Seven years ago I might have been a death-penalty abolitionist. I might have thought it was cruel and unusual punishment to kill these people. I might have thought that rehabilitation was possible. I know now you don't rehabilitate psychopaths. When Richard Allen Davis gets executed for killing my 12-year-old daughter Polly, after kidnapping her from a slumber party in 1993, I'll be there to watch him go down. I'd like my eyes to be the last thing he sees, just as his eyes were the last thing my child saw.
A life sentence without parole would not have been enough. I don't want another open-ended sentence for this guy. I don't want any ambiguity. The reality of incarceration in America is that everything is based on a lie. We sentence individuals to life without parole and then parole them. We sentence people to life and put them on the streets in 20 years. Nothing is really what it seems. If it were, Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan would not be going before parole boards every few years. Polly's killer should never have been on the street. He had been sentenced to more than 200 years.
I don't think you can compare this society with the rest of the world. This is not Sweden. This is not a European country whose crime statistics don't even come close to ours. This is a culture that has 250 million handguns in our cupboards and in our personal armories. We are a violent, brutal society. Our response to that violence has to be harsh and include the death penalty.
I do find it hard to understand how people who have lost family and friends to vicious killers can take a stand against the death penalty, but God bless them. I have compassion for them. They have come to that conclusion having walked in my shoes. It's the others, the Hollywood actors, the dilettantes, the society folks who don't live in my world. They live in gated communities and can surround themselves with extra police patrols and alarm systems. They have forgotten who the real victims are. They will be protesting Richard Allen Davis's execution. They will turn him into a victim.
Why do we coddle these guys? He never showed my child the consideration that has been shown him. The protesters who will be at her killer's execution won't remember Polly Klaas. They never knew Polly Klaas. I know that she wanted to live and she had everything in the world to live for. But he didn't let her live past 12 years old.
