Well, well

By lex

Posted on January 12, 2006

Remember that Virginia coal miner who, having been found guilty of raping and murdering his sister-in-law, went to his 1992 execution insisting upon his innocence?

Turns out that, along with being a rapist and a murderer, he was a also a liar:

A new round of DNA tests that death penalty opponents believed might finally prove that an innocent man was executed in the United States confirmed instead that Roger Keith Coleman was guilty when he went to the electric chair in 1992.

In a case closely watched by both sides in the death penalty debate, Gov. Mark Warner announced that genetic testing on semen proved Coleman committed the 1981 rape and murder of his sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy.

I’m a death penalty supporter myself, although not the kind of guy that carries signs or marches for it – It’s not that I believe so much that capital punishment might in and of itself forestall horrible crimes, nor yet in the kind of cold blooded cost/benefit accounting of execution versus paying for lifelong incarceration but rather that some classes of crime are so brutal that society itself is owed a reckoning – we have the right to express our outrage in terms which fit the horror of the crime. Some acts remove from the actor the presumption of shared humanity – they may look like us and talk like us, they may even seem sympathetic, but they are not human in the way that we have come to understand the term – they are monsters.
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Coleman’s cause had been trumpeted by Centurion Ministries, a group of folks that feel rather differently about capital punishment than does your correspondent. Their hope in convincing out-going Virginia Governor Mark Warner (a potential Democratic presidential candidate) to do a post-mortem DNA analysis was to conclusively prove that an innocent man was wrongly executed, thereby changing the public’s view on the death penalty. In this they were disappointed:

Centurion Ministries, a New Jersey organization that investigated Coleman’s case and became convinced of his innocence, sought a court order to have the evidence retested. The Virginia Supreme Court declined to order the testing in 2002, so Centurion Ministries asked Warner to intervene.

James McCloskey, executive director of Centurion Ministries, had been fighting to prove Coleman’s innocence since 1988. The two shared Coleman’s final meal together _ cold slices of pizza _ just a few hours before Coleman was executed.

“I now know that I was wrong. Indeed, this is a bitter pill to swallow,” McCloskey said, describing Thursday’s findings as “a kick in the stomach” and adding that he felt betrayed by Coleman.

Well, you have to be careful to whom you give your trust, I suppose.
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Perhaps in time they will even find some one who has been wrongly executed, and then we’ll have to have us all a good long chat about what that means. Philosophically we tend to believe that it is better that 100 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed, and that’s a noble way to think. But at some point, given the predisposition of psychopaths to repeated violence (these are not crimes of passion, but premeditated as a general rule, i.e. “lying in wait” or otherwise horrific) the math of nobility no longer makes sense: Shall we set free a thousand guilty psychopaths? Ten thousand? And there will be cases, horrible cases, in which the defendant’s guilt is unmistakable.
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Some will argue that the state should not be involved in violence against its citizens. To that I can only respond that owning the monopoly on organized violence is a hallmark of a successful state.