Texas death row inmate Ray Jasper is scheduled to be put to death on March 19. He has written us a letter that, he acknowledges, "could be my final statement on earth." It is well worth your time.
Ray Jasper was convicted of participating in the 1998 robbery and murder of recording studio owner David Alejandro. A teenager at the time of the crime, Jasper was sentenced to death. He wrote to us once before, as part of our Letters from Death Row series. That letter was remarkable for its calmness, clarity, and insight into life as a prisoner who will never see freedom. We wrote back and invited him to share any other thoughts he might have. Today, we received the letter below. Everyone should read it.
Last month (as we did last year), we sent letters to all of the U.S. death row inmates who have execution dates in the upcoming year. Today, we have our first reply: Ray Jasper, who isscheduled to be put to death in Texas in March.
The purpose of publishing these letters is to hear directly from people whose voices are not often heard. This is not a referendum on the guilt or innocence of any inmate. Ray Jasper responded to our questions numerically, so we will briefly list them here:
1. What do you think the chances are of your execution occurring as scheduled?
2. Can you describe daily life on Death Row?
3. Can you talk a bit about your own past and upbringing?
4. Has your time in jail changed your political or religious beliefs?
5. Do you have any thoughts on how the media and the public view the death penalty?
6. What else would you like to say to the public about your life, your situation, and what you think it means for our country?
My sympathies to the Alejandro family.
ReplyDeleteRay Jasper: The last words of an amoral sociopath.
Jasper organized the slaughter of a "friend", David, and he is claiming victimhood.
Pathetic, predictable, common.
Slavery - involuntary servitude of the innocent, based only upon injustice.
Incarceration/death penalty - legal sanction of the guilty, who are responsible for their own sanctions, who have harmed/murdered the innocent, given a sentence based in due process, with a foundation in justice.
I can see how Jasper, a clueless thug, would equate the two.
All this time on death row, all that time for reflection and all we have are the idiotic musings of an amoral sociopath.
A unique benefit of the death penalty is that the offender knows the day of their death and therefore has a huge advantage over the rest of us and, most certainly, over the innocent murder victim.
". . . a secondary measure of the love of God may be said to appear. For capital punishment provides the murderer with incentive to repentance which the ordinary man does not have, that is a definite date on which he is to meet his God. It is as if God thus providentially granted him a special inducement to repentance out of consideration of the enormity of his crime . . . the law grants to the condemned an opportunity which he did not grant to his victim, the opportunity to prepare to meet his God. Even divine justice here may be said to be tempered with mercy." Carey agrees with Saints Augustine and Aquinas, that executions represent mercy to the wrongdoer: (p. 116). Quaker biblical scholar Dr. Gervas A. Carey. A Professor of Bible and past President of George Fox College, Essays on the Death Penalty, T. Robert Ingram, ed., St. Thomas Press, Houston, 1963, 1992
St. Thomas Aquinas: "The fact that the evil, as long as they live, can be corrected from their errors does not prohibit the fact that they may be justly executed, for the danger which threatens from their way of life is greater and more certain than the good which may be expected from their improvement. They also have at that critical point of death the opportunity to be converted to God through repentance. And if they are so stubborn that even at the point of death their heart does not draw back from evil, it is possible to make a highly probable judgement that they would never come away from evil to the right use of their powers." Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, 146.
see
The Death Penalty: Mercy, Expiation, Redemption & Salvation
http://prodpinnc.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-death-penalty-mercy-expiation.html