Hmmmmmm. The geezers and pit bulls are unusually quiet along Charlotte Harbor right now. Nary a note in the news about neither. No reports of any senile seniors crashing their cars through Wal-Mart windows or walls or oldsters backing their Oldsmobiles over pedestrians in the parking lots, and no reports of any free-ranging pit bulls maiming, mauling, or mutilating anything and everything in their path. Yes, the geezers and pit bulls are quiet, too quiet, I fear, and that can mean only one thing . . . a geezer and pit bull outbreak is imminent!
A few blogs back I reported on one Oba Chandler (above) and his execution here in Florida. Chandler, the rapist and murderer of three women in Tampa, was 65-years-old when the state finally escorted his worthless carcass right off this planet. Next week, Robert Waterhouse, another senior citizen, will be put to death.
Seems strange, doesn’t it, that we are executing senior citizens? Strange tho it might seem, anyone gotta problem with that? I sure as hell don‘t. Although it sounds bad in theory—murdering someone old enough to be a great-grandpa--in practice, these aging killers are just belatedly getting what’s coming to ‘em. Although myself and many more, I’m sure, wish our punishments more conformed to the crime, the only big problem I have with the death system is the outrageously looooooong appeals process. Outrageous!—REPEAT—Outrageous!
In many cases, most people have only the vaguest notion why any certain-certain murderer is being executed since the original slaughter occurred two, even three, decades earlier. The super-heated atmosphere surrounding the crime and trial has cooled cold as a chilled cucumber by the time a murderer makes his last walk. Oba Chandler was a young and strapping rapist and murderer back when he raped and murdered those poor tourists from Ohio in 1989; but twenty-two years later, when he took his last, unsteady creep down that long hall to the execution chamber, he looked like a fat, harmless and broken old hulk. Some of the victims’ relatives in this case, as well as other cases—in other words, those who needed a little closure in their lives and a lot of good old fashioned vengeance--died long before they saw justice applied or before they got their silent revenge on the bastards that took their loved ones. And that’s unfair.
When most killers murder they are at the peak of their game, so to speak, in the prime of their crimes, in their thirties or forties or fifties; yet when these criminals get through the criminally long appeals process and we finally kill these killers, they have become overweight senior citizens fattened for twenty years at the public trough. Now, should this appeals nonsense get any longer, expect many of these murderers to be in their 80s or 90s when they are finally executed and in such poor health that the state might actually be doing them a favor by killing them. In other words, they who showed their victims zero mercy will be receiving just that, mercy. It stinks.
Excuse my rant. Odd of me, I know. Not so very long ago, I was rather neutral on the subject. Didn’t seem right. Committing a murder to punish a murder seemed the height of hypocrisy. After studying many capital one cases since that time, however, I now favor not only the DP and punishments to fit the crime, as a deterrent, but super swift punishments to fit the crime, as in ONE YEAR OR LESS after the gavel hits the block. Yes, some innocent people will die as a result—perhaps even myself--but that’s the price we pay for living in a savage society.
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No Small Smell—Imagine for a moment that you are a sixty-something-year-old man, deep in debt and your double-wide is headed to the bank; imagine too that there are no jobs in sight except perhaps baggin’ grub at the local super or donning a Statue of Liberty costume and waving a sign all day outside a “We Buy Gold” pawn shop; imagine that you pop pain pills like others eat peanuts and you drink up and pee out your weight in box wine per day; imagine that the cutie pie you married three decades earlier now more resembles a Kenmore Refrigerator than a woman and last time you remember having sex with her it was like trying to make love to the sofa. Imagine that . . . well, there is lots more bad to “imagine,” but space is short and I’m sure you get the drift.
Now, just when you think it can get no worse, imagine that it does. WHAM! A piece of space junk crushes your last mode of transportation, a rusty girl’s bike, your human refrigerator wife suddenly demands sex again, or, as actually did happen the other day over at Pembroke Pines, Florida, a septic tank truck crashes right outside your door.
At the time it occurred, Joe Dirt, a driver for “All Star Toilets,” was texting his drug dealer about an impending transaction when he lost control of his sewage truck. The vehicle then hit a utility pole, then overturned, then dumped a hundred gallons or so (one gallon? a thousand gallons? it's raw sewage. who's counting?) of “waste” all over the place. Within seconds a “really sinister odor,” a smell matching any of those in the fabled plagues of Egypt, swept over the entire community forcing a mass exodus of nose holes to all points up wind.
In fairness, authorities responded quickly. Clean-up crews were soon “Johnnies-on-the-spot” and the area was “vacuumed up” in a jiff. Authorities grandly announced that there was no longer any danger to nose holes and the denizens could now return to their homes. Right. Of course there was no longer any foul odors for the authorities; “authorities” had long since rolled up their windows and left as quick as they could.
Until they get some significant rain over Pembroke Pines way, the poor losers at the spill site might consider living in the woods with the other unemployed Floridians or maybe catching a freight train north to stay with family and friends in Horsechester.
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Phuny for the Day
