In The Hands Of Monsters
Zina Linnick’s parents, like parents everywhere, probably spent time sitting at her bedside when she was little, comforting her, assuring that she could sleep well when the lights go out. There are no such things as monsters.
They were wrong.
Yesterday Zina’s body was found. She found out, in the last minutes of her 12 year old life, that monsters are indeed all too real. And she died at the hands of one. And now comes the all too familiar back story, the guy was a convicted sex offender who had failed to register as such and had dropped off the radar screen, a multi-convicted criminal, an illegal immigrant who somehow didn’t get deported after being convicted of a smorgasbord of crimes, etc., etc.
And the beat goes on.
It seems that nearly every day now we wake up to the news that another girl is missing from somewhere, and we wait for what now seems to be the inevitable outcome. The girl’s body will be found somewhere in a wooded area, dumped like inconvenient litter by some animal who didn’t – couldn’t – recognize that he had just destroyed a human being, disposed of with the same disconnection that he would have when scraping something unpleasant off of his shoe.
It happens over and over again. How many times lately?
For those of you out there who do not believe in the death penalty….I defy you to find one, ONE valid reason why the monster who just killed that twelve year old girl should keep on breathing for one single hour longer. I know all the old, tired arguments against it. Will it bring her back? Nope. But nobody will be able to bring that animal back, either. It’s just revenge, they whine. Yeah. So? That’s exactly what it is. Revenge. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? We should hold ourselves to a higher standard and not commit state sanctioned murder. I don’t think the state can possibly have a higher standard than executing a monster who preys on her children without regard, mercy, or pity.
And, yeah, I know….that’s not the end-all answer. It won’t fix the entire problem. But it certainly will fix small parts of it one at a time.
Maybe parents should stop telling their kids that there aren’t any monsters out there because there surely are. Polly Klaas and Jessica Lunsford and now Zina Linnick and many others all spent the last terrified moments of their lives in the hands of one.
So…tell me again what’s wrong with the death penalty in thse cases?



