Robert Gleason, Jr.
A little after 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 16, 2013, forty-two year-old Robert Gleason, Jr. was executed at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. He opted for electrocution over the now more widely used lethal injection. He had murdered three men, the first in 2007 in connection with drug gang activity and the other two in prison – in 2009 and 2010, the second of those in the Red Onion “supermax” State Prison.
Capital punishment opponents declared that these two prison killings were a perfect example of why the death penalty should be abolished.
Huh? But wait. It’s a little more nuanced than that.
Gleason was sentenced to life in prison for the 2007 drug-related murder. It seems the other two were because he was tired of being in prison and was angling for a death sentence. He told prison and court officials that he would continue killing until he was executed.
“Gleason’s case demonstrates the folly of capital punishment,” said Stephen Northrup, executive director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “If we didn’t have a death penalty, he wouldn’t have killed these men. The death penalty not only wasn’t a deterrent, it was a spur in this case.”
Now, John Douglas and I favor capital punishment in limited circumstances, primarily for predatory killers. A full discussion of our views is featured in our new book, LAW & DISORDER, available in February. But we certainly respect many of the arguments put forth by those opposed to any state-sanctioned execution.
However, this is not one of them.
The idea that we should eliminate the death penalty to prevent bad men from killing reminds me of George Bernard Shaw’s observation in Man and Superman that, “No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens.”
In other words: Let’s declare our true intentions. If you’re against the death penalty for moral reasons, just say so, rather than imply its elimination is going to prevent more murder.
It has been argued, fairly in most cases, that capital punishment has never been shown to be a general deterrent to murder. But it is most definitely a specific deterrent.
We could just as easily alter Mr. Northrup’s statement to say, “If Mr. Gleason had been executed for his original murder, he wouldn’t have killed these men. Absence of the death penalty not only wasn’t a deterrent, it was a spur in this case.”
The point is, we know enough about the behavioral characteristics of violent sociopaths like Robert Gleason to know that they will kill whenever it suits them and the opportunity is there. Even incarceration in a supermax penitentiary will not stop them. If there were nothing that could be imposed on him beyond his existing life term, would you volunteer to be the prison guard for his cellblock?
Similar to the logic that if you make illicit drugs legal, the rich drug lords are not going to go straight and work in McDonald’s, you are not going to eliminate the killer instinct in a man like Gleason by removing a particular “incentive.”
And if you don’t believe me, I wonder what those two inmates he killed would have thought of the death penalty.
The only reason I’ve ever been in favor of the death penalty is because it eliminates a known threat.
You’re proposing a “Minority Report” scenario wherein we can execute people for crimes they haven’t yet committed. That is Gleason should have been executed in the first place because we predict he will kill again. That’s chilling! Who will be the precogs?
Regardless, the Gleason case is a poor one to argue that capital punishment can act as an incentive to murder because of the prior oppotunity to have imposed the death sentence.
But there are plenty of cases in which capital punishment acted as an incentive to murder where there was no prior opportunity to impose the death sentence. The classic one I’ve often seen is that of James French who murdered a motorist in hopes that the state would kill him (he failed his suicide attempts). When they didn’t, he killed his cellmate for the same reason. Eventually the state granted his wish. In this case absence of any death penalty would have saved lives. French would probably have had to hire a hit man to do him in.
There is similar argument. States that implement the death penalty put their citizens at risk. The case supporting this argument is that of Ted Bundy. Clearly he was going to kill again after his escape. But, as he admitted to Dr. Ronald M. Holmes, he chose Florida over other states because of its aggressive implementation of the death penalty. That made every young woman in Florida a target. They would have been safer if Florida had had no death penalty because Bundy would have gone elsewhere.
I have mixed feelings about the death penalty. I would think that reasonable people understand that there are very intelligent people who make very compelling arguments both ways. What troubles me, though, is cheering when someone is executed. If a convict has to be executed, then he has to be executed, but to have a party when someone is executed seems to me unseemly in the extreme. I have two stories to emphasize my position.
According to the Talmud, when the Egyptians were drowned, the angels began to sing. God told them to stop because, “Those too are my children..” We are all children of God and the death of anyone of us diminishes all of us. An execution may be necessary, but death is always an unfortunate result.
There is a book, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (and if you want your heart ripped out and handed to you, this is your book). There is one story about a woman who survived a concentration camp, but her mother, father, and beloved younger brother were murdered. After the war, the camp commandant was sentenced to death at a war trial, and I think we can agree that if anyone deserves the death penalty, Nazi concentration camp commandants are right at the top of the list. Anyway, the woman went to the execution seeking to extract the revenge she had earned. Watching the executions, she suddenly realized that the executions were not making her feel better. She immediately left and went on to live a good life, proving again that living well really is the best revenge.
Yep I agree the anti capital punishment guy in the article ‘is’ dead wrong. In fact capital punishment in this case would have saved 2 lives (innocent or not) and the criminal in question wanted to die anyway, too bad he just didn’t kill himself.
As far as capital punishment I’ve gone back n forth on it over time but finally settled on……….
Capital punishment for repeat offenders (basically serial killers)….your convicted of killing 3 or more people in separate murders and it should be automatic. This would get rid the Ted Bundy’s, Green River Killier, BTK, etc. who in my opinion have no place on earth.
Domestic Homicide….no way…too many unknowns…spouses fighting with each other over divorce/ foreclosure/ affair, ‘he said/ she said’, we often don’t know if it’s 1st degree murder, 2nd degree, manslaughter. Then there’s the single mothers who can’t feed their babies/ don’t want them, so they smother them neglect them too ‘iffy’ I think for capital punishment…I’d say a term of years up to natural life for domestic homicides (depending on the crime) and maybe some of them could be rehabilitated.
Common thugs/ drug dealers shooting each other, shooting liquor store clerks….life in prison….maybe with the possibility of parole for a few.
Killing a police officer in the line of duty….mandatory life…possible execution if there are especially bad circumstances.
This leaves child molester killers with 1 or 2 victims, violent rape murder criminals with 1 or 2 victims….I’d say life no parole. I’d like to say ‘death’ but with only 1 victim or at most 2 it’s too hard to know if we’ve actually got the right guy convicted I think. If there was ‘mayhem’ in addition to everything else against these 1 or 2 victims, I might go for ‘death’ on that.
Oops…I forgot ‘mass killers’ who murder dozens in schools, theatres etc. These crimes are easy to prove as the shooters are on scene, if they don’t kill themselves on scene or get killed by SWAT, I’d say automatic execution after conviction, unless a very few ‘really’ are insane.
Gleason was going to kill in prison whether it would result in execution or not. His pronouncements and most likely his option to be electrocuted were most likely just arrogant posturing.
As forensics continue to become more sophisticated, arguments against the death penalty based solely on the remote risk of punishing the wrong person should dwindle. Any serial killer who remains alive is still capable of directly or indirectly victimizing others, even while incarcerated. If they are still allowed to communicate with family, they are still spreading their toxic ideation to another generation.
My problem isn’t with executing cold blooded murderers. My problem is that we send innocent people to death row over and over again. David A. Love, the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence writes:
Since 1973, 142 innocent men and women were freed from death row, three of them this past year. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the most common factors associated with murder exonerations are perjury and false accusations, followed by official misconduct, mistaken witness identification, false confessions and false and misleading forensic evidence.
A Louisiana death row survivor, Damon Thibodeaux became the 141st person exonerated from death row in 40 years. In addition, he was the 300th wrongfully convicted person exonerated through DNA evidence, and the 18th death row inmate freed through DNA. He had falsely confessed after a nine-hour interrogation, and subsequently recanted on the ground he was coerced.
Eyewitness identification has been a crapshoot in courtrooms for hundreds of years. Cross-race identification has been a catastrophe. Prosecutors are not held accountable for misconduct like those of us in other professions are. Science illiterate judges decide who is an “expert” witness right in the middle of a trial, promoting pseudo-science throughout American courtrooms. Many jurisdictions still don’t require mandatory recording of police interviews. Good cops sleep at night believing they would never employ the Reid technique of interrogation against an innocent person, but it happens time and time again.
I can’t imagine the misery inflicted on the family of an innocent person on death row any more than I can imagine the misery inflicted on the family of a murder victim.