Last Thursday, a woman named Teresa Lewis was executed by lethal injection in Virginia. Lewis was convicted of the murder of her husband and his son, even though she was not the one who physically killed them. Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller were the ones who performed the shooting.
Charles J. Strauss was the presiding judge in this case, and he said Lewis deserved the death penalty because she was the mastermind behind the brutal killings. Lewis had an IQ of 72 – two points away from the number that would legally make her mentally disabled. Is the death penalty fair? Did Lewis deserve to be killed?
I don’t think it’s right to kill someone because she killed someone else; it’s hypocritical. In Lewis’ case, the government killed a woman who was barely outside the legal definition of mentally disabled, a woman who was diagnosed with “dependent personality disorder,” a woman who wasn’t even the one who shot the gun. It is true she provided the two men with the money to buy the weapons they needed to commit the murder, but Shallenberger said he “got her to fall in love with me so she would give me the insurance money.”
Who do we believe in these cases? I think the judges who preside over these cases are given too much authority. Sure, the governor of the state can overturn a ruling given by a judge, but even so, they are just two people deciding if it’s humane to take a person’s life. Isn’t that hypocritical of them? They sentenced Lewis to death because she planned her husband’s murder, but Strauss and Governor Robert F. McDonnell planned the death of Lewis.
Yes, she planned the murders, but she did not force Shallenberger and Fuller to pull the trigger. They could have both said “no.” Isn’t it equally their fault? Both of these men got sentenced to life in prison, but not the death penalty. What led to this discrepancy in punishment?
Some would argue that yes, it was Lewis’ fault because if she hadn’t planned the murders and “enticed” the two men to commit those murders, her husband and his son may still be alive. If Lewis hadn’t planed it, Shallenberger and Fuller wouldn’t have even known about Lewis’ husband; therefore, the murders would not have happened. But I would argue that even though this is true, the two men were completely able to turn away and not choose to kill Lewis’ husband.
When sentencing someone to the death penalty, one must look at the evidence, decide it’s “right,” and kill that person. Is that not the same thing as first-degree murder? Killing someone because she killed someone else is hypocritical. It’s not right. As Gandhi once said, “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.”