Equal Justice?
Delegate Kenneth R. "Ken" Plum
 
The crimes for which Teresa Lewis pleaded guilty were horrendous.  She plotted with two men, with whom she and her 16-year-old daughter were having a sexual relationship, to kill her husband and stepson.  She provided the money to purchase the murder weapons.  The plan was to split the money from a $250,000 life insurance policy.  She left the door of her trailer unlocked so that the two men could enter, with one man shooting her husband five times with a shotgun and the other man shooting her stepson three times while she watched.
 
All three pleaded guilty.  The two men were sentenced to life imprisonment.  Theresa Lewis was given the death penalty.  Last week she was killed by lethal injection, becoming the twelfth woman to be executed in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.  Although she had not fired a shot, the "vileness" of the crime in which she was involved made her eligible for the death penalty.  Never mind that some professionals considered her borderline mentally retarded.
 
Mary Atwell, a professor of criminal justice at RadfordUniversity, has written a book on women and the death penalty, Wretched Sisters:  Examining Gender and Capital Punishment.  She contends that with the small percentage of murders that result in the death penalty, the women who are executed are those who "fail to live up to expectations of how respectable women behave."  Certainly Teresa Lewis fit that description.
 
Last week the Richmond Times Dispatch retold on its front page the horrid details of the crime in which Teresa Lewis was involved.  Filling out the front page was the story of Sam McCroskey, who just across the state from where Teresa Lewis lived pleaded guilty to bludgeoning to death with a wood-splitting maul four persons, including his 16-year-old girlfriend and her mother, a Longwood University professor.  He stayed in his girlfriend's house for two days with the bodies of three victims until the girl's father returned, and then killed him as well.  He pleaded guilty to two counts of capital murder and two counts of first-degree murder.  His sentence - life in prison!
 
I join with others who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds.  But if Virginia and many other states choose not to repeal the death penalty as has been done in about 130 countries, should we not take action to ensure that it is equally applied?  As Mary Atwell wrote in the introduction of her book, "Justice Thurgood Marshall claimed that if Americans understood the injustices that characterize the working of the capital punishment system, they would reject it."

 

Big Sales Tax Holiday October 8-11