Murdering Baby Rapist

If you consider the title of this post harsh, it's only to remind you what we're talking about.  The Huffington Post is up in outrage about a man executed recently in Oklahoma.  It seems that in January, Oklahoma executed Charles Warner,  Charles had been convicted not once, but twice .  The second trial came, apparently on the issue of technical matters of the first trial.  The jury found him guilty again, and his case proceeded to the mandatory appeals that follow every death verdict.

The facts are not at issue, only the technical aspects of the case.  What we know is that Warner's live-in girlfriend left her 11-month-old baby in Warner's care while she ran some errands.  When she came back several hours later, she found the baby dead.  The child had been sodomized and beaten to death.  Those facts are not pleasant, but they are a medical fact. The fact that Warner committed the crime is unquestioned.

What HuffPo is upset about is that the chemicals used to execute a murdering baby-rapist caused him discomfort. A murdering baby-rapist was uncomfortable as he died.  Cry me a river.

Jazz Shaw over at Hot Air argues more succinctly than I, so I'll quote one paragraph of his.

This coddling of prisoners if a fairly recent invention. With that in mind, I would ask the reader to consider the essential nature of capital punishment for a moment. I understand that many are opposed to it on general principles, but if you accept that it is a valid choice available to the court, then it must serve some useful purpose if we are to engage in it. There are two general schools of thought for justifying the death penalty. One is that it acts as both appropriate vengeance against the perpetrator and protects the public from their creating any more havoc. (The recidivism rate following capital punishment remains at zero.) The other justification is the argument that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to others. Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, I think the idea needs a fresh look.

A fresh look indeed.  I'm no legal scholar, but I took eight-grade English, so I'm fairly conversant in the language,   I know that the conjunction AND connects adjectives, and the Eighth Amendment prohibits "cruel AND unusual" punishment.  Therefore, to my way of thinking, if a punishment is cruel but not unusual, it's okay.  Conversely, if a punishment is not cruel, but it is unusual, it's likewise okay  To my way of thinking, a punishment most be both cruel and unusual before it is proscribed under our Constitution.  Legal scholars may disagree, but the current state of the English language is not on their side of the argument.

To my way of thinking, the states should go back to hanging as a way of executing condemned prisoners.  Done properly, it is not cruel, and being in wide use worldwide, it certainly is not unusual. It has proven, over the centuries, as an efficient and effective way of reducing the death row population.

But, to be uspset because a murdering baby-rapist was uncomfortable?  Please, find a better example.