The Price of Murder and the Weight of Justice

Richard Cooey raped and murdered Dawn McCreery and Wendy Offredo, two college students, aged 20 and 21. Then Richard Cooey ate and ate and got fat in prison on taxpayer money. Today Richard Cooey is set to die, but his lawyer has filed suit saying that the death penalty would be too cruel because Richard Cooey is just too fat.

To give you some context for cruel, here's how Richard Cooey killed his two victims.

A chunk of concrete dropped from an Interstate 77 bridge crashing onto Offredo’s black Pontiac Fiero as she and McCreery were returning from a waitressing shift in the wee hours of the morning.

The concrete had been dropped by then 17 year old Clint Dickens, who along with Cooey and Kenneth Horonetz jumped into Cooey’s car and pretended to rescue the women. Instead, the three men took McCreery and Offredo to a wooded area. Horonetz got “scared” and fled, after which Cooey and Dickens subjected McCreery and Offredo to 3½ hours “of fear and torture and agony,”

By the time McCreery and Offredo were dead, they had been repeatedly raped, stabbed with a pocket knife and bludgeoned with a nightstick. Cooey then carved the letter X into the stomachs of both women.

Dawn McCreevy was a voracious reader who planned a career in fashion and marketing and longed to travel to London. Wendy Offredo was a National Honor Society scholar who aspired to be a fashion model and actress.

You won't read any of that at the Amnesty International Site dedicated to saving Richard Cooey. Of course not. Their pity is reserved only for the murderers.

Now Richard Cooey's lawyer says killing him when he's so fat would be too cruel.

A death row inmate scheduled for execution says he's too fat to be put to death, claiming executioners would have trouble finding his veins and that his weight could diminish the effectiveness of one of the lethal injection drugs.

Lawyers for Richard Cooey argue in a federal lawsuit that Cooey — 5-feet-7 and 267 pounds — had poor veins when he faced execution five years ago and the problem has been worsened by weight gain.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court, also says prison officials have had difficulty drawing blood from Cooey for medical procedures.

I completely agree. Richard Cooey is too fat to die. He gained too much weight in prison living and eating off taxpayer money and he should be made to give up every single pound of it.

To serve the ends of justice, I propose having a cinder block dropped in Richard Cooey's general vicinity which will be the signal for three inmates to chase Cooey down, drag him into the woods and rape and torture him for three hours.

I propose that this be repeated every single day until Richard Cooey is right back down to the same weight he was when he entered prison. Until every single pound of taxpayer food, every single ounce gained during the years his lawyers filed appeal after appeal for him, while his victims remained in the ground, is burned off.

Then we can execute him without any needless cruelty. Now that's justice.

Because it's all a matter of perspective. For the lawyers and the civil rights activists, Richard Cooey is too fat to die. For me and for normal people, Richard Cooey is too fat to live.

To discourse into biblical morality for a moment

לא וְלֹא-תִקְחוּ כֹפֶר לְנֶפֶשׁ רֹצֵחַ, אֲשֶׁר-הוּא רָשָׁע לָמוּת: כִּי-מוֹת, יוּמָת.

Numbers 35: 31: And you shall take no ransom for the life of a murderer, who is guilty and by his wickedness must die; but he shall surely be put to death.

לג   וְלֹא-תַחֲנִיפוּ אֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר אַתֶּם בָּהּ, כִּי הַדָּם, הוּא יַחֲנִיף אֶת-הָאָרֶץ; וְלָאָרֶץ לֹא-יְכֻפַּר, לַדָּם אֲשֶׁר שֻׁפַּךְ-בָּהּ, כִּי-אִם, בְּדַם שֹׁפְכוֹ

Numbers 35: 33: So you shall not pollute the land in which you dwell; for the blood pollutes the land; and the land cannot atoned of the blood that was shed, but by the blood of he who shed it.

What this provides is a vivid conceptualization of the difference between killing a murderer and murder itself.  A land that comes to tolerate the spilling of innocent blood by accepting ransom, in whatever form, whether it's a cash payment as is still practiced in Japan or exchanging a feeling of self-righteous in exchange for sparing a murderer, as is common in Western legal systems today-- is a land that becomes polluted with blood.

Mercy for murderers rather than decreasing killing, increases it instead, polluting the land with blood, which cannot be atoned for, except by removing the murderers from it. And in the end that civilization collapses, removing the people from it.

The mistake that our leaders today, like King Saul, fail to learn, is that mercy is not mercy when it is applied universally. It is only mercy when it protects the people from those who would harm them. But those who accept "ransom" for murderers, whether it is Richard Cooey, or Islamic terrorists, wind up filing the land with blood. Their acts of mercy are acts of cruelty, that perpetuate the cruelty of the murderers.

Today we offer up a great many things as ransom to the murderers of the east. But appeasement abroad begins as appeasement at home. The same liberal mindset that said criminals were the real victims and that the death penalty was much too cruel, decades later went on to say that terrorists were the real victims and bombing them was too cruel.

A society that cannot even dispose of its own murderers, has lost the ability to defend itself. That is why there is a direct parallel between countries that have the death penalty and those which can actively resist attack. A society where murderers thrive, becomes a society that is overrun with domestic invaders perpetrating crimes, and will in time give way to foreign invaders drawn by the rot.

For the land is not preserved from bloodshed, except by shedding the blood of those who perpetrate it. Now and always.