Time To Kill

It really is a timing thing, isn't it? A lot of the people who are proudly "Pro-Life" will stand up and shout just as loudly to advocate for the death penalty. I guess you could say that you'd have to have a hole in your head to think like that, but that's not really the case, since people like that are the ones being killed. Cecil Clayton was put to death at just after midnight via lethal injection in Missouri this past week, and yes, he had a hole in his head. More to the point, he had a brain injury at a sawmill back in the 1970's that took out twenty percent of his frontal lobe. It was in 1996 that Mister Clayton shot and killed Sheriff's Deputy Chris Castetter. Clayton's attorneys, using far more of their brains than their client could, argued that he was not capable of understanding the crime he committed and was unfit for execution.
Unfit to live? I've heard that one. But unfit to die? Maybe it all has something to do with eugenics, but I still don't think I understand the whole argument. This guy, who was described as having difficulty using a telephone and making purchases at the prison commissary, needed to be put down. I suppose it could be that the combination of his being a murderer and brain damaged made him a prime candidate for being put down. Get him out of the way so we have more room for Kardashians and their ilk. Brain damaged but not murderers.
Did you notice the math, by the way? Cecil Clayton was sentenced to death nearly twenty years ago, and the grim reaper just caught up to him this week. This week when he held the distinction of being the oldest man on Missouri's death row. Well, not anymore. Which makes me wonder why Missouri taxpayers aren't a little put off at the idea of spending all that money on the execution of a seventy-four year old man. It seems to me that a couple more years of appeals would have allowed nature to run its course and all that pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. About eighty bucks and change, not to mention the time of all those doctors, lawyers, witnesses and corrections officers.
Please understand, I have no particular love for cop killers. Or killers of any type, for that matter. I just can't help but wonder why it was really necessary to kill this one. If the answer is "revenge," I guess I understand that just a little more than "justice." And maybe that has less to do with timing than it does with semantics.