or get rid of her,” McKay said. “Samantha would just treat her like an animal,” he said, adding she used to tie Phoenix up in the bathroom. “She had no heart.” During McKay’s video testimony shown yesterday, Kematch often turned around and glared at him as he sat beside her in the prisoner box.
On the video, McKay broke down sobbing when he talked about Phoenix’s death. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail,” he said, worrying he would not be able to see his boys until they were grown. “I made a big mistake. I got to pay for it.” McKay drew a map to show where Phoenix was buried. Her body was found in a shallow grave near the Fisher River garbage dump in March 2006. Earlier in the police interview, McKay said he was on at least 10 different kinds of medication for health problems relating to diabetes, pancreatitis, depression, insomnia and fibromyalgia. The medication would sometimes cause mood swings and caused him to lose 60 pounds in one month, he said. His father had 26 kids by various women and he spent his life in foster care, McKay said, adding he used to get “lickings” as a child. At the end of the interview, he said, “I want to say sorry to Phoenix. She didn’t deserve that. This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life
Okay, if you want to see more of the story to see that both of these animals deserve to be tortured before being executed, read this. The saddest thing is that millions of kids every day go through this exact same horrifying “existence” every day. I really think we need a licensing program for children all around the world. Seriously.
WINNIPEG–A 5-year-old girl was beaten bloody with a metal rod and had her face shoved in her own vomit before one final beating left her dead on the family’s dirty basement floor, a Manitoba court heard yesterday.
McKay’s youngest son shook and covered his face with his hands as he testified that both Kematch and McKay used to beat Phoenix, sometimes with their fists, other times with a metal rod, at their home in Fisher River, Man. Phoenix was also shot with a pellet gun “just for the hell of it,” he said. The little girl was beaten and physically stomped on so much that she just stopped crying, said her 15-year-old stepbrother.
After one beating, Phoenix’s knuckles were cut open and became infected but she was never taken to the doctor, he said. At night, the boy said he could hear her sobbing in the basement through the vents and he would go down to check on her. There was no heat in the basement and Phoenix would be “curled up in a little ball” without a blanket, he said. When he tried to turn on the heat downstairs, the boy said he was yelled at. Sometimes, Kematch would laugh while her daughter was being beaten or choked unconscious, he testified.
“I would look at their faces and I wouldn’t see no tears or nothing,” the boy said. “No remorse.” He said the day she died, his father beat Phoenix and stomped on her head and chest. McKay pushed her and left her on the basement floor while Kematch watched. When the couple left the house to visit McKay’s father, the boy said he went down to check on Phoenix and thought she was playing dead. “I just touched her back,” he said. “It was all cold. Her eyes were open. I put my hand on her mouth. She wasn’t breathing.”
When the couple returned to find Phoenix’s lifeless body, the boy said they didn’t show any emotion. He was told to “watch your baby sister. We’re going to the dump and bury her,” the boy said. “They were both in it together.” Both Kematch and McKay told him not to tell anyone what happened to Phoenix, he said. When the boy returned to his father’s house several weeks later, he said the basement had been cleaned and the floor painted. Phoenix’s body was found in a shallow grave near the garbage dump in Fisher River, Man., in March 2006.
Kematch’s defence lawyers have argued McKay was in charge of the household and gave the harshest beatings. In her cross-examination, lawyer Roberta Campbell suggested that Kematch never stomped on her daughter or forced her to eat her own vomit. “Yeah, but she was there,” the boy testified. “She was standing there. She didn’t say anything. She was just watching.”
Defence lawyers for McKay suggested Kematch used to hit Phoenix and call her names when McKay wasn’t around. In his cross-examination, lawyer Mike Cook said McKay was often away. McKay drove a truck and then a school bus, as well as attended a four-week CPR course, Cook said. When Phoenix was beaten with a fridge handle and a metal rod, Cook suggested McKay was out of the house.
“It was both of them,” the boy insisted.
Time for you to change your mind on the death penalty.
The Death Penalty Provides More Protection for Innocents
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters, contact info below
Often, the death penalty dialogue gravitates to the subject of innocents at risk of execution. Seldom is a more common problem reviewed. That is, how innocents are more at risk without the death penalty.
To state the blatantly clear, living murderers, in prison, after release or escape, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers.
Although an obvious truism, it is surprising how often folks overlook the enhanced incapacitation benefits of the death penalty over incarceration.
No knowledgeable and honest party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law.
Therefore, actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, that it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
That is. logically, conclusive.
16 recent studies, inclusive of their defenses, find for death penalty deterrence.
A surprise? No.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 16 studies. They don’t. Studies which don’t find for deterrence don’t say no one is deterred, but that they couldn’t measure those deterred.
What prospect of a negative outcome doesn’t deter some? There isn’t one . . . although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one.
However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. Yet, the evidence is compelling and un refuted that death is feared more than life.
Some death penalty opponents argue against death penalty deterrence, stating that it’s a harsher penalty to be locked up without any possibility of getting out.
Reality paints a very different picture.
What percentage of capital murderers seek a plea bargain to a death sentence? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of convicted capital murderers argue for execution in the penalty phase of their capital trial? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of death row inmates waive their appeals and speed up the execution process? Nearly zero. They prefer long term imprisonment.
This is not, even remotely, in dispute.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Furthermore, history tells us that lifers have many ways to get out: Pardon, commutation, escape, clerical error, change in the law, etc.
In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to spare murderers at the cost of sacrificing more innocent lives.
Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have all been released upon post conviction review. The anti death penalty claims, that the numbers are significantly higher, are a fraud, easily discoverable by fact checking.
The innocents deception of death penalty opponents has been getting exposure for many years. Even the behemoth of anti death penalty newspapers, The New York Times, has recognized that deception.
To be sure, 30 or 40 categorically innocent people have been released from death row . . . (1) This when death penalty opponents were claiming the release of 119 “innocents” from death row. Death penalty opponents never required actual innocence in order for cases to be added to their “exonerated” or “innocents” list. They simply invented their own definitions for exonerated and innocent and deceptively shoe horned large numbers of inmates into those definitions - something easily discovered with fact checking.
There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900.
If we accept that the best predictor of future performance is past performance, we can, reasonably, conclude that the DNA cases will be excluded prior to trial, and that for the next 8000 death sentences, that we will experience a 99.8% accuracy rate in actual guilt convictions. This improved accuracy rate does not include the many additional safeguards that have been added to the system, over and above DNA testing.
Of all the government programs in the world, that put innocents at risk, is there one with a safer record and with greater protections than the US death penalty?
Unlikely.
Full report -All Innocence Issues: The Death Penalty, upon request.
Full report - The Death Penalty as a Deterrent, upon request
(1) The Death of Innocents: A Reasonable Doubt,
New York Times Book Review, p 29, 1/23/05, Adam Liptak,
national legal correspondent for The NY Times
copyright 2007-2008, Dudley Sharp
Permission for distribution of this document, in whole or in part, is approved with proper attribution.
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS, VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O’Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.
Pro death penalty sites
http://homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Dudley%20Sharp%20-%20Justice%20Matters.aspx
http://www.dpinfo.com
http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPinformation.htm
http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/links/dplinks.htm
http://www.coastda.com/archives.html see Death Penalty
http://www.lexingtonprosecutor.com/death_penalty_debate.htm
http://www.prodeathpenalty.com
http://yesdeathpenalty.googlepages.com/home2 (Sweden)
http://www.wesleylowe.com/cp.html
Well, Dudley Sharp, I respectfully disagree with you all the way.
The death penalty has been debated for a very long time and remains a very hot topic. I don’t believe that it serves as a deterrent for crime, and I highly doubt that those who commit heinous crimes, actually stop beforehand and wonder what will happen to them if they get caught. The reality is that in many cases, they are psychopaths and they don’t give a damn about anything other than what gets them off.
I’m no expert in the matter, just been around the block long enough to make my own “informed” opinion on the matter. And the truth is… for every study that you can pull out that will support your claim, I could easily find another one that would show otherwise.
I am personally against the death penalty, because I value every human life, no matter what. Almost a hundred countries have banned the practice over the last century. Does it mean that that they are all wrong?
The US (in some states) remains on the list of those that still hold on to the practice, among other countries such as China, Irak, Vietnam and Iran. I’m sorry, I don’t mean any disrespect, but… it would freak the hell out of me to be associated with these countries when it comes to treating human beings.
There is no way you can justify the benefit of the death penalty. Sure, if you kill someone who has butchered an innocent life, you can be sure that he or she will never harm anyone else. But that’s not about the death penalty being a deterrent. That’s just getting even (and yes, I can see the appeal in that).
Just look at the way the system actually works… if someone gets capital punishment, it takes on average 20 years to get through the process… so, if someone goes and kills another person, he/she might get sentenced to death BUT will still be able to live for another 20 years. That in itself does not seem like a great deterrent to me.
Anyone will choose life over death, I give you that. It’s only a natural instinct. But it has nothing to do with the death penalty being a deterrent, because they probably don’t think about it until they are caught.
It is true that when people look at the issue, they tend to talk about the innocent who gets convicted. But at the same time, you cannot claim that every innocent victim hopes for the death penalty because not all do. Many of the surviving victims have actually lobbied to put a stop to the violence, and stand against the death penalty.
I don’t believe in the death penalty because I think it’s only a mean for governments to gloss over real issues. Don’t get me wrong, I am against killing a human being for any reason, but if someone does just that, I want them to be held responsible and put away for life. Forget the parole system, forget getting off on a technicality… that’s where the problem resides and no one seems willing to tackle it. Before we put in place barbarian measures that do not work, we should really explore changing the way the system works. Instead of the death penalty, implement a law so that whoever takes a life away, WILL be shipped ASOP to a far away island with no turning back, no appeal, no parole possible. THAT… I can see as a potential great deterrent, and at the same time, a safe measure for eveyone out there.
Yes, Lily is absolutely correct in saying that we can find lots of evidence to show that the death penalty does not work as a deterrent. And yes, psychopaths have been shown to have little brain activity during what would be a fear response in normal people. In other words, as Lily correctly stated, most criminals–particularly psychopaths–do not think about getting caught or the consequences of their actions (i.e., sentencing/punishment).
And, as I’ve stated before, the fact that far too many innocent people in North America have been proven to have been incarcerated wrongly. Imagine if they were also killed for no reason.
That’s the only reason I oppose the death penalty, because unlike Lily, I’m all for eradicating the planet of people who should not exist. Psychopaths fit that bill perfectly–including numerous ENRON CEOs, presidents, and other people in power. And if someone is proven unequivocally to have committed a horrendous crime worthy of death–without certain extenuating circumstance–I’m all for getting rid of the appeals process and saving millions of tax dollars housing these literal wastes of space.
[…] an update on a horrible story I wrote about a little while back (thanks, FTP!). Thankfully, justice has been served for the poor little girl who suffered a hell […]