[dropcap]I[/dropcap] suppose I should out myself from the beginning as being opposed to the death penalty. At the very least I’m against it till we develop a system that assures 100% certainty that we are killing the right person, and that assures that every deserving scumbag gets an equal chance at the needle.
We are nowhere near that competent, or even concerned about getting it right for that matter, so I remain at the default position of con.
That being said, in regards to the September 23rd scheduled execution of Teresa Lewis in Virginia, I have an amended position.
Let’s throw some burgers on the grill, crack open a few cold ones, and watch them ice this murdering bitch on pay-per-view. Or maybe we could tweak the date a little and do it at half time of a football game. Terry Bradshaw could do the play by play.
We’ll put Sponge Bob on DVD in the other room for the kids.
I’m not just fascinated by the Lewis case because executions of women are rare. Though they are, exceedingly. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, there have been over 1,200 executions in the United States. A whopping 11 of them, or less than 1%, were women. Lewis will, if not saved by the Supreme Court or the Virginia Governor, be the first dead woman walking in that state in 98 years.
This stands in pretty stark contrast considering women commit, by DOJ estimates, 10% of all murders, are involved in 35% of all domestic homicides (are involved means, like Lewis, they get other people to kill for them) and nearly 30% of murders where the victim was another family member.
On death row, it seems, the vagina exemption is almost a given.
And that really is what makes this particular case so interesting. It is not just that female executions don’t keep up with female criminality, it’s why they don‘t. And that requires us to take another much needed look at that most peculiar of growing social phenomenon, the pussy pass.
From all the evidence available, Lewis used her pussy to get into this trouble and now wants to use it to avoid paying the price. For the latter she is getting a lot of help; that coming from her attorneys, but bolstered by a gynocentric media that is reaching a frothing and feverish pitch in activism on her behalf.
On the surface, it might appear that they have a case to make for her.
One of Lewis’s hired killers, 22 year old Matthew Shallenberger, is alleged to have written a letter in which he claims to have manipulated Lewis, who reportedly has a low I.Q., into the crime. Apparently, the boy had Game, but not on a level that helped him with the state. He killed himself after getting a life sentence.
Lewis’s lawyers have had trouble getting the letter admitted into evidence.
It is also the contention of her counsel, with supporting expert opinions, that Lewis has a Dependent Personality Disorder, which makes her susceptible to being manipulated by men.
That’s clinical speak for the pussy pass. It has to be the man’s fault, right? Women don’t do these things unless someone makes them, and that someone is always a man.
But there are some other inconvenient facts around the case that don’t work in Lewis’s favor. For instance, there was an earlier failed plot to kill her husband and step son, and to help seal the deal Lewis had taken her 16 year old daughter to have sex with the second gunman, 19 year old Rodney Fuller. Apparently it was all the encouragement he needed.
Also, in consideration is the fact that Lewis financed the purchase of the weapons, left the front door of the home unlocked so that the gunmen could slip in and waited over 30 minutes as her husband lay bleeding to death before calling 911. It was actually the husband, Julian, who stubbornly clung to life long enough to tell the police at the scene that his wife knew the people who shot him, that quickly put investigators onto Lewis as the culprit. When she broke under questioning, she told investigators she did it for the money.
It would be easy enough to argue that any of that could still be consistent with her attorney’s assertion that this was a simple minded woman who got drawn in by a more intelligent and manipulative mastermind.
The only problem with that is that it really doesn’t matter. Death chambers have taken the lives of many men of low intelligence and who were highly impressionable. But there is not a penis pass, so they get the needle anyway.
And as you peruse the headlines of any of about a hundred news stories currently running on Lewis’s execution, you get the real reason for wanting to save her from her debt to society.
She is, well, a she. Lack of intelligence and impressionability aside, the one thing every news agency, and her lawyers keep hammering on to the public is that we are about to kill a woman. The rest is just window dressing that can be seen on every death row appeal ever written in the last hundred years.
Low intelligence means nothing, unless it is low enough that the person cannot comprehend the nature of their acts, or tell the difference between right and wrong.
All of Lewis’s behaviors, before the murders and up to this very moment are bombastic advertising that she knew exactly what she was doing and knew that it was wrong. And all we are witnessing now is a society struggling to cling to the idea that a woman’s life, even a calculated killer, is more valuable than a man’s.
I think we should start sending female killers to death row, and keep sending them, until we finally get smart enough to give this stupid and vile form of sexism its swan song; until we execute our own bigotry.
And if you are against the death penalty, this would be the wisest strategy to pursue. If you really want to end capital punishment, start executing women every time they legally deserve it. The death chambers would shut down overnight. And if that is not a sign of a very sick society, nothing is.
