The
Bishop's Notebook Archive
Capital
Punishment
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The
Bishop's Notebook, 22 March 2002
“
The take on the future of Andrea Pia Yates by hard-liners
and the ignorant is that she is lucky. Lucky to face 40 years
of incarceration. Lucky she didn't get a needle in her veins.
Lucky to have room, board, three squares, and a gym and a
law library. Lucky that she will live the remaining years
of her life with only the unspeakable grief of having killed
her five children. Good fortune just seems to follow at her
heels like a stray puppy, doesn't it? Part of Yates' good
fortune was to have a history of serious mental illness. Add
to that a husband so wedded to the tenets of a fringe fundamentalist
sect, he can only be considered an accomplice in his own children's
deaths. Without the inclusion of the manner in which she murdered
her children or the time spent obsessing about their deaths,
Andrea Yates' history is too painful to take in fully. ”
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The
Bishop's Notebook, 20 April 2001, Friday in Easter Week
“The recent decision by the Attorney General
John Ashcroft to have relatives of the victims of the Oklahoma
City Bombing watch Timothy McVeigh's execution on closed circuit
television is seriously misguided. This is not the moment
to criticize victims' families as they struggle to bring closure
to a tormenting tragedy, yet the decision aggravates the larger
indecency of capital punishment. Plainly those who are earnestly
trying to "see" Timothy's face as he dies are on a journey
of their own, one that they think will serve up justice, and
perhaps a balm for their loss. At no time do we want to leave
their side while the pain of such grief remains. But this
"event", for indeed, that is what it is, is flawed from the
start. The execution of Timothy is vengeance pure and simple.”
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