Monday 11-04-2011 - “When an individual murders another individual, society must stand up and denounce this act, and if that act was so heinous that it warrants death then that individual chose their fate by his or her actions,” said Sgt. Rich Holton, president of the Hartford Police Union. “The death penalty is not about ‘an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth,’ it’s about protecting and safeguarding innocent victims - men, women, children and the elderly - from predators within society who do not have a moral compass and do not value life as the rest of society does. Is it too much to ask that these violent predators forfeit their lives when they did not give their victims a chance?”

Have you ever thought about how many criminals escape punishment, and yet, the victims never have a chance to do that? Are crime victims in the United States today the forgotten people of our time? Do they receive full measure of justice (as cited in Isenberg, 1977, p. 129)?

A criminal on death row has a chance to prepare his death, make a will, and make his last statements, etc. while some victims can never do it. There are many other crimes where people are injured by stabbing, rape, theft, etc. To some degree at least, the victims right to freedom and pursuit of happiness is violated.

[Whoever did this] must be exterminated, and they must be exterminated by us. {On the perpetrators of the Kansas City Massacre of 1933, as quoted in Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough (2004: Penguin), p. 51}

"When a state puts death row criminals to death quickly, it creates a chilling effect on violent criminals in our society," Sheriff Jack Parker said. "While working in the jail in the 1980s, I often heard inmates say the only thing that kept them from killing their victim was their fear of the (electric) chair. Unfortunately, waiting too many years for a death sentence to be carried out is bad for the victim's family, bad for justice and dilutes any deterrent value." [Sunday 17 July 2011]

Monday 1 August 2011 - Canada should bring back the death penalty as a way of capping Edmonton’s climbing homicide rate, says a world-famous sheriff.

“The first thing I would do is execute those who fall under a certain criteria,” Sheriff Joe Arpaio told the Sun.

“You should have the death penalty. I think that would go a long way.”

In Edmonton, the homicide rate continues to climb.

There have been 33 killings so far this year, with the latest four recorded in the past week.

Bringing back the death penalty is just the incentive Edmontonians need to stop killing, he said.

“Possibly with the death penalty it might make a difference if people feel they could be executed,” Sheriff Joe said.

“That person could never kill again anyway.”

On Monday 7 March 2011, Putnam County Sheriff Donald B. Smith said he truly believes that the bill, which deals with "deep moral and ethical issues,” would be a deterrent.

“Anything that we can do, Sen. Ball, to make it safer for them [law enforcement officers] to serve, to go out and go to domestic disputes, domestic incidents, to go out on traffic stops in the middle of the night not knowing who’s in the vehicle you’re walking up to, anything we can do to make it safer for them, we should do, and that’s really what this legislation is all about,” Smith said.

Delaware’s police chiefs are staunchly against repealing the death penalty, and on Wednesday 13 March 2013 afternoon they counted the ways.

Standing next to the Delaware Law Enforcement Memorial and in the shadows of a Legislative Hall where repeal was proposed the day before through Senate Bill 19, police leadership made its case to gathered media and legislators who looked on before beginning a lawmaking session.

Law enforcement, legal counsel and families affected by death row inmate’s deeds spent time discounting pro-abolition of capital punishment in a 25-minute gathering, making their quick talking points and passing out a 26-page packet to support their case.

The packet was sent to lawmakers at nearby Legislative Hall who will decide the fate of Senate Bill 19 that would make life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as the first-degree murder punishment. That would alter the sentences of 17 Delaware men currently on death row.

Lewes Police Chief Jeffrey Horvath, chairman of the Police Chiefs’ Council, said law enforcement is faced daily with the chance of death at the hands of the worst incorrigibles not affected by deterrents, but not worth trading a police life for, either, with life in prison.

“I know of no other occupation in Delaware that has a greater chance on a daily basis in their job of being murdered (than a police officer),” Mr. Horvath said.

Wednesday 20 March 2013 - Jeffrey Horvath, president of the Delaware Police Chiefs’ Council that’s lobbying legislators to keep the death penalty said “What we should be talking about” has nothing to do with “Texas, California or any other state.

“Delaware’s system is not broken. If functions quite well as an effective system … We have many safeguards in place and as I have heard many times on of the finest judiciaries in the country.” 

In closing, Mr. Horvath pointed out that Delaware’s police chiefs presented a 26-page argument for retaining capital punishment to legislators last week, and a letter that ended with:

“The murder victims, their families and the good citizens of the State of Delaware deserve to have their lives valued at the same level at least of that of the murderer’s. They deserve to have a criminal justice system that they can trust to do justice.”

Friday 12 April 2013 – In the last six years, six states have abandoned the death penalty. Should state lawmakers repeal capital punishment, that would make Delaware the seventh.

“I think if we took it to a popular vote, I'm confident that the majority of the people in the state of Delaware would support the death penalty,” said Lewes Police Chief Jeffrey Horvath.

Horvath heads up Delaware's Police Chiefs’ Council. He believes the death penalty not only provides closure to murder victims’ family members, but also brings justice to society.

“The people that have been executed from 1976 until 2012, you'll see that they all were heinous criminals, they were evil people and they deserved the death penalty.”

Proponents of the repeal argue the death penalty costs taxpayers more than life in prison, the threat of capital punishment does not deter criminals and there’s always the possibility of a wrongful conviction.

"Our senators and now our representatives should only be concerned with the death penalty as it applies to the state of Delaware," Horvath said. "No one has been put to death in Delaware that should not have been."

Not only that, Horvath says the threat of a death sentence does protect law enforcement.

"When I was in the drug unit, we used to arrest guys and they would carry a certain amount of drugs because, if they got over that threshold, they knew they were going to get mandatory jail time. So that mandatory sentence for trafficking cocaine was a deterrent for how much drugs they carried on their person. So you can't tell me that this death penalty isn't a deterrent to some people."

Saturday 19 March 2011 – A former assistant warden at Pontiac Correctional Center believes Governor Pat Quinn made a bad decision in abolishing Illinois’ death penalty.

“I am very upset with the governor’s decision. During my 38 years at PCC I was involved with many Death Row inmates,” Lou Lowery said in an interview with The Daily Leader Friday afternoon. ”I still say a person who did killing(s) deserves to die.”

Lowery said he understands that inmates in Illinois in the past have been in Condemned Units and then been exonerated.

Saturday 19 March 2011 - “I am glad that the actual killers were found or it became clear that the person sentenced to death was innocent. Get the innocent people off of Death Row, let them go, but don’t abolish the death sentence and commute the death sentences like Quinn did.”

Saturday 19 March 2011 - Lowery said he feels especially fearful of the 15 men whose sentences were recently commuted. “Some of these men were on Death Row for more than one murder. I am not an attorney. But I know what I feel and that is that a life sentence doesn’t mean they won’t escape or kill somebody else,” he said.

In the late 1980s, John Groncki was working as a Baltimore City police officer in the K-9 unit when he came upon four people he believed had just committed an armed robbery.

He followed standard procedure and searched all four men for weapons. Finding none, he continued to follow protocol and called for a transport, which is when the men were searched again.

"I was standing there on the side when all of the suspects were being searched and the one individual was hiding a gun in his crotch area," Groncki said. "The little hairs on the back of my neck started going up when he pulled that gun out of the suspect's pants."

Groncki said he wasn't happy he had missed the gun, but thanked the alleged robber for not killing him.

"He said, 'I ain't going to death row,' " Groncki recalled,”I think that absolutely prohibited him from using that gun on me -- he simply didn't want to go to death row."

While the death penalty may have scared the criminal enough to save Groncki's life, whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent has fueled debates for years in statehouses throughout the United States, and Maryland is no exception.

“He got exactly what he deserved,” Reeves said of convicted murderer Holly Wood, 50, of Troy, who was executed Thursday 9 September 2010 at Holman Prison in Atmore. He was the fourth Alabama inmate to be executed this year.

“I heard on TV some of his family was down there hollering and praying. Well, she (his victim) didn’t have a chance to do that.”

“I was probably involved in two dozen or so since 1973 that ended up with the death penalty conviction,” he said, adding that of those convictions many have been converted to life without parole and in other cases, the inmates remain on death row, waiting resolution of their appeals.

Wood’s case is the first execution he can remember from Pike County in the last 50 years, or more. But then again, Reeves said, Wood’s case is among the more brutal crimes he can remember, as well.

Woods was convicted of killing his former 34-year-old girlfriend Ruby Gosha on Sept. 1, 1993. He broke into her home and shot her in the head with a shotgun while she slept.

“It was just a really vicious, vicious crime,” Reeves said.

John Milton Jamison II -- "John" is a family name, and he was named for his grandfather -- was 13 when his father died. By the time Chaney was executed in 2000, the younger Jamison was, like his father, a police officer. He is currently a sergeant with the Coconino County Sheriff's Office, the same agency his father joined as a reservist.

The younger John was deeply angry about his father's death at Chaney's hands. The first and last time John saw the man that he called an "animal" was on the day of his execution. He looked at him through the glass partition in the death chamber, and he felt like Chaney stared back. And he rued that he did not stop by his father's medical office, like he often did, in the days before his death. Grieved, he rode his bike to the mortuary while his father was being prepared for burial and asked to see his remains. He didn't until the funeral.

But when Chaney was sentenced to death in 1983, it sounded good to the young man. He hated Chaney, and frankly, his feelings didn't change much over time. He reflects now with sadness for his father and a more matter-of-fact tone about Chaney.

"I'm just glad I don't have to deal with it anymore," he said. "It's a load off, to say the least."

There was a roller coaster of emotions: He'd get excited that the execution was around the corner, then deflate when it wasn't. He worried that Chaney would get out, or that his appeals for mercy would be granted, or that the death penalty would be abolished before he was executed. And as a police officer of nearly 20 years now, he understands how the system works.

Friday 8 July 2011 - Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, said passing the bill "will put a target on the back of my members and every peace officer in California" because criminals will know they will face only "three hots and a cot" for killing an officer.

At a hearing on the bill July 7 2011 before the Assembly Public Safety Committee, Ron Cottingham, the president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, acknowledged the system is expensive but argued it can be streamlined with the deterrent value – he believes – of the death penalty kept in place.

In an interview he added, “But what price is justice? How do you tell the mother of a (murder victim) that this person will have three hots and a cot for the rest of his life? How do you tell a women’s group and victims’ families that someone who kidnapped, tortured and raped women that lives did not really mean that much to the state because the state is not going after the ultimate punishment?”

"If somebody is going to kill a cop, they know they're going to face a death sentence. It's going to protect that police officer," said Tim Yaryan, a lobbyist for the Los Angeles Police Protective League. [Thursday 7 July 2011]

On Monday 11 July 2011, the Los Angeles Police Protective League issued a statement calling the proposal a "galling move" because, it argues, the people who support the bill have been trying to thwart the death penalty for years and have thus been driving up those costs that SB 490 seeks to drive down.

On average, five years pass before appellate counsel is appointed to death row inmates, and at least another five years pass before their first appeal is heard. These delays happen because death penalty opponents in the Legislature refuse to authorize market-rate pay for the attorneys, thereby creating a shortage of appellate lawyers for these cases. The Legislature also refuses to consider having California Appellate Courts hear the appeals, ensuring a lengthy wait before the backlogged California Supreme Court hears the appeal.

Some in law enforcement feel the death penalty does need to be reformed, but not completely abolished. “I do support capital punishment to a degree,” said Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto, who is concerned about the rising cost of the death penalty. “I think there are certain individuals that commit such hideous crimes, they forfeit the right to walk among us.” [Wednesday 21 September 2011]

Pamplin's son Larry, the current sheriff of Falls County, appeared at McDuff's Houston trial for the 1992 abduction and murder of Melissa Northrup.

"Kenneth McDuff is absolutely the most vicious and savage individual I know,'' he told reporters. ”He has absolutely no conscience, and I think he enjoys killing.''

Billings, a supporter of capital punishment, said he viewed each execution he participated in as an extension of his duty as an officer to "obey a lawful court's order of execution." He also decried society's unwillingness to impose the death penalty in cases where he believes it is warranted and its concern over whether condemned prisoners suffer when they are executed.

"Nobody thinks about what they inflicted on their victims," Billings said. "It's sad. People can't even name the victims, but they can name these guys."

Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, was among those present.  Afterward, he said of Williams, "the fact that to the end he continued to ridicule police officers shows what a thug he was...I have no sympathy for him.  I have sympathy for his family, but not for him." [Jeffrey Demond Williams was executed by lethal injection in Texas on 15 May 2013]

Police Chief Ricky Boren, flanked by more than a half dozen investigators, applauded Slater’s decision to seek capital punishment in the case.

“I think it sends a clear message to people in this community that wish to take another one’s life for something as senseless as what happened to Mr. Jackson on Carter Avenue,” he said. [Wednesday 20 July 2011 – Praising the decision of DA Julia Slater when she seek the death penalty of against Ricardo J. Strozier, the Columbus man charged last year in the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Heath Jackson on 7 September 2010]

"We don't discuss our execution protocols. ... The Virginia Department of Corrections is tasked by the General Assembly to carry out court-ordered executions and has the means to do so." [Wednesday 9 May 2012]

Tuesday 5 April 2011 - "If anyone warrants the penalty of death, it's Ronell Wilson," added Detectives Endowment Association president Michael Palladino.

Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association said after Wilson's court appearance last month that he's anxious for a retrial.

"Anything less than the death penalty would be short of justice," he told the Advance. [Monday 8 April 2011]

"Anyone who kills a cop, especially in the fashion this individual did, doesn't deserve a life behind bars." Referring to the murder of his friend, Lakewood officer Christopher Matlosz.

Death penalty is justified in some cases March 05, 2011 - So many people want to end the death penalty because they claim it costs too much money and is flawed. They seem to think that life in prison would be much cheaper. They are wrong.

They also believe the appeals process does not bring closure to victims' families. The families do not want the death penalty ended. They want the justice system to be corrected so they can see justice done properly and then they can get on with their life and hopefully live in peace.

Death penalty is justified in some cases March 05, 2011 - Many other nations do justice in their own way and dispose of murderers without due process. In this day and age of DNA and forensic evidence, mistakes are not made anymore in this country. I also believe in the death penalty as long as it is proven without a doubt that the person charged committed the crime.

I was a police officer for many years, and my partner, Phil Fahy, and many other fine police officers and citizens were murdered. They received the death penalty by the murderer.

Virtually every major law enforcement association has endorsed Cooley, partly because of fallout over the death penalty.

John Lovell, representing police chief and narcotics officer associations, said Cooley was endorsed primarily because of his own record but that Harris' handling of the Espinoza case was a "very large issue" that lingers.

"I think the feeling in the law enforcement community is that if a peace officer is murdered in the line of duty, the death penalty is an appropriate sanction," Lovell said.

Allegedly it “is unnecessary, dangerous and creates a risk of excruciating pain” (emphasis added). Dangerous? To whom? The executioners? I thought the drugs were designed to painlessly put hideous first-degree murderers to death. The last time I checked, no one put to death by this method has come back to complain of pain. So what’s the issue? [You'd Never Know It, but California Really Does Have the Death Penalty Monday January 2, 2012]

The legal arguments that the current lethal cocktail of drugs risks “excruciating pain” is simply ridiculous. It is merely another reason the public hates attorneys, and for good reason. Murder victims cannot escape “excruciating pain,” so why should the courts be concerned about the condemned? The idea that a drug designed to put you to sleep causes “excruciating pain” before another drug kills you is so nonsensical that it defies all logic. That makes as much sense as a mortician’s concern about a dead body’s bare feet being cold in a casket. [You'd Never Know It, but California Really Does Have the Death Penalty Monday January 2, 2012]

Thursday 14 February 2013 - Smithsburg Police Chief George L. Knight Jr., who was in Annapolis to express his opposition to the repeal, said the murder of a law enforcement officer is “so heinous that it deserves the ultimate sacrifice.”

“There has to be some kind of a deterrent to keep a career criminal or criminals from taking the life of a law enforcement officer while they are performing their duties,” Knight said. “I believe they need to give us the tools to do that [as a deterrent against criminals]. Taking away the death penalty option takes away that tool.”

Former Boston Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said Tuesday 16 April 2013 that those responsible for the bombing of the city’s marathon should be put to death.

Bratton said he had “every confidence” that the authorities would “get to the bottom of this and bring those responsible to justice.”

Massachusetts abolished capital punishment in 1984, but Bratton said the federal authorities could take over the prosecution of terrorist acts like this and a federal court could pass the death sentence.

 “I think this act would be an appropriate use of the death penalty as a penalty for the crime,” he said.