The questions we should all be asking are these:
What's inexcusable anymore?
What do we draw the line?
What warrants the ultimate penalty and no plea deal?
I write these words hours after Turning Point USA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk was murdered Wednesday, a high-powered bullet striking him in the neck before a crowd of 3,000 in Utah.
The popular young activist was continuing his drive to bring conservative debate back to our liberal enclave campuses, and to our young people, when he was murdered.
Hours prior to this latest abomination, we were reeling from the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska, a young Ukrainian woman who dared to ride a train home from her job at a pizza restaurant in Charlotte, North Carolina, three weeks ago.
Stabbed repeatedly in the neck, the case of a black man murdering a white woman didn't get much attention from our liberal news media.
That is, until video of the actual murder emerged, and Fox News led their reports with it.
Turns out the mentally ill man arrested for her murder had already been to prison once, and had 14 run-ins with the cops and courts since getting out.
Even his mother wanted him taken off the streets because he was dangerous.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said some judges should have their own days in court to explain why that menace was free to roam the streets.
This is not just a North Carolina problem, as judges are letting dangerous people back out onto the street around the country, many without any alternative under crazy “cashless bail” laws passed by liberal politicians.
Earlier this summer, the monster who stabbed to death four college students in Moscow, Idaho, three years ago was allowed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. Which begs the question: If the case of Bryan Kohberger's crime doesn't warrant the death penalty, what crime does?
I watch a lot of “Gunsmoke,” and in that fictional depiction of the post Civil War West, a death sentence meant a trip to the gallows within days of a circuit judge's maximum sentence.
Granted, that's on the hasty side, but was it any more ridiculous than condemned murderers today languishing on Death Row for 20 years before paying their debt to society, if then?
The death penalty has evolved into a vastly expensive, tortuously time-consuming exercise in multiple court appeals that last decades. Lawmakers talk about swift justice, but in the courts it's anything but. So modern prosecutors tend to avoid it, or plea bargain it away.
Look at Bryan Kohberger in Idaho, the crazy Charlotte stabber, and whoever murdered Charlie Kirk this week, and ask yourself whatever happened to the concept of deterrence.
The best society can hope for is that a murderer dies of old age on Death Row, at least kept from killing anyone else.
In the turbulent 1960s, we had the very public murders of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.
Then things calmed down, and other than two failed attempts to shoot Jerry Ford, and Ronald Reagan's shooting, we made it all the way to Donald Trump before a crazy high school kid came perilously close to killing the former (at the time) president.
Then a couple weeks later, a nut hiding in some bushes was set to kill Trump on a golf course, but was detected by the Secret Service and ultimately apprehended.
And now we have the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, the very popular 31-year-old husband and father of two young daughters, a God-fearing family man and optimist who created Turning Point USA when he was only 18, and became vastly successful at getting young people interested and involved in conservative politics.
Things are getting violent again, like in the 1960s.
When was the last time you heard about a judge handing down the maximum sentence for any crime? When was the last time you heard someone called a tough “hanging judge?”
What has happened to the concept of deterrence? Why all the plea bargaining by prosecutors?
And what ultimate crime – like the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah, or Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina, or the four young college students stabbed to death in Idaho – still warrants the ultimate penalty?
Where are the tenacious prosecutors and hanging judges when we need them?
Dave Simpson can be reached at DaveSimpson145@hotmail.com
