CROSSVILLE CHRONICLE Opinion   David Spates "Therefore I Am" Taking a life is tough for the rest of us Extinguishing a human life is easy for Robert Glen Coe, the convicted murderer for whom Tennessee may dust off its electric chair - an execution that would be the state's first since 1960. For the rest of us, however, killing a person, even a worm like Coe, is a much more difficult decision to make. The trouble is this: We have a conscience, and having a conscience makes it tough to kill someone. If Coe had a conscience, he wouldn't have raped and killed an 8-year-old girl in 1979. But he doesn't, and he did. I've written about my views of the death penalty before, and with all of the courtroom drama unfolding in the recent weeks regarding Coe's on-again-off-again date with the eternal fires of damnation, I though it would be an opportune time to reiterate some of my thoughts. I'm opposed to the death penalty. It's not because I feel that every life is sacred, that we as humans have no right to determine who lives and who dies or any bleeding-heart hogwash like that. My beliefs on this matter follow a three-pronged sense of logic. One, that spending the rest of your days in a dank 80-square-foot cell is a harsher punishment than death. Two, that the seemingly eternal appeals process costs the state more money to prosecute than it would have spent simply caging an animal like Coe until his natural death or until a fellow inmate took matters ­ and a filed-down screwdriver ­ into his own hands, whichever comes first. And third, the aforementioned appeals process taxes the victim's family dreadfully, in this case preventing the family's closure for more than 18 years. If the family was expecting life imprisonment without parole and nothing more, the closure would have come as soon as the judge's gavel dropped. Originally, Coe was scheduled to die today, but the Tennessee Supreme Court stepped in. The execution has been put off for a few weeks, and there's a fairly good chance, judging by our state's history, that the execution may never take place. Meanwhile, the victim's family waits for a conclusion they were promised but may never come. But like I said, the major stumbling block in all of this is our conscience. The Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer or whoever you believe heads up the afterlife's punishment department will get his hands on Coe soon enough. The question is are we going to bloody our hand to speed along the arrival? I say that we shouldn't bring ourselves down to his level. Killing is wrong for Robert Glen Coe, and killing is wrong for us. Executions don't act as a deterrent - some people are simply cold-blooded murderers who don't care what repercussions their actions may bring. If the state penal system were to announce that all convicted killers would be sentenced to live in a cell listening to "Livin' La Vida Loca" 24 hours a day, now that would be a deterrent. Actually, that may fall under the heading of cruel and unusual punishment, and the ACLU and Amnesty International would go nuts with it. Sting and John Mellencamp would organize a concert to raise money and awareness - it would just be a bad scene. We're just not an execution-happy state like Texas or Florida. When governors run for re-election in those states, they actually run campaign commercials boasting about the number of killers they've sent to their deaths. We in Tennessee don't seem to have the stomach to kill the killers, and I think it would be better to take the execution issue off the table rather than using it as a hollow threat. Use your browser's back button to return to the previous page