Posted on 11/26/2012 12:26:57 PM PST by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
It’s been 20 years since I sat across a conference table from the attorney representing Robert Alton Harris, a double-murderer who had spent 13 years on California’s Death Row.
The attorney hoped to make the case that, despite his crimes, Harris should be spared his scheduled date with the executioner. He related that the convicted murderer was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. That he was neglected as a child. That he was abused as an adolescent.
I’m sorry, I told the attorney. Your client killed two boys. He deserves to pay the forfeit for taking innocent lives.
And not long after that, Harris died in California’s gas chamber. His was the Golden State’s first execution since 1967.
I thought about Harris, the killer, after watching “Benji,” a documentary on the life and death of Chicago high school basketballer Ben Wilson, which debuted last month and re-aired yesterday on ESPN.
Wilson was rated the nation’s best in class in 1984. And just days before he was to begin his senior season, he got into a beef with two 16-year-old gang members, Billy Moore and Omar Dixon.
Moore pulled a .22-caliber pistol out of his waistband and shot 17-year-old Wilson twice. The high school basketball star died in the hospital.
Wilson’s murder made national news. And nearly three decades later, the circumstances of his premature death has made for a most poignant documentary.
Yet, what I found most poignant was not Wilson’s tragic story. Not his funeral, which drew more than 10,000 mourners. Not the grace with which the young man’s mother, a devout Christian, comported herself after her son was violently taken from her.
But the redemptive story of Billy Moore, young Ben Wilson’s killer.
Moore was sentenced to 40 years in prison for Wilson’s murder. He spent 19 years behind bars before being granted parole in 2004.
Agreeing to appear in the documentary, Moore remembered praying that Wilson would survive the shooting that would claim his life. Perhaps, he said, praying as hard as the victim’s mother.
At his sentencing, Moore said, he spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, Ben’s grieving parents. “I gave them my deepest apology,” Moore said. “I didn’t want to be the one who stole (their son’s) dream.”
Today, Moore is a youth counselor. In 2009, he actually was recognized as a successful example of rehabilitation in a White House ceremony.
Twenty years ago, I would have argued that Moore should have been tried as an adult in Ben Wilson’s death and, if convicted, sentenced to life in prison, if not sentenced to death. I also would have strenuously objected to his parole, after serving little less than half sentence he actually received.
But my thinking has evolved over the past two decades.
I now believe there is no one beyond God’s redemption. Indeed, His Word promises: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”
Billy Moore, the reformed killer, is living proof.
Re; “Nothing emboldens sin more than mercy”
For sure! I once read an article in Reader’s Digest that was written by a Rabbi. It was entitled WHEN FORGIVENESS IS A SIN.
The writer was very clear as to how forgiving the unrepentant is very bad for both those who purport to “forgive” and those who feel that they have a right to forgiveness no matter what they do.
I am not willing to bet any child's safety on the sincerity of a pedophile's remorse or on his "good behavior" in a prison where he doesn't have access to children. I am not willing to bet my wife's or daughter's safety on a rapist's conversion. Similarly, I won't bet an innocent person's life on a murderer's change of behavior. The merciful response includes balancing mercy to the innocent against mercy for the guilty. I may forgive the criminal and still not be willing to forget. God's forgiveness is what matters for the criminal, but the safety of the innocent should be a major factor in decisions on mercy for the guilty.
There is always God’s redemption, and actually I’m surprised that the young killers you named got as long as they did for a non-premeditated killing in an argument, even if the killer was a gang member. In any case, most states do not allow execution of anybody that age.
As for adults guilty of premeditated murder, especially depraved killers (such as the one who was finally and way too late put to death in CA), as it was said once, there’s nothing that clarifies the mind like the prospect of hanging.
In my opinion, they’re more likely to repent and find God’s mercy if they’re sentenced to death than anything else.
If a murderer truly repents and pays for his sins, he will have a chance at going to Heaven when he dies.
Society’s job is to control crime by making criminals pay for it, thus discouraging others from stealing and killing because they fear the penalties, which will be justly applied.
If people commit deliberate murders, then they should face the death penalty. And if they subsequently repent while on death row, then as the saying goes, let God sort them out.
And if a Christian has contact with such people, he should urge them to repent and/or convert, not work at letting them go free, provided that they were justly convicted.
Give these animals mercy by throwing the switch or pushing the plunger on the syringe.But get it done.
It takes way to long to execute these murderous thugs.
Biggest problem I see with this story is the perp who got to live and extra 13 years on death row.
If we executed those who commit murder in under a year from the time they are convicted, the murder rate would drop radically.
You forgot the </ sarcasm> tag. Self-made orphans, indeed.
In my view, even after 20 years of appeals, death is too easy for murderers because it ends their suffering. However, the only way I support the present move toward life without possibility of parole as the most severe punishment is when it is also life in the strictest form of solitary confinment.
By the strictest form of solitary confinment, I mean complete solitude with absolutely no priviledges and no activities to divert their minds from the contemplation of their crimes. I visualize this as soundproof, padded cell kept in perpetual twilight; a cell kept at a temperature that is neither hot nor cold; a cell one never leaves; a cell where one will eat the same unvarying starvation-level meal, not too little and not too much, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. (Think something like vitamin-laced oatmeal made with beef broth.) No television, no radio, no books, no pen and paper, no nothing. The door closes and locks the condemned prisoner inside with their thoughts forever.
IOW, make the confinement the closest living equivalent of the tomb they sent their victims to. The purpose is punishment, not reform. BTW, if they go insane, so much the better; no medications as it increases their suffering.
Genesis 9:5-6
Last I heard, He hasn't evolved from his last position. Maybe it's in that new convenant I haven't seen along with Gay Marriage.
When Wesley Allan Dodd got mercy from God when he accepted Christ as his Savior. His conversion was not faked.
It is nice that you can be so forgiving, but it is not up to you. That is God’s prerogative.
To suggest that Stanley “Tookie” Williams should have been spared the needle belies that fact that many who are incarcerated for violent crimes and are rehabilitated only get God when the worst has befallen them.
Let them face god for their acts after their death, let them face their fellow citizens while they are alive. And if WE decide that this individual has committed a crime deserving of the ultimate penalty then let them face it.
The victims of these people were never given a chance to choose or repent. They were killed capriciously and without mercy. They should receive the same from their fellow citizens.
Wasn’t Paul a murderer?
Some people deserve a good killing, however.
There is a big difference between repentance and punishment.
If you commit a crime, you should be punished for that crime no matter if you are repentant or not.
I truly resent it when a plea bargain is offered to an offender, or an innocent person, that if they confess to the crime, whether or not they committed it, they will get a lesser sentence. Is this done solely to soothe the judge and the prosecutor, that they may sleep at night in the comfort that they have never, ever, convicted an innocent man?
Because they are lying to themselves.
Likewise, after conviction, judges often demand an admission of guilt, and *repentance*, or threaten to impose a harsher sentence. Of course, if you *admit* guilt, you also cannot appeal your sentence on the grounds of innocence. This is a foul dirty deal.
When you confuse repentance with punishment, the miscarriage of justice is almost guaranteed.
I remember the case of another California child killer, who was arrested and the evidence against him was damning. After an effective trial, just when the jury was being led out to reach their decision, he “flipped them off” with a hand gesture. To be expected from such scum.
They quickly found in guilty, and in that there was no fault. But then a juror said something horrific: “I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, until he flipped us off, and then I *knew* he was guilty!”
This stupid statement should have been enough to overturn the conviction, but it didn’t.
Yet this is the slippery slope you tread, when you consider redemption as mitigation to guilt and punishment.
Had the condemned killer not been executed, found Jesus, and became a good man, IT DOES NOT MATTER. What matters is that he is punished for his crime, no matter his state of mind. And if that punishment is execution, so be it. If he is to find redemption, let him do so before Saint Peter.
His chance for redemption on Earth is done. Justice demands punishment.
I would forgive them and hope that God has mercy on them as they serve their life sentence with no parole. Forgiveness has nothing to do with a clear and sensible punishment.
For every reformed Mr. Moore, there are twenty repeat offending, murdering and raping Mr. Smiths who will be freed to murder more and more innocent people in the name of this woman’s “Christian” forgiveness.
This is what is forgotten from the last time we played footsies with European socialism in the name of liberalism’s “Christian” criminal “reform.” The innocent became an endless stream of victims and their injury was ignored in the name of a criminal’s endless excuses. All attention and money went to the criminals who repeated and repeated their crimes. No one in power cared.
Americans were told by the “forgiving” Limo liberals and lazy politicans: if you don’t give more to welfare, housing projects and race prefenences, these poor criminal predators will be forced to murder you too. They did not care at all about the slaughter their “forgiveness” caused. No doubt the Trayvon Martin stories about the poor wittle predators shot by their targeted victims will accompany this slaughter and liberals will be prosecuting victim who does not die peacefully like they do in England.
Do we have to repeat this incompetence and if we do repeat it, don’t slaughter the innocent in God’s name! Can’t we just observe the endless rape of Infidels in Europe or the mass murder in Mexico and call it a day?
I’m not interested in “redemptive” stories either. All I see is someone who got away with murder and is now rather bragging about it. My idea of mercy is that we don’t torture them first.
If someone commits a capital crime, they desesrve the punishment, and if they are truly repentent, they will not want to be exempt from the punishment.
The soul is eternal, and if they are truly repentent, they will be rewarded.
Forgiveness and mercy is God’s to give. The law is (or should be) the law.
It can be said that to err is human and to forgive is divine, however too often when people say “I’m sorry’’ , what they’re really trying to do is change your mind.
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