I’ve got four kids. Four. The youngest is five, same age as Kamarie Holland when Jeremy Williams got his hands on her. So when I read what that man did, I didn’t need a grief counselor to process my feelings. I needed to not be holding my phone near my children because the details would curdle your stomach right out of your body.
Williams smoked meth. Then he forced a five-year-old to smoke it too. Then he sexually abused that little girl for over an hour. Then he strangled her. He filmed the whole thing. He kept her body afterward so he could keep going. Her body was found in his basement under a car tarp with a rope around her neck. He had offered that child’s mother $2,500. The mother is in prison now for sex trafficking her own daughter, and honestly, twenty years doesn’t sound like enough either.
Williams is scheduled to die by lethal injection today in Alabama. Good.
He’s not the only one. For the first time in sixteen years, three executions are happening on the same day in America. In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, is set to die for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins, a 54-year-old motel maid who was cleaning a room when Hines raped her, robbed her, and stabbed her to death. They found her wrapped in a bedsheet. He stole her car keys and wallet on his way out. That was forty years ago. Forty years this woman’s family has been waiting.
And in Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, is scheduled to die for murdering his girlfriend Olimpia Fisher in 2003. She was trying to leave him. So he shot her in one eye. Then he waited. Eight minutes. She screamed for help. He stood there and listened. Then he shot her in the other eye. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said it plainly: “He made her suffer because she dared to live beyond his control.”
Now here’s where I need to speak to the managers of the criminal justice system, because I have questions.
TheAHL (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsRodriguez’s attorneys actually went to the Pardon and Parole Board and asked them to spare his life. Their argument? He had a “difficult childhood in Cuba.” He had brain damage. He had PTSD. He had depression with psychotic episodes. You know who else had a difficult day? Olimpia Fisher, screaming on the floor of her own home with a bullet in her eye, knowing another one was coming. I’m supposed to weigh his childhood against that? I’m supposed to sit at my kitchen table with my kids’ homework spread out in front of me and think, well, he had a hard time in Cuba, so maybe we should let the man who shot a woman in both eyes live out his days on the taxpayer’s dime?
Rodriguez himself didn’t even want the clemency. He told the board he didn’t want mercy. He said his time had come and he wanted to leave in peace. At least someone in this story has a functioning moral compass, and it’s the murderer.
And let me tell you something else I noticed doing my own reading. Florida already executed Andrew Richard Lukehart on Tuesday. He killed his girlfriend’s five-month-old baby, Gabrielle Hanshaw, in 1996. Dropped the baby on her head, shook her, threw her in a pond, then called his girlfriend and said the baby had been kidnapped. He said “I’m sorry” and recited a Bible verse as his last words. That was Florida’s eighth execution this year. Eight. And somehow the sky hasn’t fallen.
I keep hearing from the people who think they’re smarter than me that the death penalty is barbaric, that it doesn’t deter crime, that we’ve evolved past it. You know what I think is barbaric? A five-year-old girl under a car tarp. A motel maid wrapped in a bedsheet. A woman screaming for eight minutes while the man who supposedly loved her decides whether to finish the job.
Three men are dying today. I’m not going to lose a minute of sleep over it. I’m going to tuck my kids in tonight and be grateful that somewhere, three sets of victims’ families are finally getting something that looks remotely like justice, even if it took decades too long.