This article is news with not-so-liberal commentary.
William Emmett LeCroy (photo), 50, was executed on Tuesday, September 22, 2020, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the 2001 rape and murder of a Georgia nurse he believed had put a hex on him. (Read story here.)
LeCroy was a neighbor of the victim, knew her, and often waved to her. But obsession with witchcraft drove him to break into her home, lie in wait, and kill her. When she came home, he smacked her with a shotgun, bound and raped her, then slashed her throat and stabbed her multiple times.
“He later told investigators he’d come to believe she might have been his old babysitter he called Tinkerbell, who LeCroy claimed sexually molested him as a child,” NBC News reported. “He had ruminated for days before the slaying about how Tiesler was Tinkerbell and that assaulting her would reverse a hex she put on him.”
Georgia has the death penalty, but he was prosecuted under a federal carjacking statute, because he took her car and tried to escape into Canada in it.
Like many liberals, I’m leery of the death penalty, but I’m not totally against it. Some cases cry out for it. While dozens of wrongly convicted men have been freed from death rows thanks to DNA and the work of the Innocence Project and similar groups, there was no doubt about LeCroy’s guilt.
LeCroy had a troubled childhood and was kicked out of the Army. He obviously was delusional, but the legal test of insanity is whether he knew right from right, which he clearly did as he wrote an apology for the murder right after committing it. Other people have troubled childhoods or traumatic experiences in life, but it doesn’t turn them into murderers. His obsessions — with witchcraft and the former babysitter — smack of someone trying to deflect blame for screwing up his own life.
I don’t believe the death penalty deters anything. How do you deter someone with his delusions? Let’s be honest about this. The only plausible rationale for executing this man is that he had it coming. I wouldn’t argue he didn’t.
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