Death penalty is damn right

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Flip McWho
Thats why you should really switch to MMP.

So that the majority could still make the rules?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
And since we do happen to live in a democratic republic, the majority makes the rules.

QFT

By the way do you still have the study that shows deterent effects of death penalty with respect to murder rates?

[Jaguar]

In the US, there was a rise in violent crimes after Furman vs Georgia took away the DP, and then they began to decline after the DP started getting reinstituted.

It's likely that the two had nothing to do with each other, though.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe


QFT

My point is not that majority decisions on new laws is completely illegitimate. The point I'm making is that you have to at least acknowledge that protection of the minority is essential to prevent tyranny of the majority.

[Velociryx]

In the spirit of some of the earlier postings of murders, here's SOME OF South Carolina's own serial killer's greatest hits. Not nearly all of them, but just a little cross section.

These accounts prolly aren't gonna change anybody's mind, but I wanted to include them so there was absolutely no doubt what sort of person I referred to when I made the comment about monsters. If you read the words below, and do not come away convinced of the existence of monsters at the very least (even tho I'm not expecting you anti-dp'ers to change your minds), then Houston...we have a problem.

This guy is quite possibly the sickest of the sick, and as I said before, I'm glad he's dead and gone. The State made the right call. When you're done reading, even if you DON'T believe in the death penalty, I guarantee you that you'll breathe a sigh of relief knowing that this character no longer walks among us.

I would say "enjoy" but I assure you that you won't.

Coastal Kills

Gaskins settled in Sumter, South Carolina, working construction and stripping hot cars on weekends, cruising bars for sex. He still suffered “them aggravated and bothersome feelings,” now accompanied by headaches, stomach cramps, and pain in his groin. Increasingly, he raged and brooded over women who rejected him. He drove compulsively along the Carolina coast, later recalling, “It was like I was looking for something special on them coastal highways, only I didn’t know what.”

In September 1969 he found out.

The hitchhiker was young and blond, bound for Charleston, thumbing rides outside Myrtle Beach. Gaskins picked her up and propositioned her. When she laughed in his face, he beat her unconscious and drove to an old logging road. There, he raped and sodomized his victim, then tortured and mutilated her with a knife. She still clung to life when he weighted her body and sank her in a swamp to drown. Leaving the scene, Gaskin recalled, “I felt truly the best I ever remembered feeling in my whole life.”

Gaskins later called that first impulsive homicide “his miracle ... a beam of light, like a vision.” From that day on, he made a habit of trolling the coastal highways on weekends, seeking victims and exploring future dump sites. By Christmas 1969 he had committed two more “coastal kills -- ones where I didn’t know the victims or their names or nothing about them.” It was recreational murder, refined over time until he could keep his victims alive and screaming for hours on end, sometimes for days.

In 1970 Gaskins averaged one “coastal kill” every six weeks, experimenting with different torture methods, disappointed when his victims died prematurely. “I preferred for them to last as long as possible,” he wrote. The next year, Pee Wee claimed 11 nameless victims, including his first kidnap-slaying of two girls at once. Ideas for tormenting his captives came to Gaskins as he browsed through hardware stores, eyeing the tools. “I never gave no thought to stopping,” he admitted. “They was a clock-kind of thing. When it was time, I went and killed.”

His first male victims were acquired by accident, two long-haired boys whom Gaskins took for girls as he drove up behind them in March 1974. Gender would not save them, though. Gaskins drove them both to a hideout near Charleston, where he sodomized and tortured both, cooking and cannibalizing their severed genitals before he granted them the mercy of death.

Gaskins lost track of the victims he murdered for sport between September 1969 and December 1975. They were hard to recall, he explained, “because they’re mostly just a jumble of faces and bodies and memories of things I did to them.” In terms of numbers, he said, “The closest figure I can come up with is 80 to 90.” Sadistic murder was addictive for Pee Wee. “I finally reached the point where I wanted the bothersomeness to start,” he wrote. “I looked forward to it every month, because it felt so good relieving myself of it.”

The only coastal victim he recalled by name was 16-year-old Anne Colberson, picked up near Myrtle Beach in 1971. Gaskins was not hunting at the time, but he refused to miss a golden opportunity. Over four days of rape and torture, he became “real fond of her.” Finally, “because she had been so nice to me,” Gaskins stunned her with a hammer and cut her throat before dropping Colberson into quicksand.

The coastal kills were always recreation, though. However numerous the victims, however atrocious their suffering, they meant nothing to Gaskins. The focus of his life lay inland, where murder and business mixed.


Serious Murders
Before 1970, despite sporadic incidents of violence with family and friends, Gaskins maintained that he never gave “any real serious thought whatsoever” to killing a personal acquaintance. “The most important thing about 1970,” he wrote from prison, “was that it was the year I started doing my ‘serious murders’” -- defined as slayings of persons he knew, whose deaths required more planning to avoid detection.

His first two “serious” victims were a 15-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, and her 17-year-old friend, Patricia Alsobrook. Gaskins had entertained thoughts of raping Kirby but saw no opportunity until one night in November 1970, when the girls were out drinking, in need of a ride home. Gaskins volunteered, taking them instead to an abandoned house where he ordered both to strip. The girls fought for their lives, clubbing Gaskins with a board before he drew a gun and overpowered them and beat them unconscious. After raping both, he drowned the girls and buried them in separate locations. Police grilled Pee Wee about the double disappearance, and while he admitted talking to the girls on the last night they were seen alive, he claimed they had left him and driven off in a car with several unknown boys. Lacking a corpse or other evidence, the trail went cold.

A month later, Gaskins kidnapped, raped and murdered Peggy Cuttino, the 13-year-old daughter of a politically prominent family. This time, he left the body where it would be found. His alibi looked solid when police came calling, and they later focused on another suspect, William Pierce, already serving life in Georgia for a similar offense. Conviction of Cuttino’s murder brought Pierce his second life sentence, a moot point since Georgia had no intention of releasing him. Years later, when Gaskins later confessed to the murder, embarrassed prosecutors rejected his statement, insisting Pee Wee claimed the murder “for publicity.”

Gaskins interrupted the murder spree to marry his pregnant girlfriend on Jan. 1, 1971, but it was only a momentary distraction. His next “serious” murder victim -- and the first African American he ever killed -- was 20-year-old Martha Dicks, a hanger-on around the garage where Gaskins worked part-time. For reasons best known to herself, Dicks seemed infatuated with Gaskins, boasting falsely to friends that they were lovers. Gaskins tolerated the jokes until Dicks claimed to be carrying his child. Inviting her to stay on one night, after work, he fed Dicks a fatal overdose of pills and liquor, discarding her corpse in a roadside ditch. Rumors of sex and racism aside, Gaskins insisted, “I didn’t kill her for no reason besides her lying mouth.”

In late 1971, Gaskins moved to Charleston with his wife and child, committing his next two “serious murders” there in 1972. The victims were Eddie Brown, a 24-year-old gun runner, and his wife Bertie, described by Gaskins as “the best looking black girl I ever saw.” Gaskins sold guns to Brown, including stolen military weapons, but he grew nervous when Brown informed him that federal agents were sniffing around Charleston, seeking illicit arms dealers. Fearing a setup, Gaskin shot the Browns and planted them behind the barn where he had buried Janice Kirby in 1970.

Gaskins moved to Prospect, South Carolina, in July 1973, after his Charleston home burned down. (He blamed arsonists for the fire, but never identified the culprits.) Before year’s end, he murdered three more victims, starting with 14-year-old runaway Jackie Freeman. Gaskins picked her up hitchhiking, in October, and held her captive for two days of rape, torture and cannibalism. “I always thought of Jackie as special,” he recalled in his memoirs, “not really a serious murder, but likewise not just another coastal kill.”

The weekend after Freeman’s slaying, Gaskins bought a used hearse and put a sign in the window: WE HAUL ANYTHING, LIVING OR DEAD. When asked about it over drinks, he explained that he wanted the vehicle “Because I kill so many people I need a hearse to haul them to my private cemetery.”

His first passengers were 23-year-old Doreen Dempsey and her two-year-old daughter Robin Michelle. Gaskins knew Dempsey from his carnie days. An unwed mother pregnant with her second child in December 1973, she planned on leaving town that month and accepted Pee Wee’s offer of a drive to the local bus station. Instead, he drove into the woods and there demanded sex. Doreen agreed, then balked when Gaskins started to undress her child. Gaskins killed Doreen with a hammer, then raped and sodomized the child before strangling her to death and burying both victims together. Years later, he would recall his brutal assault on Robin Michelle as the best sex of his life.

Pee Wee’s “serious murders” continued in 1974, beginning with 36-year-old car thief Johnny Sellars. Sellars owed Gaskins $1,000 for auto parts, but he was slow to pay. Finally, tired of excuses, Gaskins lured Sellars to the woods and shot him with a rifle. Later the same night, hoping to forestall investigation of Sellars’ disappearance, Gaskins called on Johnny’s girlfriend, 22-year-old Jessie Ruth Judy, and stabbed her to death, hauling her corpse to the forest for burial beside her lover.

Horace Jones, another car thief and con man, made the fatal mistake of trying to romance Pee Wee’s current wife in 1974. “That pissed me off,” Gaskins recalled in Final Truth. Not the attempt per se, “but the way he went about doing it. I mean if he had come straight to me like a man and asked to make a deal with me for my wife, I would probably have give her to him, for a night or a week, or to keep, if the offer was good enough.” As it was, he shot Jones in the woods and stole $200 from the corpse before leaving Jones in a shallow grave.


Searchers identify grave site


By December 1974 Gaskins was a grandfather, settled into a routine that suited him and satisfied his needs. That Christmas season, he recalled, was “the happiest and peacefullest I can remember.”

Pee Wee didn’t know it yet, but he was running out of time.

"The Killingest Year"

Writing from prison, Gaskins called 1975 “my busiest year and my killingest year.” His pace of random murders on the Carolina coast remained “about the same,” although he started January with a threesome, including a man and two women. Gaskins described them as “hippie types” from Oregon, whose van had broken down near Georgetown. He offered a lift to the nearest garage, then detoured to a nearby swamp and handcuffed his captives at gunpoint. Before he drowned the trio, Gaskins said, “It was hard to say which one suffered most. I tried to make it equal.”

Gaskins made a critical mistake when he recruited ex-con Walter Neely to help him dispose of the van. Neely drove the vehicle to Pee Wee’s garage, where Gaskin customized and repainted it for sale out of state. The drive made Neely an accessory after the fact, and Gaskin trusted his simple-minded helper to keep a secret. Before year’s end, he would regret that choice.

Pee Wee’s first “serious murder” of the year involved a contract to kill Silas Yates, a wealthy Florence County farmer. He accepted $1,500 for the job, on behalf of 27-year-old Suzanne Kipper, furious at Yates for taking back a car, two horses, and other gifts he had given her while they were romantically involved. Two go-betweens on the contract, John Powell and John Owens, handled negotiations between Gaskins and Kipper. Gaskins recruited Diane Neely, friend Walter’s ex-wife, to lure Yates from home on the night of Feb. 12, 1975, claiming her car had broken down near his house. Pee Wee waited in the darkness to abduct Yates at gunpoint and drive him to the woods, where Powell and Owens watched him knife Yates to death, then helped Gaskins bury the corpse. Kipper subsequently married Owens, while Pee Wee used his knowledge of the murder to blackmail her for sex on demand.

The contract came back to haunt Gaskins when Diane Neely moved in with Avery Howard, a 35-year-old ex-convict whom Gaskins knew from state prison. She told Howard about the murder, and together they approached Gaskins with a demand for $5,000 hush-money. Gaskins agreed to meet them in the woods outside Prospect and bring the cash. The blackmailers arrived to find an open grave and Gaskins with a pistol in his hand. Two shots, a bit of spadework, and Pee Wee reckoned his problem was solved.

The human juggernaut rolled on. Kim Ghelkins was the next to die, a 13-year-old friend of Gaskins who angered him by rejecting his sexual overtures. Pee Wee reacted in typical style by raping, torturing and strangling her, planting her body in the woods. Diane Neely’s brother, 25-year-old Dennis Bellamy, teamed with 15-year-old half-brother Johnny Knight to loot Pee Wee’s chop shop that summer, thus earning themselves a death sentence.

And then, of course, we have his "Death Row Killing"

Rudolph Tyner was already marked for death by the state, but he wasn’t dying fast enough to please some people. Condemned for the holdup murders of Bill and Myrtle Moon at Murrells Inlet, in Georgetown County, Tyner expected to drag his case out for a decade or more with appeals before he kept his date with the electric chair. He might even beat the rap, since racial aspects of the case -- black gunman, white victims -- added weight to his appeals. South Carolina’s death penalty statutes had been twice invalidated by Supreme Court rulings in the past eight years, proving that anything was possible. Tyner’s worst problem on Death Row, so far, was feeding his insatiable narcotics addiction.

Outside the prison walls, Tony Cimo schemed to accelerate Tyner’s execution. Cimo was Myrtle Moon’s son by a previous marriage, bent on avenging his mother’s death. Through prison contacts, he negotiated for the hit, passed along from one convict to the next until he connected with Donald Gaskins. Finally, he had a contact who could guarantee results for a price. A maintenance trusty housed next-door to Death Row, Gaskins had free access to condemned inmates, mending broken pipes, toilets, light fixtures, anything at all. Unknown to Cimo, Gaskins also had a tape recorder, capturing their conversations for posterity -- a blackmail tool as good as money in the bank if he should ever manage to escape from custody.

Gaskins decided poison was the way to go. Befriending Tyner on his visits to Death Row, Gaskins began to slip the holdup killer junk food, marijuana, pills and heroin. Tyner received the gifts, unquestioning, and begged for more. Cimo supplied a box of candy laced with poison “strong enough to kill a horse,” but Tyner merely suffered stomach pains. Over the next 12 months, Gaskins repeated the experiment five times, spiking his target’s food and drugs with ever-larger toxic doses, all in vain. Tyner lived on, oblivious to the “coincidence” between his gifts and stomach-churning trips to the infirmary.

Six strikes and out. Gaskins gave up on poison and decided to construct a bomb. Cimo supplied the wiring, hardware and C-4 plastic explosive (smuggled past distracted guards in the hollowed-out heels of cowboy boots). Tyner agreed to let Gaskins connect a homemade intercom between their cells. Gaskins strung wire through prison heating ducts, constructed a “receiver” for his target from a plastic cup, and packed it with C-4. The two men synchronized their watches for a test run on the evening of Sept. 12, 1982.

At the appointed hour, Tyner pressed the loaded plastic cup against his ear and spoke to Gaskins, on the far side of the wall between their cells. “The last thing he heard through that speaker-cup before it blew his head off,” Gaskins later said, “was me laughing.”

-=Vel=-

[Flip McWho]

So that the majority could still make the rules?

Well yeah, but at least its not an either or situation (ie democrats or republicans, here (NZ) at least you have labour with the majority, but they also have NZ First and United future as part of the government who they have to listen too. (also jim andertons progressive party but really he's just labour, though he likes to think hes different)). It basically boils down to whoever can form a coalition, which isn't necessarily the party with the most votes, though they do have it easier. It's a lot more diverse than the current american system.
Though I imagine trying to switch american politics to a MMP system would cause headaches so big it'd probably be alot easier to go to war with china.

[ajbera]

Was that from "Final Truth"? A very interesting book, but you have to wonder how much was truth vs. bs.

Though there's no doubting that Pee Wee was an evil bastard. Nine confirmed murders, I believe. Even if his boasts of 200 was a major exaggeration, he was a pretty evil serial killer. And the Death Row murder was inspired.

[Velociryx]

Oh, he didn't kill two hundred, I don't think, but having grown up in the same area that he killed in, and having done a good deal of my own research on this dark-but-fascinating man, I can promise you that 80-100 is definitely NOT beyond the realm of extreme possibility.

Prospect, which was one of his "serious murder" killing grounds is not half an hour from my old townhouse, and it hasn't changed much since the seventies.

-=Vel=-

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Velociryx
. . . I wanted to include them so there was absolutely no doubt what sort of person I referred to when I made the comment about monsters.

-=Vel=-

Not arguing that these guys are not monsters.
Not arguing that they should not be punished.
Am arguing about what punishment will have the greatest effect in detering future heinous acts.

I see no evidence that the death penalty deters future murders.
I have concerns that executions will be perceived as an societal disrepect for the santity of life...an d that this disrespect for life mayl induce future murders.
I have no evidence to back up these concerns.

[Velociryx]

Not arguing that these guys are not monsters.
Not arguing that they should not be punished.

Good. I'm right there with you so far.

Am arguing about what punishment will have the greatest effect in detering future heinous acts.

Well, I can tell you with absolute, 100% certainty that there has never been a case where a serial killer was put to death, and went on to kill again.

I can't say the same thing about serial killers who were imprisoned, however.

Thus, in terms of which one has the highest success rate in ensuring that it won't happen again, the solution that I support boasts an impressive 100% success rate.

I see no evidence that the death penalty deters future murders.

As above.

I have concerns that executions will be perceived as an societal disrepect for the santity of life...an d that this disrespect for life mayl induce future murders.
I have no evidence to back up these concerns.

An interesting perception, but like you, I have seen nothing that would support this position. As it stands then, based on what we KNOW, I would rather trust a 100% effective solution when it comes to dealing with monsters like the one above.

I realize, however, that others will and do feel differently.

-=Vel=-

[Zkribbler]

You're talking about future crimes committed by the guys inside the walls.
I'm talking about future crimes committed by the guys outside the walls.

BTW: Actually, I do have some evidence. Namely, European nations have no death penalty and also have a much lower murder rate.

[ajbera]

Well, there's little or no evidence that CP either deters or promotes future murders, so that adds nothing the argument.

But the guys behind the walls, the ones who have murdered, won't be murdering anyone else when they're dead.

And there are cultural differences between the US and Europe. We have a culture that encourages people to go out and get what they want out of life, and this is followed by those who obey the law as much as those who don't. We have higher highs, but we pay for it with lower lows.

[Zkribbler]

And the chances of them murdering someone else if they live inside the walls is miniscule.

[Velociryx]

You're talking about future crimes committed by the guys inside the walls.
I'm talking about future crimes committed by the guys outside the walls.

BTW: Actually, I do have some evidence. Namely, European nations have no death penalty and also have a much lower murder rate.

Yes. I'm talking about future crimes that would likely be committed by serials who'd do it again if they got out.

When talking about the population of murderers, it's important to count all of them, including the one's you'e currently caught. Until they're dead, they're still part of the population and cannot be magically exempted from the accounting of their numbers.

If your argument is that by killing Pee Wee Gaskins, we do nothing to deter some other random person from committing murder, I would counter with the position that it makes little difference. Pee Wee did just fine all by his lonesome, thanks.

Further, while some have touted this as being a side effect of the death penalty (and while others refute it), to my knowledge, it has NEVER been listed as a serious argument in favor of. Rather, it is a 100% effective solution to the problem of seeing that a bad, bad seed doesn't get another chance, and it's good at that.

It's very, very good at that.

100% effective, as mentioned, which is a higher success rate than ANY OTHER form of prevention you can name.

As to Europe....they also have restrictive gun ownership laws, more liberal drinking laws, and higher speed limits. I could create a correlation between ANY of the above and their lower murder rate, but just because I can demonstrate it, would not make it so.

True?

-=Vel=-

[Zkribbler]

I'm talking about future crimes that would likely be committed by serials who'd do it again if they got out.

My solution: Don't let them out.