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Tennessee jury lets torturer-murderer-rapist live to prey on others
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Some juries are indulgent towards even the most vicious and plainly-guilty criminals. A Nashville jury just let a nightmarishly-evil torturer-murderer-rapist, Letalvis Cobbins, escape the death penalty in the rapes, torture, and murders of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian. Now, he can spend the rest of his life raping and preying on vulnerable prison inmates, like first-time offenders.
The jurors who blocked the death penalty may have mistakenly believed that they were being sophisticated and progressive by rejecting the death penalty, but in truth, they were being cruel, since, as it says in Midrash, he who is kind to the cruel is cruel to the kind. Scholars like Ernest Van Den Haag have concluded that the death penalty actually saves lives by deterring murders. (A recent Emory University study says that each execution deters approximately 18 murders). When I was a young liberal, I used to oppose the death penalty, in part because I was arrogant and it made me feel morally superior to those who support it based on “gut instinct.” But “gut instincts,” such as indignation, are important guides to what is right and wrong. As the great Athenian lawgiver Solon noted, true justice will not be achieved until those who have not been victimized by crime are just as indignant as those who have been.
Some of the horrifying facts of the case are below; if you are squeamish, don’t read further. I describe them in order to explain why it is an insult to justice to give a torturer-rapist-murderer like Letalvis Cobbins the same sentence that many ordinary murderers receive:
"Christian and Newsom had gone on a date at a local restaurant on Saturday, January 6, 2007, but did not return home. During their night out, the couple was hijacked, bound and blindfolded and taken back to Lemaricus Devall 'Slim' Davidson's rented house on Chipman Street.
"According to the testimony of the Knox County Acting Medical Examiner Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, Newsom was repeatedly raped and then blindfolded, gagged, arms and feet bound and his head covered. Barefoot, he was either led or dragged outside the house to a set of nearby railroad tracks. He was shot in the back of the head, the neck, and the back, and his body then set on fire.
"Christian's death would come only after hours of sexual torture, medical examiner Mileusnic-Polchan testified. Christian suffered horrific injuries to her vagina, anus and mouth. She was not only raped but savaged with 'an object,' possibly a broken chair leg, the doctor testified. She was beaten in the head. Some type of chemical was poured down her throat, and her body, including her bleeding and battered genital area, likely scrubbed with the same solution - all while Christian was alive, the forensic expert said. She was then "hog-tied," with curtains and strips of bedding, her face covered tightly with a small trash bag and her body stashed inside five large trash bags before being placed inside a large trash can and covered with sheets. Christian died slowly, suffocating, the medical examiner said."
Yet the defense attorneys for Letalvis Cobbins, one of the five people who perpetrated these atrocities, think that he can be rehabilitated, and will not pose a risk to others in the future. Do you agree? I don’t. If I were a first-time prison inmate, in for something like drug possession, I would be scared to death by this vicious criminal’s presence.
Some have speculated that the jurors refused to impose the death penalty out of racial favoritism, and that some on the “racially-diverse” jury may have had difficulty empathizing with the victims, who were white. When a Brooklyn jury acquitted the killer of Yankel Rosenbaum, who died in the 1991 anti-semitic riots in Crown Heights, commentators suggested that race similarly played a role in the black defendant's acquittal, citing the seemingly “airtight” evidence against defendant Lemrick Nelson, who had been identified by the dying Rosenbaum as his killer. If the race of the victims and perpetrators in this case had been switched, the ensuing media coverage would have dwarfed the Duke Lacrosse case.
The crime didn’t happen in Nashville (Davidson County), where the jury was drawn from. The jury was selected from there, rather than a less pro-defendant venue closer to where the crime actually occurred, by presiding Judge Richard Baumgartner, a liberal Democrat. His excuse was that the jury needed to be selected away from Knoxville due to adverse pre-trial publicity; but even if so, there was no need to select a jury from distant Nashville, 180 miles away. Tennessee voters should ask why Baumgartner did this.
