Oct 9, 2013 3 min read

Help me out here. I’ve got questions about the criminal justice system in this state, chief among them: Why does it take so long before a capital case goes to trial? Especially a high-profile case such as murder?

And here’s the killer (pun very much intended): At the conclusion of a murder trial in which the defendant is found guilty and subsequently is sentenced to receive the death penalty, just how long must the victim’s family and the public wait for that sentence to be carried out?

Don’t get me wrong here. I am not the least bit blood-thirsty, nor am I an eye-for-an-eye conservative. I just want to know how long is long enough for a condemned killer to languish in prison, enjoying the luxury of breathing – precisely what his victim or victims don’t do – awaiting a sentence that may never be carried out.

Is five years long enough? Ten? Twenty?

Surely, 25 years is too long, most of us will agree, especially if the murder victim was elderly to begin with, and would have had the chance to expire of natural causes, in bed, which is the reward that elderly people earn with their longevity.

Appeals, you say. They take time, because, after all, we don’t want to execute someone who just might not be guilty, although the overwhelming evidence gathered and presented at the time of trial would say otherwise.

Memories fade with time, especially 25 years worth of memories as to what was seen and what was testified to, under oath and probably under a great deal of emotional distress if it involved a loved one. People forget things that they swore they’d never forget. Small things, details that meant something significant but have since faded over the years of not trying to remember what was seen.

What justice would be served if a condemned killer were to die of old age while under the penalty of state-sanctioned death by lethal injection? Will the same condemned man file appeals – and to whom – if someday medical tests were to indicate advanced stages of lung or liver cancer would beat the state executioners to the task? To that there is no appeal that will be successful.

What brings this subject to mind was the execution last week of the D.C. sniper by the state of Virginia only eight years after he and a young assistant assassin killed 13 people in and around a terrorized Washington, D.C. Eight years was obviously enough.

And the week before, up here in this Washington, convicted killer Roland Steele gets one more round of appeals 25 years after he murdered three elderly East Washington women. Karate-chopped them to death, he did, stole their purses and dumped them in the weeds. And he lives on. Defenders claim he had a bad childhood and has mental issues. Anybody who kills three matrons in broad daylight obviously has mental issues, but not so much as to not hide what he did and lie about it.

The ladies he killed 25 years ago would have been long dead by now; he should have joined them years ago, which is what I’m struggling to say clearly.

The 16 victims of those two particular killers had a right to life; their killers earned their rights to death, while we the people deserve to see justice served in a timely manner.