Death sentences

Nearly three-dozen men sit on death row in Arkansas, where capital punishment has been suspended since 2005. Unless clemency is granted, eight of them will be given lethal injections all within a 10-day period later this month.

Why so many? Why the rush?

The New York Times reports that the unprecedented pace is “brought about by a looming expiration date for a drug used by the state for lethal injections.” The drug is midazolam, “which has been used in several botched and gruesome lethal injections in other states in recent years.” Because of the controversy surrounding midazolam’s use, “a number of pharmaceutical companies have restricted their drugs from use for capital punishment.”

Anti-death penalty groups are upset, and the state is having difficulty acquiring a sufficient number of witnesses, as required by law.

These are “bad hombres,” as President Trump might describe them. Many of them have been on death row for more than 20 years while the appeals process ground on.

Don Davis, now 54, was sentenced to death in 1992. He is to be executed on Monday. Davis was convicted of shooting 62-year-old Jane Daniel in the back of the head while robbing her home, even though she complied with his demands to hand over her valuables.

Bruce Earl Ward, 60, is also slated for execution Monday. He’s been on death row since 1990 after being convicted of murdering 18-year-old Rebecca Doss at a Little Rock convenience store where she worked the night shift. The court heard testimony that Ward drove around town looking for a victim and strangled the young woman in the store restroom.

In 1993, Stacey E. Johnson, now 47, raped, beat, strangled, and then killed Carol Heath, a mother of two. Heath was attacked in her home. The Sun newspaper reported her daughter, Ashley, then 6, “was found staring out her bedroom window the following morning … having spent the night knowing her mother was dead in the room next door.”

The list goes on, but this is their common profile.

Now for the innocent.

According to the Arkansas Department of Health, 3,771 abortions took place in the state in 2015, part of the more than 59 million abortions performed in the United States since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Where is the anti-death penalty crowd’s compassion for those babies or for the many women who say they regretted their decision to terminate their pregnancies and would have made a different choice had they received additional information?

Those opposed to capital punishment can certainly gin up outrage and sympathy for convicted murderers and rapists but seem to offer very little sympathy to the relatives of their victims and not an ounce of outrage for the innocent unborn who have been aborted.

Is this an unfair comparison? Not at all. Consider this. Many oppose the death penalty because they claim all human life has value. Then is not an innocent unborn human life? How is an unborn baby any less valuable than a convicted rapist or murderer?

For secular-progressives, opposition to the death penalty appears to be based largely on sentiment, not on the intrinsic value of life.

For secular-progressives, opposition to the death penalty appears to be based largely on sentiment, not on the intrinsic value of life. Yes, there are reasons to oppose the death penalty. It can often be unequally applied. I get that. But I’m speaking of the larger moral issue.

On several occasions I have offered people opposed to the death penalty a deal. I will oppose capital punishment for the guilty, if they will oppose “capital punishment” for the innocent unborn.

I am still waiting to hear from them.

Listen to Cal Thomas’ commentary on the April 13 edition of The World and Everything in It.