Cockburn on Tucker and Death Penalty

Re “A Day for the ‘Hang ‘em’ Ghouls,” Column Left, Feb. 5:

Alexander Cockburn fails to mention the “arbitrary and capricious” use of the pickax in the hands of Karla Faye Tucker, which hacked out the life of her victim under extremely savage conditions.

It is a major tenet of our democracy that its citizens are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These things cannot exist, however, without both accountability and simple justice.

In the heart of the average citizen the concepts of accountability and simple justice are a strong, unrelenting, insistent presence; their frequent absence a source of real despair to the populace. It is not the ghoulish pleasure, but the painful duty of government to exact the simple justice of Tucker’s sentence. The ghoulishness was entirely on her part when she buried the pickax 29 times in the pleading body of her victim. (Or was it only 19 times?)

I am happy that Tucker apparently found redemption with her savior before she died. The only possible appropriate redemption with her victims was in the act of dying herself.

LELAND L. SPRAGUE

Ventura

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Murder is murder, whether by pickax or by legal, lethal injection. The repulsion for killing is part of human nature, part of our genetic inheritance. But some people do lose control. Driven by drugs, a fleeting hate, the passion of revenge or some often ignored biological defect, people do kill. That doesn’t mean that we, as a society, have to retaliate in kind. We can punish but as punishment execution can only fail because the morality of the collective executioner descends toward and meets that of the killer.

Tucker’s punishment taught her nothing. She’s dead. Does Texas stand over the lifeless form and say, “That’ll learn ya, Karla”? Better that we stand in judgment on ourselves. We are no less guilty for allowing this barbarism to continue.

RICHARD LAWS

Santa Clarita

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Cockburn reached a new low in audacity with his sanctimonious criticism of families of the victims of Tucker. The fact that the victims’ families had to wait 14 years for the sentence to be carried out was a grave injustice.

DAVID T. MARTIN

Ontario

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Capital punishment and murder are one in the same: the manifestation of the hatred which our society and certain of its members feel toward each other. It’s self- perpetuating.

Tucker learned how to love. So should we.

RONALD WEBSTER

Long Beach