No Mercy for Child Killers

Before today, I was opposed to the death penalty. I believed it to be a faulty cog in a flawed justice system meant to dispose of human beings like the garbage no one wants.

Then someone did that very same thing to a little girl in North Carolina named Shaniya Davis. Someone kidnapped her, killed her and threw her little body in the woods. What happened in the middle is--mercifully for those of us who grieve this child--still a mystery, though police are speculating that she was sold for prostitution. I didn't know her or her family and she is one of hundreds of children whose faces appear in news sources every week after having been abused or killed. Yet my heart breaks as if she had been one of my own family and there's no mercy to be found there for her mother or the killer to whom she sold her five year-old baby.

I used to be someone who looked for the reasons behind behavior, maybe to help people understand that sometimes it's not entirely their fault. We live in a cruel, unequal world that doesn't make sense. But we also live in a world with evil people with no sense of humanity and animalistic intentions who don't deserve to live among us. Those who abuse and kill children are those people.

There are several reasons why this case hits me particularly hard. The first is the haunting image of little Shaniya--the last of her alive--on a hotel surveillance camera being carried by her kidnapper, one of her arms naively holding to his neck. She is still breathing, still unaware. You want to reach in and snatch her back into safety, hold her close, rock her and tell her that she'll never be left alone again.

Then there's the fact that I'm a mother to a 19 month-old and due to have another baby in April. I probably speak for most parents when I say that I would kill anyone who tried to hurt my children in such a way.

If there's a flaw here, it's that my gut reaction is so powerful when it comes to this story; the mother in me--no, the human being in me-- sees no use in finding reasons to save those who threw away a beautiful little girl's life. I used to be among those who touted rehabilitation as an answer but I don't believe evil can be rehabilitated. And those who run child prostitution rings are evil, possessed by drug addiction or money. I don't care what motivates them, to be honest. What I care about it is swift and certain justice that suits their crimes.