A Texas man who unsuccessfully challenged the safety of the state’s lethal injection drugs and raised questions about evidence used to persuade a jury to sentence him to death for killing an elderly woman decades ago was executed late Tuesday.
Jedidiah Murphy, 48, was pronounced dead after an injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the October 2000 fatal shooting of 80-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham of the Dallas suburb of Garland. Cunningham was killed during a carjacking.
“To the family of the victim, I sincerely apologize for all of it,” Murphy said while strapped to a gurney in the Texas death chamber and after a Christian pastor, his right hand on Murphy’s chest, prayed for the victim’s family, Murphy’s family and friends and the inmate.
“I hope this helps, if possible, give you closure,” Murphy said.
The bottom line is that any law that can be used to rightfully execute a guilty person can be abused to wrongfully execute an innocent. It isn’t that expensive to house criminals, and you should be happy to pay for it on the off chance that you end up as one of those few innocent people wrongfully convicted.
It’s only inexpensive to house criminals because we house so many of them, when we should be rehabilitating them and having a minimal long term prison population. However, that would also be leaving the worst of the worst criminals, people who cannot be rehabilitated, people who continually harm others. Sure, it’s possible for a person to be convicted of one crime, get the death penalty and then later be exhonerated and proven innocent, but if someone has been convicted for 3 or more different serious offenses and failed multiple attempts at rehabilitation that worked for almost everyone else, that continually and sometimes successfully violently attacks the guards? They’re clearly guilty.
At some point, at some extreme limit of the most deplorable a human can be, killing them would be better than keeping them.
But we can’t even say anyone has got to that point, because we don’t try and rehabilitate.
True as this is, reducing the length of sentences won’t reduce the number. There’ll always be people in prison serving a year or two, even in a perfect world of rehabilitation-focused incarceration.
And killing them remains barbaric, especially when our methods of execution are all as torturous as lethal injection and electrocution. We should be better than that.