I can’t stand the death penalty, as some of you know. I also found this letter from Vinson Goddard from Phoenix, Ariz. in response to my syndicated column we ran earlier this week powerful and I wanted to share it.
I write to you as reader of National Review since 1991. I am also a career prosecutor and have focused on death penalty cases almost exclusively for nearly 11 years of my total 19 as a prosecutor. I am an Anglican and committed “WFB” conservative, who as you know was also in favor of the death penalty.
I know you are Catholic and I do not write to change your mind about the death penalty, but rather in the sources that you use for facts. If you tell conservatives to trust the media on issues like abortion or family values and they immediately and justifiably roll their eyes. But for some reason those same conservatives will trust the media on an issue that is as dogmatic as abortion is for the left: the death penalty. Reliance on the Tennessean for a capital case is like relying on Mother Jones for news about Trump.
My second hope is to open the door, even if slight, to the Kantian/Aquinas idea that though the death penalty is not something that we ought to relish, it is absolutely necessary if any dignity is to be given to the victim. All of the information I am providing is available by reading the opinions of the appellate courts, and most importantly in the habeas petitions the defendant has filed over the years.
Miller’s victim Lee Standifier was indeed innocent as you point out. She was also mentally retarded. The Tennessean refers to Miller as “homeless” which isn’t exactly true. He was living with an ordained minister who brought Miller into his home to give him a place to live. Miller had lived there for over a year prior to the murder. The suggestion that Miller was “friendless” is patently untrue, and a rhetorical flourish that the newspaper attempted to add to generate sympathy for a man that the jury unanimously determined that he had murdered in a way that was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel” because Miller had “tortured” with a “depraved mind.” The media love to use shorthand when describing murders, as the Tennessean does. Yes, she was “murdered” and “beaten” and “stabbed” as you point out in a single sentence, and then immediately compare her murder to Miller’s supposed childhood. A less dismissive way to describe Lee’s death is that she was raped, brutalized, and butchered. Blood was found in the kitchen, fireplace, garage, and smeared for over 100 feet. Missing from the Tennessean account was the rope tied around her neck and wrists, the hammer that was used to smash her skull, and the Bowie knife used to flay her neck, shattered jaw, the knife wound through her jawbone, and the stab wounds to her chest and stomach. The medical examiner felt that human strength was not capable of inflicting the wounds to her rib cage, and believed that Miller used the hammer to drive the knife through the bone. And then of course Miller raped Lee. The medical examiner found numerous defensive wounds and scrapes to Lee’s hands, knees and arms, meaning she attempted to get away from her killer. This also necessarily means that to the extent Lee could intellectually understand what was happening to her, she died painfully, alone, and slowly. Miller was no first-time criminal, having raped two women prior to this murder.
The rest of your article is devoted to the childhood of Miller, which you equate morally to Lee’s demise. What is interesting is that Miller never asserted many of these claims at trial. The jury in 1982 heard all of the childhood evidence that Miller wanted to present. They categorically rejected those excuses unanimously. As has every appellate court in the State of Tennessee and federally. Much of the details of his childhood comes years after the trial, asserted for the first time in habeas petitions. At trial, Miller’s primary defense was that he was too drunk to form the intent necessary for premeditated murder. The only psychiatrist to testify, found that Miller did not suffer from any mental disease or defect (this includes the PTSD he would claim years later), knew right from wrong, and was able to conform his conduct to the law. Rapists and molesters almost universally claim that they were also raped or molested as an attempt to deflect blame. Studies have shown however that these claims are almost universally false and that there is no correlation between being a victim of sexual assault/molestation and then becoming one. It is once again an oft-repeated false logic advanced by those who wish to explain evil.
Your article is a form of prayer for Miller and the rest of us who believe it is appropriate for Miller to die. “Whoever sheds the blood of men, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.” Gen 9:6 would also be a prayer for Miller. The primacy of scripture and the natural law should put your mind at ease that we as a society can, and must, give Miller exactly what he deserves. We show mercy by not killing Miller the way he killed Lee. Miller had a choice in how he could be executed, and he chose electrocution. Yes, when electricity runs through the body, it makes people tense up and extend their fingers. However, if you interview pathologists without a political agenda you can rest assured the movements are long since post-mortem. Miller deserved to die painfully, and he may have done so. But his was a quick death. The same cannot be said of Lee. Until very recently, the Catholic Church has at times supported and seen the value of the death penalty. St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope Pius IX spoke extensively about capital punishment. Cardinal Ratzinger has written about the “legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about… applying the death penalty.” This is because the death penalty has been part of Catholic doctrine for millennia, and must always remain because of the primacy of scripture (Gen 9:6, Num 35:33, Deu 19:11, Luke 23:41, Acts 25:11, Rom 13 to name a few). The death penalty is supported by Church Doctors and Fathers, Popes and Saints. It is a necessary component to the concept of retributive justice. We don’t have to like it, but it is as old as civilization itself.
I respectfully and viscerally believe that for Lee to be truly “beautiful” as you claim, as forever more her memory will be linked to Miller’s, her life must be given value. We as a society made a final and decisive expression of a value judgment when Miller was executed. Willard Gaylin said it best in his book The Killing of Bonnie Garland:
“When one person kills another there is immediate revulsion at the nature of the crime. But in time so short as to seem indecent to the members of the personal family, the dead person ceases to exist as an identifiable figure. To those individuals in the community of good will and empathy, warmth, and compassion, only one of the key actors in the drama remains with whom to commiserate— and that is always the criminal. The dead person ceases to be a part of everyday reality, ceases to exist. She is only a figure in a historic event. We inevitably turn away from the past, toward the ongoing reality. And the ongoing reality is the criminal; trapped, anxious, now helpless, isolated, often badgered and bewildered. He usurps the compassion that is justly his victim’s due. He will steal his victim’s moral constituency along with her life.”
Lord, have mercy on us as we make these calls — especially those in criminal justice and government, and, yes, the media, too.