DC Sniper to Die on Tuesday
On Friday I wrote a piece about the Ft. Hood shootings. In it I discussed how we have not in fact lost lives to Islamic terrorists since 9/11 (not on American soil, at least), but we have, sadly, lost large numbers of people to mass killings and shootings carried out by an assortment of psychopaths, sociopaths, and otherwise unbalanced persons since that date, none of whom were motivated by religious extremism.
One of those instances I mentioned was that of the notorious Beltway killers, also called the “D.C. Sniper”, a pair who killed 10 people and terrorized many more with their random, stealthy shootings.
In a footnote to that post, I see a news report this evening that the mastermind of that duo, John Allen Muhammad, is slated to die by lethal injection tomorrow night, Tuesday November 10. It is unlikely he’ll receive any reprieve.
In contrast to so many death row sentences, he is not spending decades awaiting execution, but is being pushed relatively swiftly through our ponderous legal system. (He and his sidekick Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested in 2002).
Wheels grind slowly but exceeding fine, and all that.
I note that the press has been very uninterested in finding out anything about him as a human being. I finally found an interview with his siblings, recounting severe childhood abuse by his parents, possibly causing brain damage, which is typical of violent criminals.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/02/10/sprj.dcsp.s...
Interviews with his ex-wives covered only domestic violent. There was no indication of whether his thinking was irrational.
I found no interviews with other people who knew him, no indication of his habits of thinking.
If society does not defend children, why do we deserve to be safe when they grow up? Why should they care about us?
That's a good point and a great observation, Patricia. Yes, after that pair were caught they did drop right off the radar, didn't they? There was very little insight offered to the public in the media about who they were or what motivated them.
Then again, we were right at the accelerating downswing of the mainstream media's descent into "stenographer to the powers that be." As the press corp was forgetting how to ask questions in 2002, and investigative journalism was being kneecapped left right and center, there was a whole lotta stuff that got no looking at.
This was one of them.