For the record: I don’t support the death penalty
Ok, I get that your life was falling apart in front of you but people have been through worse and not brutally raped and murdered 11 year old girls.
Plenty of people get kicked out of their homes by their significant others. People lose their jobs, people get sexually, physically, and mentally abused as children and still don’t become murders. Plenty of people battle addictions with heroin or cocaine and deal with their lives falling apart, but they turn to people and ask for help.
My point being, thousands of people have been in his situation and did not kill or rape someone simply because their life had hit rock bottom. You destroyed the life of someone who was too young to be frightened of dying… and you ask for forgiveness for the sake of your children? You want your children to get to know their murdering, ex drug addict father while he serves a life sentence? How is that fair? It isn’t.
I don’t support the death penalty. I think killing people is wrong, period. How can you say “killing is wrong” and then believe that it is ok for the government to kill people? I don’t like the idea of “an eye for an eye”. I do, however, believe that capital punishment must exist in order to prevent certain crimes and to be used in extreme circumstances. I’m not saying this man deserves the death penalty by any means. What I am saying is that his reasoning disgusts me more than his crime. If I was his lawyer (which I would never be), I would not have let him make that plea for those reasons. He wants what he took away from that little girl’s family, no one should grant him life in prison for those reasons.
Being a drug addict in recovery is tough, I’m sure. But I doubt every ex drug addict who goes through a rough patch in their life goes out and decides to murder someone because they were “so high”.
Being high is not an excuse.
Being “down on your luck” is not an excuse.
Receiving “inadequate” treatment is not an excuse.
There is no excuse for murdering and raping an 11 year old girl.
As an after thought, how is it possible that 2 members of that jury found him “not guilty” (for whatever reason) when he CONFESSED TO THE CRIME? I was under the impression that a jury was there to decide whether someone was innocent or guilty, not whether they were “not guilty” because they were high. Somehow, confessing to the crime should trump any “reasonable doubt” the jury of his “peers” had. But it didn’t.
It is because of people like this man that parents fear for the lives of their children.