Hey all... ya know I don't usually jump in on politics threads... but on this one... as today we are going to have an execution here in Virginia and it is one that MANY people, even those normally against execution, are saying should be carried out... I thought I would post about it... It is pretty much all anyone is talking about around here today... When the shootings were taking place, and some of them happen right in my neighborhood, at a gas station where I get gas, at a middle school where I grew up... it was just a terrifying time...

The D.C. Sniper Should Die. But Not Like This.
I’ll be glad to see John Allen Muhammad go for his murderous rampage. But the death penalty is still wrong.
http://www.theroot.com/views/dc-sniper-should-die-not

I don’t believe in capital punishment, but I will be glad if John Allen Muhammad is executed tonight. I wish someone had shot him down in the street before he and his witless teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, went on their murderous spree, killing 10, wounding others and terrorizing the entire populations of Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

Muhammad is the sort of soulless killer who puts death penalty opponents like me in a moral bind. We don’t believe in the state putting anybody to death, including irredeemable thugs like Muhammad, but we—or at least I—wish they were dead. I resent expending millions of tax dollars to support a wretch like Muhammad as his appeal winds through the courts. I detest the notion that as long as he lives, he can still hope for a delay of his rendezvous with lethal injection. It troubles me that our legal system affords him mercy that he denied his victims and their families.

Like everyone who lived in Washington at the time of the Beltway sniper rampage, I have indelible memories. One of his victims, 72-year-old Pascal Charlot, was gunned down only a few blocks from the house in which I was living. My then 10-year-old daughter’s soccer team was forced to practice inside, running zig-zag to the door of the gym like pint-sized GIs evading enemy fire, because the sniper had threatened to target children. The hair on the back of my neck stood up every time I saw a white van, the sort of vehicle the police were looking for until they learned that the sniper actually drove a dark Chevy.

And yet I know that as much as I hate John Allen Muhammad for killing all those people and for frightening me and my kid, as glad as I’ll be when he’s finally gone, it’s wrong for the state to execute him. My belief is rooted in the conviction that the deliberate taking of life is always wrong, no matter who does it, no matter how heinous the criminal act that led to a death sentence. If anyone ever deserved to die for his crimes, it’s John Allen Muhammad. He deserves to die.