Choke Him!

"Choking is what I did and I was pretty good at it,"

These are the words of Gary Ridgeway, a guy who' s major accomplishment in life has been to brutally murder 48 women. He has the distinction of being the most prolific serial killer in the U.S. to date. He beat Bundy. He beat Dahmer. He beat Gacy.

At least we got him, you say, and he can't do it again. Not so fast. Instead of the death penalty, this miserable shred of human debris plea bargained his sentence down to life in prison. No he won't be executed. The taxpayers of the great state of Washington will be paying for a warm bed and three square meals a day for him for the rest of his natural life, which at the age of 54, could be another three or four decades.

There are some who are happy about this outcome. The death penalty is cruel and unusual, they say. It's vengance. It's not fitting of a civilized society. What a wholesale bunch of crap.

First of all, plea bargaining with a brutal murderer is ridiculous. In this case, it appears that they had enough DNA and crime scene evidence to convict him on at least some of the murders. They didn't need to make a deal with him to get him to confess to more. Even so, how can you trust the word of a guy who is more than likely going to try to cover his ass for self-preservation? This guy spent most of the past 20+ years tricking women into believing he was a nice guy so he could take them out and strangle them. Fry him. It's what an evil bastard like this deserves.

If there are any death penalty opponents reading this right now, their pent-up seething liberal rage has probably boiled over and they're spinning into outer space. "He says 'fry him', see, it's pure vengance" their namby-pamby little minds are thinking. Well, simmer down, liberals. You've got it wrong and I'll explain it if you can deal with the truth. If you can't, you had better move on. Find some liberal blog that won't tax your world view or your critical thinking skills so much.

First of all, death penalty supporters aren't out for vengeance. This guy strangled 48 women. Jeffrey Dahmer killed numerous small-framed boys and men and cooked their parts on his stove after forcing or tricking them into having sex with him. John Wayne Gacy just had a different method of disposing of his victims after having sex with them -- he buried the bodies of 28 young men and boys in the crawl space under his house. The fact that they committed these crimes is not a matter of dispute. The only fair and just punishment for these guys is to pay with their life.

Secondly, people like this don't sit around in prison feeling terrible remorse and guilt for the rest of their lives. They're sociopaths for God's sake. They're going to do what they have to do to keep themselves alive. In this case, it was to admit to 48 brutal murders. Most sociopaths are going to sit around and try to figure out how they can get out or how they can appeal their sentence, tying up the legal system, spending our hard earned tax dollars and forcing us to pay to keep them alive. After all they've got nothing but time. Some even kill again -- in prison. In Iowa, a lifer who was convicted of killing his brother's girlfriend, cutting her head off, throwing the head out of his car on a farm road and having sex with the headless corpse before stashing it in his bathtub, killed an inmate convicted of robbery with a dinner utensil. Not that robbery is a laudible activity and I don't know the particulars of the guy's crime, but perhaps he deserved another shot at life that he doesn't get now because this twisted murderer was kept alive. You see, Iowa is one of those "progressive" states that doesn't have the death penalty.

Finally, sometimes these death row guys who have nothing better to do than sit around and think actually do figure out how to escape. You hear about it happening once of twice a year, It happened in Texas not too long ago and those guys killed several people before being caught in Colorado. Try telling the relatives and friends of their most recent victims that life in prison is okay because "they can never get out" and "they have to live with what they did for the rest of their life". As far as I'm concerned, in these types of cases, the rest of their life should consist of the time between the time the judge hands down the sentence and the time it takes to warm up the electric chair and strap them in.