Pro-Death… By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

April 11, 2012 Whitney Farmer 18 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an M.B.A, and continues to practice forgiveness…with some unforced errors.

Convicted murderer Charles Manson is expected to NOT appear in court for his 12^th parole board hearing wherein his attorneys will ask for his release. Since 1997, he has allowed others to plead the cause of a prisoner who is unrepentant and noncompliant.  Within the last three years, he has been caught twice with cellphones that have been smuggled in on his behalf and with a homemade weapon.  His legal team continues to recommend that Manson be transferred to a mental health facility in Atascadero to live out his days.

Such things should not be so.

Capitalizing on a temporary ban on capital punishment in 1997, Manson had his sentence commuted to life in prison, astonishingly, with the possibility of parole. The subsequent years have allowed the cult of his personality to grow and thrive.  The home of the Tate murder has become not a memorial to the tragedy, but more often a shrine to the horror. It was once sublet to a rock band who built a production studio there where they recorded their second lucrative album in the midst of their black paint and bloodied cross décor.

There are some types of evil that grow stronger with attention. Celebrity becomes a fuel that powers a monstrous machine. The breath that still is housed in the skin sack full of demons that is Manson taunts the family and friends of the victims with public commentary that arrogantly plays between the maudlin and the dangerous. Their lives have become a lifelong battle to keep a killer restrained. If they hadn’t battled for the last forty years, Manson could have been freed during any of the last twelve opportunities and be standing next to you at a 7-11 buying a Slurpee. As Alfred Hitchcock successfully hypothesized, evil is more striking when it is unexpected and housed in the mundane. And Manson, like others with dark souls, has nothing else intriguing about them that would make you look twice at their resume.

Within a republic, victims of crime enter into a social contract wherein they forego individual vengeance in exchange for the ideal, even-handed justice that weighs evidence and impartially judges. The hope is that all citizens will be afforded the same opportunity in the event that they fall under suspicion. That’s the social contract.

The handling of Manson has been a courtly romance rather than justice from the courts. To say that he deserves confinement in a hospital for treatment is an insult to souls who suffer from mental illness rather than glory in the title as if it is a privileged club, and it denies what should be the appropriate expectation of citizens who offset all natural inclination to punish evil through eradication.

I once met a man who had been imprisoned for theft for a few years. During that time, he claimed that he had been used by prison guards to kill a child murderer who was expected to be argued into freedom. He described being left alone with the hated target in the kitchen with a knife during food prep assignment, guns trained on him from above in case he decided against becoming the Hand of the King. His story might have been a lie. But it couldn’t have traction if there wasn’t an uncomfortable sense that sometimes death is called for in order to protect the innocent and honor the dead, and that sometimes the necessity of that is denied. In that event, the wound remains unhealed even as new wounds become probable.

The Ten Commandments state, “Thou shalt not murder”, not ‘kill’. Killing to teach a lesson as well as to purge an influence is in fact essential, sanctioned and prescribed. That decision – made soberly and even with heartbreak over the final disposition over the unredeemable who once had been the child who could have loved and been given love – once made, closes the book. It prevents the infection that could erupt into Thunderdome within a society.

The quote of Jesus of “Judge not, or you too will be judged…” is inaccurately shortened to “Judge not…” The full context continues, “For in the same way you judge, you will be judged. And with the same measure you give it will be measured to you.” Matthew 7:1-2.  There is the potential for boundless evil in the human heart, and even wrath that stays hidden has consequences. It destroys families and careers, but it is different than if that wrath was nurtured and given birth and championed and murders without remorse. If that is the measure that is given, every person of conscience should embrace that consequence of death via capital punishment if that’s what we personally dish out.

If I ever do what Manson did, kill me. Please. Your hands will be clean. Close the book and heal the wound.

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Quote of the Blog, from Plato: “Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.”

Photo courtesy of Sharon Tate Official Website, administered by the Tate Family.