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Show Each violent death diminishes all of us Ted Bundy is dead, and I .suppose .sup-pose we should feel some relief at that. liut I don't. Oh, I know all of the arguments in favor of capital punishment, and I know I'm supposed to believe them. Ifanyhumanbeingon this earth had a debt to pay to society, it was Ted Bundy. He preyed on the unsuspecting, un-suspecting, the innocent, the vulnerable vul-nerable young women who often took the safety of their neighborhoods neighbor-hoods for granted until Bundy ripped them away from that safety and brutally murdered them. It is impossible to excuse what he did on any basis. Any individual who commits dozens of murders, one at a time, leaving a trail of death and devastated loved ones in his wake, forfeits any claim to existing ex-isting as part of society. If society places any value on human life, some would argue, then it must take Bundy's life as payment for the blood he has shed remorselessly - how many times we'll never know, despite all the last-minute confessions. Others would say that taking Bundy's life is the only way to prevent pre-vent Bundy from taking more lives. After all, the man has demonstrated demon-strated a proclivity for making prison escapes - and prolonged incarceration would increase his opportunity for escape - and his opportunity to commit more murders. mur-ders. Besides, another argument the ediior's column ) ' , ) By MAKC j I HADDOCK goes, prolonged incarceration costs money. And our overburdened penal system spends too much money feeding, housing and clothing cloth-ing the likes of Ted Bundy as it is. The costs are exacerbated by the lengthy appeals process now required re-quired to take a man convicted of murder through the courts to his execution. It costs a lot of money to maintain main-tain a murderer in prison for his life. But it costs even more to pay the legal fees to carry out his execution. execu-tion. Under the current system, our society pays too much either way for the Ted Bundys of the world. And still others would say that speeding up the process and making mak-ing it easier for society to clean out the vermin that clutter the death rows across America would not only save money, but would reduce violent crime. After all, when the judicial system sys-tem demonstrates it is not afraid to execute a murderer, some of those would-be murders might be afraid to take another human life. A stream-lined route to the electric chair, or the gas chamber, or the table for a lethal injection is the best deterrent to violent crime, they would say. And finally, in Utah at least, some will maintain despite disavowal dis-avowal by LDS Church officials, that only by the shedding of blood can a murderer hope for any forgiveness for-giveness in the life after this one. Blood Atonement, while no longer official church doctrine, still holds a powerful place in the minds of many Utah residents. Understanding all this, it should be simple for me to accept Ted Bundy's death as the best approach for all concerned. The state of Florida will no longer have to feed, clothe and house Bundy. He can no longer pursue costly court appeals. It is certain he will never damage another an-other human being. And society has demonstrated it values the life of those Bundy murdered by exacting his own life as the payment for his homicidal from killing when the compulse StrNkoene of this help, I am still uneasy that I am a part of a society that feels it has a right to take human life --a hold-over attitude from the Middle Ages and before when life was held in low regard and killing was common. And yet there are nations that have decided that the best way to show that human life is valued is to make it impossible for the state to take human life. Great Britain, for example, no longer has a death penalty - and has thus eliminated the appeals process that costs more than lifetime incarceration. But in the process they lose all the other benefits that come from state-authorized executions. Personally, I'm torn. I understand under-stand the arguments in favor of capital punishment - and in my mind they make sense. But in my heart I can't feel good about anyone taking another's life under any circumstances. The act of killingcheapens lifeitself, even if it is the state doing the killing with the approval of our legal system. Ted Bundy did it each time he killed. And the state of Florida did it Tuesday, when it killed Ted Bundy. I don't feel sorry for Bundy. He earned his punishment. But I do feel sorry for the rest of us. |