04/21/2017
An NBC story about the execution of Ledell Lee (above, at an April 18 hearing) in Arkansas says nothing about what he did to get executed, but is all about the maneuverings of anti-death penalty fanatics, and the possibility that a lethally-injected killer might suffer brief discomfort before dying. [Arkansas Executes Ledell Lee, State’s First Inmate Put to Death Since 2005, by Phil McCausland, April 21, 2017]
Here’s brief description of that:
In February 1993, 27-year-old Lee robbed and strangled 26-year-old Debra Reese in her Jacksonville home. He then beat her 36 times with the same tire thumper her husband gave her for protection. Her son was only six years old. "My mother was everything to me," said Joseph Lucky. "When she was ripped from my life, it started a spiral that I almost didn’t recover from. My family has lived in the shadow of this event our entire lives." Lee was sentenced to death two years after Reese’s murder. Prosecutors referred to him as a psychosexual serial rapist. According to court documents, Reese wasn’t Lee’s only victim. He committed violent crimes against five women, all in the Sunnyside area of Jacksonville. Some involved rape and some ended with murder. The ages of Lee’s victims ranged from 17 to 70. "He is the embodiment of the evil that should never have to exist in this world," Lucky said. AR Executions Recap: What Ledell Lee Did to Land on Death Row, By: Jessi Turnure, Arkansas Matters, April 19, 2017
Debra Reese’s son Joseph is a white man, which means that his mother was. Not all of Ledell Lee’s victims in the Sunnyside area of Jacksonville were white — he was also charged with the rape and murder of Christine Lewis, the daughter of Jacksonville, Arkansas’s first black alderman.
Lewis, 22, was abducted from her Sunnyside home in November 1989 as her 3-year-old child watched. She was raped and strangled and her body dumped in the closet of an abandoned home. Lee’s Appeal Rejected, Case In Federal Court, By Garrick Feldman, Leader Online, May 11, 2009
The response to Arkansas’s effort to do justice by its white and black murder victims has been snark:
Arkansas’s attorney general is working through Easter weekend to make sure the state can quickly execute eight men: https://t.co/qQZp9xhgjm
— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) April 16, 2017
(Looks like that Tweet was deleted.)
But what about the anti-death penalty activists working just as hard to help guilty men get away with murder?
Ledell Lee, of course, maintained he was not guilty of the murder of Debra Reese. He would, wouldn’t he?
In Godless: The Church Of Liberalism, Ann Coulter wrote
Instead of allowing fallen men like [executed California mass murderer] Tookie Williams to confess, repent, and ask God for mercy, liberal busybodies rush in and lock the men into a lie, damning their souls forever. They are like a Bizarroworld version of Christian missionaries, promoting eternal damnation. Surrounded by earnest "Innocence Project" groupies, the guilty will never confess, never repent, never get right with God. No! No! Don’t repent! Tell a lie right before you die, Tookie!"
That, apparently, is what Ledell Lee and his lawyers were doing.
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