Tucker gets lethal injection
Campus Times
February 6, 1998
Capital punishment. Should the government have the right to take a human's
life for a crime or should the criminal's life be spared and sentenced to
jail time?
The answer for the state of Texas has been to not hesitate, but rather
to impose the sentence on an almost regular basis, 144 times in the Lone
Star State since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment,
more than any other state in the United States. So when Karla Faye Tucker
was on death row in Texas, her fate was sealed.
According to the Chicago Tribune, in 1983, Tucker along with her boyfriend,
Danny Garrett, broke into the Houston apartment of Jerry Dean, who was with
the company of Deborah Thornton asleep in bed. Burglary was Tucker's first
idea, but she ended up using a pickax on both Dean and Thornton in a murder-frenzy
fueled by drugs.
On Tuesday, Tucker paid the ultimate price for her crime-death by lethal
injection. But Tucker stands for much more than just an end to the crime
she committed. She became the first woman in the state of Texas to be executed
since the Civil War and only the second woman (Velma Barfield in North Carolina
was the first woman to be put to death since the Supreme Court ruling to
reinstate the death penalty in 1976) to be put to death.
This case certainly re-opened the debate on whether or not capital punishment
should continue in America. What made this into a media frenzy and so high
profile was that Tucker was a woman. However, that fact should not be a
determining factor in deciding whether or not to impose capital punishment.
The issue of capital punishment is a hard subject to deal with. On one
side of the coin, many victim's families want closure, or revenge for lack
of a better term.
"I want to say to every victim in the world, 'Demand this; this
is your right.' Fourteen and a half years ago, Karla Faye Tucker exploded
my family. Fourteen and half years later, she brought my family back together
... We'll begin tomorrow without the name Karla Faye Tucker stuck in our
face every day," said Richard Thornton, Deborah Thornton's husband,
after the execution on Tuesday.
Richard Thornton is right because Tucker's actions could not be ignored
by the state. And if the state had let Tucker off with just a stiff sentence,
the example to society is that of "Don't kill. But if you do, we won't
sentence you to death, maybe just a long time in jail." If the consequence
of killing someone is only jail time, does this scare future offenders to
remain good?
But at the same time, who are we to say who lives and who dies?
Maybe Tucker did find the Lord as she claims to have done. Maybe Tucker
did change her ways to a point where she was sane. Pope John Paul II felt
Tucker had changed, sending a message to Texas Gov. George W. Bush asking
him to spare Tucker's life.
But Bush's decision was to ignore the message by Pope John Paul II and
the rest of the Tucker supporters and let the execution follow through as
planned.
Tucker was a woman who killed and then learned from her mistake, finding
peace in the Lord through Christianity. But she may have done that in a
final plea to spare her life, knowing religion was her last attempt to live.
Although Tucker was killed, she did accomplish a rebirth, at least in
her mind. Maybe for both sides this was best or maybe it was not. In any
event, the answer to the question of the capital punishment debate, in Texas'
view, is the highest form of punishment. No matter what changes Tucker went
through, the crime had already been committed, and regardless of her being
a woman, her punishment of death for the crime, double murder, she committed.
