At 6:00 p.m. tonight, I'll close my eyes and say a prayer for myself and for the families of the victims of Danny Rolling. He's scheduled to die by lethal injection later today. I'm glad. That's why I'm praying for myself.
It's a very tough sell, and it crops up in what has been a rather remarkable turnaround of philosophy over the last couple of years. Back in 1990, it wouldn't have even been a question. I was the secretary of the USF College Republicans, a hard-core, pro-defense, pro-death penalty conservative. To be sure, I didn't give the issues the thought they deserved back then, but I was clinging hard to a little piece of stability in my life, which was pretty solely grounded in my friendship with a certain guy and my social networking with the CR crowd. I wasn't medicated yet, and life was quite painful, so I forgive myself now for blindly following the Right the way I did.
I was a student at USF in Tampa in 1990, living on campus, so I saw and felt firsthand some of the fear that Gainesville experienced. Since it took a while for Rolling to be captured, we all lived in some fear, taking safety precautions, not going out alone at night, and such. I met students who transferred to USF from UF, either because they were in fear for their lives or because their parents had made them. A year prior, I had bunked with CRs at the Williamsburg Village apartments on a junket; the first victims were found there. You look back on things like that and enjoy a little "there but for the grace of God..." moment. Rolling was most certainly Gainesville's Bundy, and I don't recommend reading the online information that you'll find about the killings, like CourtTV's Crime Library; it's graphic and nightmare-inducing in the details of his depravity.
About half a dozen years ago, maybe more, the tide turned in my philosophical beliefs. I discovered witchcraft, Unitarian Universalism, and became a granola-eating, nuke-protesting bleeding heart liberal in the best senses of those terms. I mean, I don't even believe the US has any right to sanction or dictate limits in North Korea's arms race until we disarm ourselves. Naive, probably, but not hypocritical.
A biggie in my turnaround is my opposition to the death penalty; I see it as a detractor in our humanity and an act that only brings us to the level of the criminal. It's not a deterrant, and it lessens the human race every time we strap somebody in for it. The fact that Florida retired Old Sparky means nothing; it's still an eye for an eye at the expense of mankind. Like I said, this is a vent.
But Danny Rolling? That crazy sonofabitch didn't even bother to mount a psych defense. Heh, contradiction in terms...oh, he talked of multiple personalities at times and tried to string together a nut persona that turned out to be cribbed from Exorcist II, but before the lawyers could even start posturing, he changed his plea to guilty and admitted that he murdered the Gainesville 5. He wasn't devious or calculating like Bundy, spinning stories left and right to keep himself from the needle. He admitted it. Period. Felt like it, wanted to make a name for himself, no remorse. From there, the lawyers doing the appeals dance was academic, an exercise for Con. Law class.
Maybe I can't change my mind on him because I was stupid and morbidly curious enough to read the true crime websites about the crime scenes and the mutilations awhile back. Maybe I'm clinging to some 15-year-old fear. All I know is I'm still against the death penalty, and I'll be happy and relieved come 6:01 tonight. And it doesn't feel contradictory.
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