From here:
Russell Williams has gone off to prison, where he will have ample time — the next 25 years at least — to reflect on the evil he unleashed: the brave young women he tortured and killed, and the pain and suffering he inflicted on their loved ones.
It is more likely, however, that he will choose to reflect on how much he misses his cat, or on the bad luck of having tires with a unique pattern, and the misfortune of there being snow on the ground to make that pattern visible to police. Who knows what sociopaths reflect on when they are incarcerated? Who cares?
If ever there was a moment for a national discussion on a return to capital punishment, this is it. We have before us a serial torturer and killer, and a nauseating superfluity of evidence attesting to his crimes, not to mention his own detailed confessions.
Williams’ crimes were born of neither passion nor insanity. On the contrary, his crimes are distinguished by the dispassion and sanity he brought to bear in committing them. Williams led a double life with chilling efficiency and organization. He was so competent at compartmentalizing his professional life and domestic life from his life of perversion that his own wife and closest associates were totally bamboozled. That takes a high order of intelligence and ruthless planning to carry on. Everything he did was premeditated.
Williams has no right to live. He should die.
The arguments against the death penalty generally run along the lines of:
To kill someone is always wrong. It is difficult to maintain this pacifist position without hypocrisy while living in a society whose order and well-being are maintained by force or the threat of force.
To kill someone to punish them for murder makes the state as bad as the murderer. If that were true, the state could not imprison kidnappers or use force at all to maintain order since it would always be as bad as the criminal.
From a Christian perspective, to kill someone gives them less time to repent and turn to Christ. Alternatively, as Dr. Johnson noted, the threat of one’s imminent demise serves to concentrate the mind, so it could lead to accelerated repentance.
Capital punishment is not a deterrent. The original article addresses this to some extent. Common sense would tell us that insofar that any punishment is a deterrent against crime, the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime should be more of a deterrent than imprisonment.
Capital punishment is wrong since human life is sacred. True, but if capital punishment is a deterrent, it would save lives and protect the innocent.
Capital punishment is irreversible. True; and the impossibility of correcting a mistake is one of the few convincing arguments against capital punishment.
Temporal justice has always seemed to me to be tinged with fraudulence; as Pascal noted, “if magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would of itself be venerable enough”. Nevertheless, if temporal justice has any meaning, I find it hard to see how someone like Russell Williams should not be put to death.
Perhaps a kindly prison guard will walk by his prison cell one day and unsuspectantly toss in his pant belt. That way Russell can save us all a lot of time, frustration and money on his own accord. I’m pretty sure he’ll get the hint.
Years ago when an earthly judge would pass judgement on an individual found guilty of a crime that called for a death sentence. A sentence that God calls for according to His Word. The judge would say and may God have mercy on your soul. The judge recognized that he or she did not have the final say on where they would spend eternity. Today the courts do not recognize God’s authority or His existence. We will spend $ 5,000,000 dollars to provide for the needs of this sociopath over the next 25 years. plus another several million on his pension. He will write a book and get access to free porn at our expense, conjugal visits from his wife. What he did was so terrible within a few years we will make a movie about it and sell tickets to see the mayhem. Further proof that once we decide to play the role of God we slowly but surely end up creating Hell on earth.
The bible gave the ancient Israelites the right to put criminals to death. We are under a new covenant – those are civil punishments which no longer apply to Christians, and which Christians no longer have a biblical warrant to inflict.
David’s first point doesn’t follow. There is a vast difference between a police officer killing someone in the line of duty and allowing the state to put someone to death. The former is often necessary to protect the officer or society. Capital punishment isn’t – the offender is already behind bars where he can do no more harm.
If capital punishment is a deterrent, why is our murder rate lower than in the US?
It costs just as much, if not more, to put someone to death as it does to put someone away and throw away the key (appeals, longer trials, etc). Do you think, if we had the death penalty, that Williams would’ve confessed? Not likely. There would have been a long, involved, and costly trial, and his victims who are still living would have had to testify.
The pension is really moot – what can he do with it? I hope it goes to his wife. Perhaps his victims will sue him, and the pension can go to them.
Murder is wrong, period. Whether the state does it or a person does it. Vengance belongs to God, and capital punishment crosses the line from punishment into vengance. Williams is going to spend 23 hours a day, for the rest of his life, in a room not much bigger than a walk in closet. (2.5 meters by 3 meters). He will not have free access to porn (no internet), and he won’t even have a tv unless he pays for it himself. Frankly, I think that sort of complete isolation is a worse punishment than a clean quick death.
Hello Kate,
This time I entirely agree with you. Well said.
If I may I would also like to contribute this. One of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not murder”. In my humble opinion capital punishment is murder carried out by the state/government. For this one reason alone I cannot endorse nor support capital punishment.
What I do disagree with is the prospect of Williams EVER being able to apply for parole. He should be put in an oubliette, forever. And that means his rotting corpse can stay there until the end of days.
Here’s a link to per capita murder rates, by country:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
The USA appears much higher up on that list than Canada does.
The prospect of capital punishment is only one of countless societal influences that affect a county’s murder rate. To single out one factor, be it capital punishment or gun control, compare it to the murder rate, and than draw a conclusion is outright foolish.
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The absence of the death penalty, or its abolition, gives our the bad message that the life of the perpetrator is ultimately more important than the victim, and those of potential victims (the “Humanist”, ie. in-humanist, materialist understanding of human nature is the root cause: the belief that humans are basically good, and capable of being reformed and perfected, and are probably not responsibile for their actions anyway (many materialists now attack the idea of free will)). The argument against the death penalty is the possibility (remote, maybe, but real nontheless) that a totally innocent person can be executed by mistake – “better to let many murderers go than kill one innocent person”.
I don’t think the absence of the death penalty says that at all, John. The absence of a meaningful punishment for murder would say that. Locking him up and throwing away the key, which is basically what we have done, says that the lives of the victims were important. Here is a link describing how he will live for the rest of his life:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/10/24/prison-life-williams.html
Every single human being is precious in God’s sight. Every one.
I do wonder, though, why his life sentences were concurrent. If they were consecutive, it would have been a guarantee that he never gets out. (If he were ever granted parole, the second life sentence would start).