Crime Headlines

“GUILTY!” the headlines screamed, as though the verdict was a surprise in the too-long trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, younger of the two brothers in the Boston Marathon Bombing. I say too-long because there was never any doubt about his guilt on the 30 counts, so why should there be this media shout? And now begins the second phase in this trial—death or life imprisonment. It will take only one juror to hold out for life imprisonment, and the people in this country are 50-50 on this issue. So it will be no surprise when they come up with life imprisonment. At a cost of about $50,000 a year for possibly sixty years, which equates to about three million of today’s dollars. Tsarnaev’s Chechen mother says that Americans are the terrorists, not her son. If the same crime had been committed in Chechnya, the bombers would have been hastily put to death, with never a question about taking care of them for life. So, would the death penalty be a deterrent to future terrorists in the U. S.? Certainly not, since so many of these terrorists are more than willing to strap on a suicide bomb and take a hundred or more innocent people with them. But we are a humane society and we will clothe, feed, house, and provide health care for this young man for the rest of his life.

And while I’m at it, what about Michael Slager, the South Carolina cop who gunned down a fleeing Walter Scott, saying he, Slager, “feared for his life?” How absolutely thoughtless, how absolutely stupid was Slager in this age of ubiquitous smart phones that can record every action at any time? It doesn’t matter what Walter Scott had done or how many previous crimes he may have committed, or how the two of them may have struggled for Slager’s Taser, it’s obvious from the video that officer Slager was never in any life-threatening danger, especially not when he gunned down the fleeing Scott. Our police forces around the country are here to protect us from crime and criminals, but not to take vigilante justice into their own hands.