The mother of all execution delays
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This case has a personal link. The little girl was from the town of ~25,000 people I lived in at the time. The girl lived on the same street as my sisters friend.
Bryan Frederick Jennings was a 21 year old Marine on leave. He broke into a 6 year old girl's bedroom, put his hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream, and dragged her out the window to his car. He took the girl to a canal, raped her, then crushed her skull by pile-driving her head onto a rock. She still wasn't dead, so he held her under water in the canal for 10 minutes until she drowned.
He later got pulled over in the next county for a traffic violation. Police thought he looked like a picture of the guy captured on video near the crime scene, so they held him. Later they found witnesses who saw him with wet clothes on the day the girl disappeared.
He later confessed to the murder.
All this happened in May of 1979. He was finally executed.... last Thursday.
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This is the sort of anecdote that will be a weakness for Newsom in his presidential bid. He has unilaterally refused to inflict that particular legal punishment. And the families of the victims are not happy about it.
Education is extremely important.
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This is the sort of anecdote that will be a weakness for Newsom in his presidential bid. He has unilaterally refused to inflict that particular legal punishment. And the families of the victims are not happy about it.
@Horace said in The mother of all execution delays:
This is the sort of anecdote that will be a weakness for Newsom in his presidential bid. He has unilaterally refused to inflict that particular legal punishment. And the families of the victims are not happy about it.
Is it still up to the discretion of the governor? I would have thought the state legislature abolished the death penalty years ago.
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I wonder if that issue has the salience it did when it hurt Dukakis and Clinton later executed the retarded guy so as not to suffer the same fate. I would think not only because there are a dozen other culture war issues that superseded it in importance since.
