Thank You, Attorney General Barr

Just the News posted an article today about a recent action by Attorney General Barr.

The article reports:

The Justice Department will try to reinstate a death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped in the 2013 attack that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.

Attorney General William Barr on Thursday told the Associated Press that the department would appeal a court ruling last month that threw out Tsarnaev’s death sentence and ordered a trial to determine whether he should be executed for the attack .

Barr said the department would take the matter to the Supreme Court.

I was living in Massachusetts during that time. One of my daughters has a friend who ran the marathon that year and came up on the scene just after the bombing. She was so traumatized by what she saw that she did not want to run the marathon the following year. Eventually my daughter agreed to do it with her and she did run. There is no reason this crime does not deserve the death penalty. It was an intentional terror attack on innocent people.

The article concludes:

Under Barr, the Justice Department has again begun carrying out federal executions, putting three men to death so far and scheduling at least three others next week and in September.

In the Tsarnaev case, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit court found in July that the judge who oversaw the 2015 trial did not adequately question potential jurors about what they had read or heard about the highly publicized case.

What was the evidence? And was he convicted on the basis of the evidence?

Sometimes The Death Penalty Is A Good Thing

I know there was a high-profile death penalty case in the news yesterday. I am not going to comment on that case because I don’t know enough about it and can’t get enough information from sources I trust to form a logical opinion. This article is about another execution yesterday that didn’t get anywhere near the publicity.

Associated Press reported that yesterday that Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in Texas. Lawrence Russell Brewer was one of the men involved in the dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas.

James Byrd, Jr., was a disabled man who lived very modestly on his disability check. Because he couldn’t afford a car, he walked wherever he needed to go. He was seen on Sunday, June 7, 1998, walking down the road not far from his home in Jasper, Texas. Later, he was seen riding in the bed of a dark pickup.

The article reports:

Testimony showed the three men and Byrd drove out into the county about 10 miles and stopped along an isolated logging road. A fight broke out and the outnumbered Byrd was tied to the truck bumper with a 24 1/2-foot logging chain. Three miles later, what was left of his shredded remains was dumped between a black church and cemetery where the pavement ended on the remote road.

I don’t know if the death penalty will stop anyone else from doing something so horrible, but I am glad this man will not be alive to spread the mental poison that allowed this crime to happen.

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