The Post Chronicle today reports:
A Nazi sympathizer who was convicted of killing three people in 1982 on an Ohio college campus was executed on Thursday by lethal injection, officials said.
Frank Spisak, 59, died at 10:34 a.m. local time at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. This was the seventh execution in the United States so far this year.
Spisak wore a Hitler-style mustache during his 1983 trial.
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Spisak said he killed Rickerson because he was a black man who rebuffed his sexual advances, according to prosecutors. Spisak tried to kill another man, John Hardaway, 54, while on a "hunting party" for black people, prosecutors said. While on another "hunting party," Spisak killed Warford, who was black, prosecutors said.
He killed Timothy Sheehan, who was white, because Spisak believed he was a potential witness in the Rickerson murder, prosecutors said.
Spisak's lawyers argued for a commutation on the grounds that their client was mentally ill. In some sense, I'm sure they're right, but people who are mentally ill in the legal sense generally do not plan, and then carry out, witness elimination.
Far too long for justice to be carried out here. The Sixth Circuit unnecessarily delayed justice here.
No question about it.
A delay of this length for a multiple killer whose guilt no sane person contests is a stunning indictment of the seriousness of our law.
The whole question of seriousness is one I plan to address in a later post. Frivolousness shows itself in undeniable form in the Spisak case. But the identical problem runs throughout our current political and media culture: Entitlement spending will bankrupt the country, but the President does nothing about it, and liberals pretend that state-level prisoner releases are the answer. Camden, a dangerous city to start with, cuts its police force in half. This gets mentioned in what amounts to a footnote, while the media gushes day after day over Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. We have 15,000 murders a year, but interest in doing something about it is simply absent from the press, which busies itself instead with multiple stories about Sarah Palin's daughter's ex-boyfriend.
Good grief.
We had better get a grasp on what's important, or we are in for major, major trouble.