Should  serial  and  violent  rapists  be  executed?

It is one thing to rape someone against his or her will by using force but to rape someone violently and causing severe injuries to the rapist’s victim and even kill the victim is something else. My feelings of contempt also apply to serial rapists.

Frederick Dozier, 33, was convicted of a series of brutal sexual assaults along San Francisco's 24th Street corridor last year. He was found guilty of 25 attacks on three women between June and December 2011 which involved kidnapping, robbing and sexually assaulting all three. He was sentenced on December 14, 2012 in San Francisco Superior Court to 370 years to natural life in prison.

Richard J. Dallas, a 24-year-old man living in Lyons, New York State was charged with predatory sexual assault against a child in June 2011 plus an additional seven counts ranging from aggravated sexual abuse to endangering the welfare of a child. The child was nine months old and suffered severe injuries as a result of the alleged rape. If he is found guilty in his trial next year, he should get a very, very severe sentence.

The rising chorus in citizens in India to make rape an offence punishable by the death penalty could be a difficult challenge to surmount. There have been at least five murderous rapists in the recent past where rapists awarded the death penalty managed to escape the noose after President Pratibha Patil of India commuted their sentences to life imprisonment. These include a rapist who raped and killed a five-year-old girl and another who tried to rape a teenage girl and killed her family in revenge when she resisted. Another convicted rapist named Satish raped and murdered a six-year-old girl, Visakha, in Uttar Pradesh in 2001. His death sentence was also commuted to life imprisonment by President Patil in May 2012. Molai Ram and Santosh Yadav gang raped and murdered the 10-year-old daughter of a jailor in February 2011. They too were reprieved by the President of India and re-sentenced to life in prison. She has commuted the death sentence of as many as 35 convicts to life — among them are those convicted of mass murder, kidnapping, rape and killing of children. 

          One is forced to wonder why the president of India is so determined to forgive such monsters and force the taxpayers of India to house and feed rapists who murder their victims or their families. If she really believed that they were innocent, then I could see where she is coming from. But if she knows that they really murdered the children or their families after raping the children, there simply doesn’t seem to be a logical explanation that would satisfy any reasonable person that the lives of these inhuman monsters are more important to her that the lives of their innocent young victims.

While observing that the rape and murder of an innocent 22-year-old who worked as a BPO employee in Pune, India has had a deep impact on the society of India especially on women travelling alone, the Bombay high court on December 23, 2012 upheld the death penalty awarded to two for committing the heinous crime. The High Court of Justice which included VM Kanade and Justice PD Kode confirmed the death sentence of the two accused—Purushottam Borate and Pradeep Kokade for kidnapping, raping and murdering their victim. These justices have ignored the decisions of soft-hearted President Patil although it must be on their minds that this soft-hearted president may commute the sentences of these two minsters to life in prison.

Madhya Pradesh’s, chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has joined the growing clamour to award capital punishment to rapists. He announced, “The state government is considering setting up fast track courts for speedy disposal of rape cases.”                                                                                                                                                   

This latest condemnation of rapists in India came about when six fiends who were riding in a private bus, (which was normally used during the day to bring children to school)  picked up a young woman and her date and beat them savagely before and after raping the young woman while the bus was being driven around the city of Bombay. At this writing, she is still in a Bombay hospital and for some time while she was in the hospital, she was fighting for her life. Even as the Delhi police pressed charges of ‘attempt to murder’ against the six accused of brutally raping the 23-year-old medical student in the moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012 the shocking incident has left a lot of people in India and elsewhere extremely angry. They vented out their resentment by joining the nation-wide chorus, demanding the death penalty for the accused. Four of the six men have been arrested, including the driver of the bus, Ram Singh.

The leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj spoke to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the evening of December 23, 2012 and urged him to convene a special session of Parliament for amending the existing law to provide the death sentence for heinous crimes against women. Leftists in parliament said on December 23, that capital punishment for rapists by itself is not a deterrent for perpetrators. MP Sitaram Yechury said, “The death penalty cannot be a deterrent unless swift and sure delivery of justice can be ensured.”                                                                                                                                                                                        

Well in my opinion, if rapists who kill or seriously wound their victims are convicted on valid testimony and evidence, they can be sentenced soon after the trial and after they have run their gambit of appeals, they can be  hanged and when that happens, then surely these leftists can be satisfied that the delivery of justice has been ensured.

I realize that there are a great many people who will claim that only God has the right to take a life.  I don’t accept that premise at all for two reasons. The first is that if there really is a God and it, he or she will decided on the punishment of rapists who murder or seriously wound their victims, then what was God doing while the victims were calling out to God to spare them from the pain of rape and death? Second, Mankind has the right to decide for itself as to what punishment is to be awarded to heinous criminals who have no mercy for their victims.

Serial rapists should be imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives however I have a different view with respect to rapists who murder their victims or alternatively, seriously injure them and rapists who rape small children. I have always been an abolitionist when it comes to capital punishment for one main reason. We don’t want to execute innocent people. Further, we don’t want to execute people whose crimes are not serious enough to justify the death penalty. But rapists who fall into the three categories I just gave in this paragraph should be done away with. We don’t tolerate rabid dogs in our community. We put them down. We should also put down the fiends I have been speaking about. One of the main reasons is that if they are reprieved, they might someday be released from prison and do their same crimes again. Don’t think this hasn’t happened before. It certainly has. 

Many years ago in Canada, a child killer who raped and then murdered his two young victims was eventually released from prison and later, he raped and murdered two more children. In the United States, on December 24, 2012, a 62-year-old man who served 18 years in prison for killing his grandmother, shot and killed his sister and two firemen who had come to his home to fight the fire he started. After he shot himself to death, they found a note  that said, "I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighbourhood I can burn down and do what I do best; killing people. In the UK between 1997 and 2007, as many as 30 convicted killers released from prison during those years killed more victims again, according to Home Office figures. If those fiends had been executed, their victims would have been able to live out their lives until they died of old age.