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Washington, D.C. sniper put to death
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John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind behind the 2002 Washington, D.C. metro sniper shootings, was executed on Tuesday night. Several members of his family watched as he was lethally injected at the Greenville Correctional Center in Virginia. Pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m. ET, Muhammad had no final words or statement.
“I feel better. I think I can breathe better and I’m happy he’s gone. Because he’s not going to hurt anyone else,” said Nelson Rivera, whose wife Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was killed at a Maryland gas station.
Muhammad was executed for killing Dean Harold Meyers at a Manassas gas station during the three-week sniper ordeal. “Honestly it was surreal watching the life being sapped out of somebody intentionally,” Dean’s brother, Bob Meyers, told CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
Hours before his execution, Muhammad was calm, but continued to declare he was innocent of the crime he was being killed for. Muhammad’s attorneys attempted to change his sentence to life in prison, saying he was severely mentally ill, but the court turned the proposition down.
Muhammad’s accomplice to the shootings, Lee Boyd Malvo, is set to serve out six life terms for the murder of six people. Execution was ruled out for Malvo, because he was seventeen at the time of the shooting spree.
Laws of the United States strongly criticize murder, as they should, but the Eighth Amendment states that cruel and unusual punishment should not be performed. Muhammad was put to death for killing another man, but if the U.S. is injecting someone with the intent to kill them isn’t that cruel and unusual?
Not only have numerous innocent people been killed by execution, it is hypocritical to take the life of someone else when laws deter murder. Why not send a criminal to jail for the rest of their life? Keeping a murderer locked in a twelve by fifteen foot cell for the rest of their life seems legitimate. The criminals deserve to suffer every day of their life thinking about the crime they committed.
