Death Row..what a brother know!!!

Charles Manson has spent more than half his life in prison for masterminding the notorious Helter Skelter killing spree that left actress Sharon Tate(wife of Roman Polanski another blog altogether) and six others dead in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969. While his appearance has changed significantly from the wide-eyed cult leader who appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1969, Manson continues to wield influence over some who consider him a wizened messenger. According to CNN.com Prison officials say Manson still gets lots of mail and spends most of his days singing and playing guitar in a high security unit. This crime happened 40 years ago yet Charles Manson is still alive and actually has followers. He just celebrated his 75th birthday, he is able to celebrate and enjoy his birthday albeit in prison, but he is still aboveground and in reasonably good health. After the Manson Family killings probably the most notorious serial killer would be David Berkowitz , otherwise known as The Son of Sam. The twelve months of terror that David Berkowitz inflicted on the people of New York that culminated in 1977 was such a huge event that it became known as the Summer of Sam. Berkowitz confessed to killing six people and wounding seven others in the course of eight shootings in New York between 1976 and 1977; also this week John Allen Muhammad was executed by the state of Virginia on Tuesday night. During three weeks in October 2002, Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, Muhammad’s step son then 17, killed 10 people and wounded three, while taunting police with written messages and phoned-in threats and demands. During two trials and in years of appeals, Muhammad professed his innocence. One of his trials included testimony from Malvo, whose youth excluded him from consideration for the death penalty.

These are just a few instances where I’m perplexed by the justice system. Charles Manson and his followers brutally slaughtered 7 people yet he gets to remain alive and basically living off of tax dollars for 40 years and counting. John Muhammad had so little regard for human life that Prosecutors say he intended the killings to provide a smokescreen to cover up his real goal -- killing his ex-wife Mildred and gaining custody of his three children. Muhammad was put to death by lethal injection 7 years after the fact. David Berkowitz was sentenced to 365 years in prison. Since being imprisoned, David Berkowitz has undergone “religious” conversion. He has become a writer and evangelist, his supposed strongest desire is to repair the evil that came out of him during his madness. While redemption and repentance are things that I do believe in, I still think after killing people there has to be some type of retribution by the justice system. Some states don’t have the death penalty and others such as California spend more than $130 million a year on its capital punishment system -- housing and prosecuting inmates and coping with an appellate system that has kept some convicted killers waiting for an execution date since the late 1970s Forty executions have occurred so far in 2009 in 10 states, all by lethal injection. That total is up from 37 for all of last year, but less than half of the high of 98, from 10 years ago. The Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

The Death Penalty Information Center study found that death penalty costs can average $10 million more per year per state than life sentences. Increased costs include higher security needs and guaranteed access to an often lengthy pardon and appellate process. The group is an information resource on capital punishment, and opposes its application as unworkable, inefficient and prone to mistakes. Many death penalty proponents say part of the problem is that states have added unnecessary, time-consuming delays, and have been reluctant to carry out the death penalty that their own legislatures have enacted. They say states should carry out the wishes of judges and juries that weighed evidence and imposed death on the worst murderers. In states with the death penalty, the average county obtained sentences of at least 20 years in almost 51 percent of cases in which the defendant was charged with murder and convicted of murder or voluntary manslaughter. Those sentences were reached through a guilty plea in about 19 percent of the cases. In states without the death penalty, sentences of at least 20 years were obtained in 40 percent of those cases, but only 5 percent were guilty pleas, about one-quarter of the number in the death penalty states. That study relied on U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 33 large urban counties. When it comes to worst murders, who is worse someone that shoots his victims or someone that stabs his victims? Does it matter no of course not murder is murder and if someone is sentenced to death then they should be put to death. There are mitigating factors in certain instances, and yes some innocent people have been put to death (mainly minorities), and that’s not to say that the death penalty is used disproportionately against us. My point is that when you have serial killers and admitted murders …KILL EM