I spoke with my sister this evening. She was pretty down. A young woman she had taught in sixth grade was murdered the other day. The woman's estranged boyfriend (she was separated from her husband) and a female relative of the victim allegedly lured her and her three young children to the woods outside a park. They are charged with beating Jessica Johnson Palmer to death with a baseball bat, slitting the throats of her seven year old son Juan and four year old daughter Lindsay, and leaving Johnson Palmer's seven month old baby girl Robbyn in the woods to die.
The next day, a groundskeeper was mowing grass in the park, and saw four year old Lindsay staggering out of the woods, holding her baby sister. She ran towards the lawnmowers, then collapsed. But she and Robbyn survived. Little Lindsay was able to tell police everything she had seen, and they arrested the two alleged murderers. Details in this report from the funeral yesterday. Excerpt:
Clutching her Bible, Elaine Johnson strode up to the pulpit at the end of her daughter and grandson’s joint funeral services Saturday and declared that she forgives the pair accused of killing them.“I love them. I cannot hate them,” Johnson said of the accused, her cousin, Trendall Lashel Matthews, 22, and Dominique Dantoni Smith, 28. “God says to love.”
[snip]
Relatives wanting to hold tiny Lindsay in their arms passed her back and forth during the three-hour service. She had a white scarf around her neck to conceal her wound.
Juan Palmer Sr. carried his 7-month-old daughter, Robbyn, her arms marked with bug bites from her night in the woods, into the church Saturday morning.
That child apparently saw her own mother beaten to death, survived a throat-slashing, spent the night in the woods sheltering a baby, then carried that baby to safety.
Four years old.
There are no words.
UPDATE: It turns out the man charged with these murders (along with a female companion) is the father of Lindsay and Juan. Which, if the charges prove true, would mean he either cut his own children's throats, or watched passively as the woman did it.
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For some reason those here who are against the death penalty are ignoring the deterrent effect.
It's easy to ignore, since no proof for it has ever been established. To the contrary, every study demonstrates that the death penalty provides almost no deterrence at all. Which is why almost every other civilized nation on Earth has abandoned it, and yet none of those that have done so has noticed any precipitous climb in their homicide rates.
I also find it funny how many of Rod's regulars found the Amish reaction to the murder of their children so praiseworthy, so amazingly Christian. And yet, confronted with this situation, those ideas go right out the window for some. Apparently, the Amish should have felt cheated they didn't have the chance to hang the killer themselves, as God would have wanted.
Of course, I'm arguing with a guy named Max Schadenfreude...a word defined variously as "vicariously enjoying the suffering of others", "enjoyment taken from the suffering of someone else", "the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts", and "malicious glee or gloating". Given how immensely far from anything Christian that concept is, I feel silly having taken the time.
little mermaid - That's because there is none. Hell, in the eighteenth century they had the death penalty for petty theft, and that didn't disappear, much less murder.
Elizabeth Anne,
I submit that the appropriate reading of Karth's post is to place his clear caveat that he is writing from personal experience at the top, and keep it in mind. At no point has he extended his remarks in the direction of stereotypes. His second post clarifies what I would agree was a bit of ambiguity in his first post.
If you don't see it that way, then I regret that you were upset by it (I know, I know, it seems like I'm apologizing for Karth; actually, I'm apologizing for agreeing with him ;-) ).
Nicely put in reply to little mermaid, btw.
Eric W @ 8:52 AM:
Thank you, sir. However, you do me too much credit. The facts are there; I simply report them.
Elizabeth @ 12:29 AM:
"Long diatribes about what "The Female" will do in - based on how you wrote it - any given situation. Now, I'll grant that you may have meant it as something to be applied in more narrow constraints, but as one of the females, it sounded very general, and very misogynistic, to me. I would also suggest that if you're basing your opinion of people in general on your experiences in the criminal justice system, you're getting a tainted sample."
Allow me to clarify something. As a family-law practitioner, my clientele includes a great many people who, quite frankly, have something seriously wrong with them or their situations. Some are temperamental in the extreme. Others are abusive, drug-addicted, mentally ill....the list could go on for a week; I won't bore you with all the gory details. Most of my clients in this area are assigned-counsel clients, meaning that I see all the above problems, but compounded by poverty. They come from a variety of ethnic origins; black, Hispanic, white (interestingly enough, in the course of 19 years of practice, I have had perhaps 3 Asian clients, none of which have been in neglect or custody cases).
The overwhelming majority of my urban clients, REGARDLESS of ethnic group, do have one thing in common: a common cultural base, if you will, of short-term thinking, near-solipsistic hedonism and sexual norms of casual promiscuity and serial monogamy. My rural clients (I practice in several predominantly rural counties in Upstate NY as well as ones with cities in them) also tend to share this sort of mentality. It's the same mindset that Theo. Dalrymple discusses in his book "Life at the Bottom".
I refer to them as "males" and "females" because I was raised (as I'm sure you were) in an environment where adult men and women were expected to do certain things and avoid others. Chief among the desirable attributes is a certain degree of self-control and personal discipline. An adult--a "man" or a "woman"--is expected to be able to manage his or her own behavior. This means not sleeping around, no addictions, no beating one's spouse or children, for example. Most (not all !) of the people in my clientele do not have that control ability in one or more areas of their lives; that's a primary reason they are clients. They are not acting as adult, Human beings.
I do not know you, other than through these posts, and I would not dare to presume that you are anything other than a mature, self-disciplined woman. In other words, you come across as being an adult person. My comments are not directed at you, and they are not intended to do so.
I trust this clarifies things ?
Franklin Evans @ 8:33 PM:
Sir, there is absolutely NO reason to apologize for agreeing with me. Agreeing with me clearly and demonstrably establishes you as a person of refinement, taste and intelligence, not to mention plain good sense. ;-)
Your servant,
Lord Karth
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