October 05, 2026
Rules and Consequences
Timothy Birdnow
Innocent until proven guilty is the cornerstone of the American legal system (except in some specific cases, mostly involving civil law). It is also not innocent until proven unquestionably guilty but until proven beyond a REASONABLE doubt; you can convict a woman of raping and murdering another woman, say,because it is not a reasonable doubt to claim women are nurturers and do not do such things. That may be your personal opinion but it is not a reasonable doubt.
This is important in the debate over the death penalty. At this time in history we not only have a scientific basis to determine guilt or innocence but we also have multiple appeals so that the case will be chewed over worse than abc gum.
This is important in the debate. In the days of the Founding Fathers It was much, much harder to get credible evidence proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. You had to have eye-witnesses and physical evidence like a bloody knife or whatnot. Despite that the Founders did not ban capital punishment. They did ban cruel and unusual" punishment, which they put in place to avoid blood feud style retribution. No throwing homosexuals off buildings or 'eye for an eye' punishments where you got a guy's body part off for his cutting someone else. But it was never, ever intended to end capital punishment and in fact that is one of the proscribed punishments for treason IN THE CONSTITUTION. Treason is, by and large, difficult to prove. IF the Founders had intended there to be no executions they would have enumerated that in the founding document.
A murderer forfeits their right to live.
That isn't true of all killers. An accidental killing should not be subject to the death penalty, for instance. A drunk driver might kill a child in a car crash but there was no malice aforethought and as a result the drunk should be punished but not by the ultimate sentence (in that case it would be cruel and unusual punishment). Even someone who stabs his girlfriend may, perhaps, be excused the death penalty (this is where debate will come in, no doubt) if it was done in a fit of rage and the killer out of control. But premeditated murder is absolutely inexcusable and justice demands we carry out sentence.
Justice demands. A civilized society carries out justice. It is exactly why the authorities have the "power of the sword" as the Bible put it "to punish evildoers". It is not to rehabilitate very bad people (you will fail if you try) but because there are certain crimes that justice demands final punishment over. It is not to teach anybody anything; it is to show society at large that we hold a moral code that may not be broken and when someone does so in so egregious a manner then as civilized people we must forfeit their lives.
There are rules and there are consequences. They should be clear and applied equally and fairly, but they should be applied.
I would point out that, while there was always plenty of killing (particularly in the frontier back in the day) America never had the kind of cruelty we are seeing since we restricted the death penalty. Yes, gangsters shot people, and sometimes did worse, but these days ordinary people are committing extraordinarily brutal crimes. IF it is so civilized to end the death penalty then these sorts of crimes should have slowed down. We were told by the anti-death penalty crowd that violence by the State only begets violence from the citizenry. We were lied to.
And even now our squeamishness towards the death penalty has led to executions happening decades after the crime, and in private so they have no chilling effect on other evildoers. The whole point of the death penalty is for it to be public and notorious and for everyone to SEE justice being carried out.
We need to bring back public executions. It's unfortunate but it's necessary.
And how do we judge a society that gives greater rights and has more concern for the villain than the poor victim? What kind of moral code is that?
At any rate this was prompted by the failure to successfully execute Christa Pike, a woman who lured a romantic rival into a remote area, tortured her for over half an hour, cut a pentagram into her chest, then killed her. And after decades on death row she finally went to her execution and it failed because Tennessee was using a method that was too kind and soft.
American Thinker discusses the matter in a post that echoes what I said above, something I've long argued.
The article quotes reports about what happened that day:
Pike murdered her Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, in a jealous rage in January 1995 because she believed the victim was trying to steal her boyfriend, prosecutors said.
Along with her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and her friend Shadolla Peterson, also 18, Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus to brutally torture and kill her.
Peterson acted as a lookout while Pike and Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest with a boxcutter, beat her with a meat cleaver and repeatedly slashed her throat while she pleaded in vain for her life.
At the end of the horrific ordeal, which investigators said lasted at least 30 minutes, Pike murdered Slemmer by bashing her head in with a large chunk of asphalt and then kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
Just because she was still in her teens that doesn't excuse this behavior, nor does anything else (like the fact it happened decades ago); she forfeited her right to life when she carried out so brutal a torture/murder. We can have mercy on her soul but her body belongs to the People of the Great State of Tennessee.
Mercy does not compel us to excuse this woman; mercy compels us to bring justice for the victim and the victim's family, who have been imprisoned in hell through no fault of their own. Where is the mercy for THEM?
Where is the mercy for the public at large?
Since we are discussing the Bible (one of the core sources for American jurisprudence) I would like to mention 1 Samuel 15:14. God had commanded King Saul to commit an act of genocide, to put the Amalekites under the "ban" aka wipe them out, their families out, and their livestock out. All of it. It sounds harsh but in those days it was the only way to deal with a corrupting influence like the Amalekites, who would come back to haunt Israel. So God commanded Saul to end them all. Saul found his moral judgement to be superior to that of God's. And in his greed he killed the people but kept their livestock.
When the prophet Samuel arrived he chastised Saul
"And Samuel said, What’s this I’m hearing? The bleating of sheep, the mooing of cattle? What’s going on?”
And Saul tried to excuse his disobedience to God by saying he saved the cattle to make a sacrifice to God, but that wasn't what he was ordered to do.
For this act and a few others God gave Saul over to madness and to his eventual destruction by the Philistines. When God commands you had better obey.
That is not to say we are not to be tempered by mercy, but there are some acts that cannot be forgiven by Man; it is up to God to forgive certain things. Otherwise you will decline, Saul-lie, into madness and eventual destruction.
We now believe we are God's moral superiors and this hubris will not go unpunished. If we cannot execute someone as vile as this gal then how can we enforce any other laws? We no longer hold the moral high ground - it's just power now. We have the power to constrain and to imprison but not the moral right to judge.
THAT is what a refusal to enforce the death penalty ultimately gives us.
And every time we perform an unjust act of mercy we degrade ourselves further and when that happens the State finds easier pickings to uphold their own sense of moral superiority, largely against people who do not deserve it, the good people who are trying to do good and be obedient to God and morally righteous laws. Far easier to arrest a Christian praying at the door of an abortion clinic than to arrest a satanic killer; the Christian will go quietly. It's why oppressive systems become that way in the first place - there is a moral and spiritual myopia that sets in and the people in power are eager to show they have the power to judge the public but don't want to take on the hard work of judging the truly unrighteous. Tyranny is usually born of a myopic vision of justice.
Then the death penalty will be overused; both are flip sides of the same moral myopia.
Author Mike Rogers is absolutely correct in his assessment. A decent people do not reject the death penalty. Nor do they hide it and make it clean and sanitary as we have done. We need to restore public executions to warn evildoers, and to remind ourselves.
And honestly it may be more cruel to leave a woman on death row for a quarter of a century anyway. Better to get it done.
We have to grow up in the Western World. We've become children with juvenile minds and juvenile hearts.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:41 AM
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