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Cyrus
Rednecker

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20 years

f the American people had managed to rid of the nation of its bleeding heart liberal secular progressives before they adopted them as the national conscience, there would very likely be a lot less crime in this country today—and the cost to incarcerate those guilty of breaking the law would probably be much less of a financial burden on the taxpayers. Secular progressives have always championed the perpetrators of criminal activity over their victims. It's almost as if they eschew good and worship evil. Criminals are cancers that feast on the flesh of the nation. Crime needs to be eradicated. Like the excising of any disease from the body, it's an effort that cannot be achieved without pain. That pain should be borne solely by the malefactors.

Unfortunately for America, the secular progressives believe that it's inhumane to imprison those who steal what we have earned through our sweat equity, or who rape our wives,daughters and mothers, or those who sexually exploit our children, or even those who murder family members, friends or neighbors. Secular progressives blame society for the crimes of its discontents. In the view of the secular progressives, the victims of crime—providing they are middle class whites—are the real criminals since they horde their wealth instead of sharing it with those less fortunate. (The solution, in the minds of the secular progressives, is to steal the wealth of the middle class through taxation and to use it to bribe the underclass into submission. The underclass of America believes it will have a perpetual free meal from the State. Little do they realize when the secular progressives erase the Constitution, their free ride ends—as it does in all totalitarian states.)

Crime, in America, is on the rise for the first time in five years according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Murders rose 4.8% in 2005 with over 16,000 Americans meeting their deaths at the hands of others. This was the largest increase since 1998. Las Vegas had a 10% increase in violent deaths; Philadelphia had a 14% increase, and Houston had a 23% increase. Most of the violent deaths were gang-related. Even more surprising, the statistical increases were not found in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC or Detroit, but smaller urban centers and their suburban shadows and smaller cities across the United States where the gangs are spreading. (According to the Police Executive Research Forum—a group of large city law enforcement officials—much of the statistics concerning crime rates is never submitted to the FBI, so the crime rates in the United States are actually much higher that the data suggests.)

Sadly, among the social progressives is the former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee who believes in the compassionate approach to crime—particularly when those who commit them are addicted to either alcohol or drugs. Huckabee condemns "...the revenge-based corrections system" claiming that the United States incarcerates more people than any country on Earth. As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee pushed for drug treatment rather than incarceration. Huckabee was critical of governors like Rick Perry of Texas who "...gladly pull the switch [on death penalty cases]." Huckabee, like the rest of the social progressives, believes conservatives view criminal law as a tool for revenge rather than rehabilitation. The secular progressives view punishing criminals as the "second crime"—inflicting suffering on those who society left behind.

Myself, I've always thought that was the general idea of prison—punishment. That's why judges send criminals there. Someone robs a convenience store and shoots the clerk because he doesn't empty the register fast enough. I think he needs to be punished. A woman pushes her car into a river with her children inside because she thinks they're the reason her boyfriend doesn't want to marry her. I think she should be punished. The social progressive thinks they should be rehabilitated.

No one understands the battle between the social progressives and the advocates of the rule of law better than the perpetrators themselves who know the advocates of social justice are winning the war. They understand that when they commit crimes, first, the odds are less than 1-in-3 that they will be caught. Second, they know if they come before a social progressive judge they will receive a much lighter sentence. And, since prisons are overcrowded, the odds are better than even that they will be paroled sooner rather than later. What does this mean? It means, quite literally, that for the criminal, crime does pay.

And, as long as crime is profitable, criminals will continue to steal rather than invest their own sweat equity in a real job. If you want to end crime in America, we need to find a way to make it non-profitable. Remove 100% of the profit from crime, and you will remove all of its allure. Crime would be less appealing to the felon if there was no plea bargain nor any parole. And, if the felon had to reimburse his victims before he could get out of prison, its possible they would think twice before committing another crime.

The Biblical View of Punishment

The concept of restitution is Biblical. Before justice is fully served, not only must the guilty pay society for violating the law, the victim of the crime must be made whole. The Bible says: "...because he has sinned and is guilty, he shall restore what he has stolen, or the thing which he has extorted, or what was delivered to him for safekeeping...He shall restore its full value, add one-fifth (20%) more to it, and give it to whomever it belongs." (Lev. 6:4-5; NKJV). Remove profit from crime and you remove crime from society.

Slap an ankle monitor on the felon (or surgically implant a tracking chip since it will be an additional deterrent in the future) and indenture him to his victims—or to the large agri-conglomerates who are now illegally using illegal aliens as day laborers. (The agri-giant provides the indentured convict with a bed and three meals a day, and the wages earned are given to the victims of that convict until court-ordered restitution and the cost of his trial—and any appeals—is paid by the felon. The taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for the appeals that will put a predator back on the street.

By doing this, you accomplish two things. First, you dramatically reduce the expense to the taxpayers to house and feed convicts. That saves the State billions of dollars. And it will ease prison overcrowding and eliminate the need to build new penal institutions. Nevertheless, the social progressives would never allow this since they believe all people are inherently good and the "village" is to blame when one goes bad. Besides, forcing felons to work to make restitution to their victims smacks of slavery and, thus, is not something that the advocates of social justice would accept as punishment. They actually prefer to punish the victims of crime by blaming society and not the thief.

Clearly God isn't a social progressive. He knew that people would be dishonest—and evil. In His word He prescribed the punishment to fit a variety of crimes. In no instance did He blame society for the crimes man would commit. In every society on Earth some people travel through life with limited resources. Some people have little or nothing. When you have nothing, or very little—and around you are people who are prospering—it is easy to rationalize stealing. And, it's even easier for the social progressives to excuse theft—and blame those who used their sweat equity to build a security net around their loved ones. Which is why violent crime is on the increase in the United States.

Stealing without violence

Once again, the concept of restitution is Biblical. Leviticus 6:5 establishes reparations at restoration plus 20%. The thief is obligated to pay back more than he stole. In a real world not hindered by social progressives, that might work. It worked in the 1st century. And, it will work just as well in the 21st century. Crime is profitable. When the punishment becomes more costly than profitable, crime will diminish. Sadly, we will never completely eliminate crime in America—or anywhere else—because hardened criminals seldom calculate the cost. Stealing is easier than working and, for some, prison-life—although restrictive—still beats the daily grind.

Thieves who loot homes and businesses in the dead of night—and who do not carry a weapon nor threaten their victims—whether in desperation to pay the rent or feed their hungry children, are guilty of a crime which has consequences beyond the theft. Home invasions rob the homeowners of one thing that cannot be replaced with money: security. Once a thief violates someone's home, he has robbed them not only of their property but of their sense of security. The justice system makes no allowances for this loss, which is much more traumatic than the loss of a couple of computers, a plasma TV and a handful of rare coins. The victims of crime are seldom compensated for their loss—other than being able to deduct a small portion of the value of the stolen goods from their taxes. If the stolen property is not recovered—and it seldom is—the victim suffers both the physical and psychological loss.

Thieves who steal without violence need to pay society for their crimes. But they also need to pay reparations to their victims. The thief who invades your life has to learn that stealing has related costs that exceed any profits they received from their ill-gotten gains. A thief should, by law, be required to reimburse the justice system for the cost of his trial, and pay reparations to his victims equal to three times the cost of the physical loss to the victims. If the victim required medical assistance to help recover from the trauma of the rape of their privacy, the perpetrator would be required to pay treble damages there as well. Triple reparations to the State and to the victim would have to be paid before the felon could be released from prison.

If the felon's family chooses not to contribute to the reparation fund, and the felon does not have assets which can be seized and converted into cash, then the State is obligated to indenture the inmate to one of several contract employers where they would be required to work off their debt to the victims and/or the State.

Violent robberies and assaults

The social progressives are probably already composing their e.letters denouncing me as a racist hate monger for advocating the reinstatement of slavery or, at the very least, the reintroduction of indenturism in America. Here is the simple truth: if we want to end crime in America, we need to eliminate the societal experiments that the social progressives have foisted upon us over the last hundred years or so. We need to punish criminal behavior, not coddle those who practice it.

Social progressives believe those who come from the "wrong side of the track" deserve breaks in life not afforded to the rest of us and, in fact, at the expense of the rest of us. There's a simple truth that is conveniently ignored by society's activists—poor Americans rise from mediocrity to middle class not because the social progressives rob the middle class in order to enable them, but because the poor who want to better themselves will always pull themselves out of the rut by their own bootstraps. Constitutionally, America is the land of opportunity, not entitlement. Those who are enabled become permanently shackled to the enabler. Ultimately, those who are enabled feel entitled. They become convinced society owes them. The affluent owe them. Entitlement becomes license in part because the social progressives mitigate their crimes by making society responsible for their bad deeds. The ideology of the social progressives, not society, is to blame when petty thieves become career criminals. When there are only minimal consequences to crime, profit outweighs risk, and crime becomes an easy lifestyle choice.

When the thief uses a weapon to commit a crime—but the victim or victims are not physically injured—the penalty increases. The perpetrator should be sentenced to serve a specific period of time in a penal institution. Once sentences are imposed the convicted criminal will serve every day—either in a prison or in a work camp. There should be no paroles or social progressive early release programs for good behavior. (When felons cause problems in prison, time should be added to their sentence.) This is, after all, the "punishment phase" of the sentence. The perpetrator will be obligated to pay reparations equal to ten times the replacement cost of what was taken. By forcing the perpetrators to foot the entire bill for their bad character, crime becomes unprofitable and the criminal discovers he or she simply can't afford to break the law.

When criminals use violence in commission of a crime, and injure their victims, the rate of reparations would increase from ten times to twenty times. If the perpetrator commits violence on another person not in an attempt to rob them, but simply to assault them, reparations will be based on the earning capacity of the victim, and a rate of reparations would equal 20 to 100 times the victim's annual earnings. The perpetrator is then sentenced to a work camp where reparations begin. When the victim is fully compensated, and the State is reimbursed for the trial and any incarceration costs, the perpetrator would then be eligible for release.

The trifecta of capital offenses

The Bible views human life as the most precious gift of God. There is no way to mitigate murder—except if the taking of life is in self defense to protect your own life or the lives of your loved ones. The taking of human life in the commission of a crime requires the death penalty.

The social progressives argue that society cannot condemn to death murderers below a certain age, or execute murderers with diminished capacity. However, the victim is just as dead if the killer was 15-years old when he pulled the trigger, or had an IQ of 85 when he pulled the trigger. People who kill—regardless of their age—should face the consequences in an adult world. Murder requires the ultimate penalty—as punishment. People who commit murder should face the death penalty. The death penalty is punishment for the taking of human life. The annals of the US justice system is replete with case upon case of murderers who were "rehabilitated" and paroled only to kill again; and rapists and pedophiles who were released from prison only to rape again. Usually the victims of the rapists and the pedophiles were killed in the commission of their crime. Social progressives find it easy to dismiss the victim as unimportant because he or she is gone. It's sad, they argue, but all of the punishment in the world is not going to bring that person back. Instead, the social progressive wants to rehabilitate the killer at the expense of the taxpayers. It's wrong. And, its dangerous. It puts the public at risk.

Rehabilitating cold-blooded killers who have such a disregard for human life that they can casually kill someone without an ounce of remorse is about as easy as rehabilitating a rapist or a pedophile who are driven by urges they cannot control. These three crimes are cancers on society. And like all cancers, there is no absolute cure. To get rid of any cancer, it must be excised.

Rapists and pedophiles have one thing in common with the murderer. Each destroys the life of their victim—even if the victims survive the ordeal. While the killer steals the physical life of his victim, the rapist and the pedophile destroy the psychological lives of their victims. One is just as dead as the other even though the victims of the rapist and pedophile are still breathing.

(Note: date rape between consenting, legal age boyfriends-girlfriends, [and spousal rape] must remain a special crime classification since date rape will always be "he said, she said" affairs. The same must be true of minor girls who able to conceal their age when they "dress up." Rape, like murder, needs to be classified as first, second or third degree. First degree rape should be construed as forced rapes in which threats of death or physical beatings subdue the victim. This is the only rape that would be construed as a capital offense. Second degree rape would be a rape in which date rape drugs or alcohol is used to dull the senses of the victim. It would also include the compliant seduction of a minor. Third degree rape would be the "he said-she said" date rape in which both parties consent to heavy petting that goes too far, or spousal rape—providing no violence takes place and the estranged couple is no longer living together.)

Real criminals: the killers, the violent rapists and the pedophiles should face capital punishment—without having the luxury of using taxpayer dollars to file endless appeals, or sit on death row for 12 years or more (and, after they outlive the families of their victims so, ask the State for clemency.) (Sadly, rapists seldom get the death penalty. Pedophiles never do. That needs to change.) The social progressives argue that spending their lives in a 7' X 10'8" cell is far worse than death. (I guess someone would have to ask their victims that question.)

I don't think the taxpayers should have to pay the $26,422.35 per year it takes to keep the dregs of humanity alive. (The average death row inmate lives on death row for 12.01 years before execution. That means the average cost borne by the taxpayers per inmate is $317,332.42. (This does not include the thousands of dollars the taxpayers are charged for that inmate's appeals for a new trial, or for clemency.) As of Jan. 1, 2007 there were 3,350 prisoners on death row in America's prisons in the 37 States that have the death penalty. The cost to incarcerate them until their "date with destiny" will be approximately $1,062,178,464.00 in today's dollars. A billion dollars to a social progressive who knows someone else is going to pick up the tab, is pocket change. To the working class stiffs who are forced to pick up that tab, a billion dollars is impossible to visualize, but collectively, they will be obligated to pay.

The trial and appeals process for those convicted of capital offenses (which I have grouped into a trifecta of abominable crimes: murder, rape and pedophilia) needs to be streamlined. We need to [a] make sure the guilty person and only the guilty person is convicted, and [b] we need to make sure the execution is carried out within 45 to 60 days after the expedited appeals process is completed.

The question is: how can this be accomplished so that we don't come back, 6 months or a year later and discover we executed a person who was actually innocent of the crime for which he was executed? First, as "cost-saving" as this idea is, no person can be convicted on circumstantial evidence—which includes "eyewitness" testimony. Eye witness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence since people's perception of what they saw sometimes does not match the reality of what happened. Particularly when law enforcement officers—who are convinced their "suspect" is guilty because they have a "gut-instinct" that he is—put photo images of the suspect in front of the witness enough times that, when they see the "suspect" in a lineup, they have no trouble singling him out of other prospects they have never seen before. (Understand how—and why—this is done. The police show the witness mugshots of their suspect—mixed in with mugshots of other people who will not be in the lineup Thus, the only previous face the witness has seen before the lineup will be the person the police are convinced did it. Even if the witness has never seen the suspect before, they will recognize them in the lineup from the mugshot. It is too easy for an identification to be triggered by the mugshot and not the witnesses' actual mental recollection of what the perpetrator looked like.)

The identification needs to be made by irrefutable scientific evidence. DNA is preferred. Over the last decade or so, hundreds of men who were convicted of rape based on personal IDs performed in the manner described above, were exonerated when their DNA was compared to samples filed away in evidence lockers. This is the only evidence that does not lie. In the Duke University case, the DNA evidence revealed that none of the Duke Lacross players accused of raping Crystal Gail Mangum had done so.

In fact, there was no DNA evidence to support the claim that any member of the Duke Lacrosse team raped her. Yet, the fact that the accuser had not been raped by anyone still did not stop Durham, North Carolina prosecutor Mike Nifong from pursuing charges he knew to be false—for his own personal political gain. Nifong was in a tough reelection campaign and it appeared that he was going to lose. To win, Nifong needed Durham's black vote. He was willing to manipulate the evidence in order to make it appear that Collin Finnerty—19, Reade Seligmann—20, and David Evans—23, were guilty of a crime that actually had never happened. Nifong needs to be charged with felony obstruction. Mangum needed to be charged with perjury and felony obstruction. Both need to be in prison since both tried to steal the freedom of three innocent men.

Nifong, sadly, was not alone. High profile rapes, murders or pedophilia will always bring the political opportunists out of the woodwork. High profile crimes put petty bureaucrats on a career fast track. Nifong was reelected. However, when his concealing the DNA evidence that would clear the Lacrosse players became public, the North Carolina Attorney General stepped in and took over the investigation. The Lacross players were swiftly exonerated and Nifong was removed from office for malfeasance. he was disbarred.

During the daycare scandals that began with the Kern County and McMartin Daycare incidents in California, the Democratic Florida Attorney General created a daycare scare in Florida to help score votes during the Reagan Revolution in 1984. The attorney general hired two self-styled "sex-abuse experts," Joseph and Laura Braga to coerce confessions from children that they had been sexually abused. Several people were wrongly convicted and the attorney general, who fabricated the Dade County daycare sex abuse scandal was reelected. A federal appeals court threw out the convictions after the Wall Street Journal got involved. But, by that time, the Florida Attorney General had become the US Attorney General. Her name was Janet Reno.

The daycare abuse scandals built political careers for petty bureaucrats from 1982 to 1995. Ultimately, almost all of the convictions were overturned when investigations by the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers revealed that the children were coerced into confessing abuses that simply never happened. Innocent people spent from 11 to 20 years in prisons not only for crimes they did not commit, but from crimes that never happened. Many of the prosecutors used those convictions as stepping stones to further their careers.

Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt

The State has a responsibility to make absolutely certain those accused of capital offenses (or of any crime that will rob a citizen of their freedom) are guilty of those crimes before they are condemned to die or incarcerated in the US penal system. As shown in the illustrations above, high profile cases are career boosters for local prosecutors or State or US prosecutors. And it is clear from the daycare scares and the resulting convictions of innocent people in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio and Washington State that overzealous prosecutors are as big a danger to the public as are the criminals they purport to prosecute.

Therefore, the first step in ending crime in America is to make sure we have honest prosecutors. Prosecutors like former US Attorney General Janet Reno and former Durham, NC DA Mike Nifong should be jail, not holding county, State or federal office. The convictions of overzealous prosecutors will send a message to every district attorney or State or federal prosecutor in the United States—and also to the police officers who investigate the crimes—they will be charged with felony malfeasance for knowingly prosecuting an accused by either concealing evidence that would exonerate them, or by fabricating evidence to convict them. Police officers who fabricate or destroy evidence because they have a "gut instinct" their suspect did it—or committed some other even worse crime for which they were never caught—need to be fired and then prosecuted themselves.

Protecting the accused's right to a fair trial

The Constitution of the United States guarantees that anyone accused of a crime will have a fair trial. That means, all of the evidence—not just that which condemns the accused—must be presented to the jury for consideration since all of the evidence is required to complete the whole "picture" of what happened. Prosecutors will attempt to exclude all evidence that suggests someone else did the crime, or makes the accused appear innocent. Even when the prosecution surrenders that evidence to the defense, they will petition the court to exclude that evidence as "prejudicial to the prosecution's case." Usually, the courts will grant that request. In the O.J. Simpson case, Judge Lance Ito granted the prosecution's request to exclude the fact that the famous bloodstained gloves were not a man's size 11 gloves, but were, instead, a woman's size 11 gloves. They were Nicole Brown Simpson's gloves, not O.J. Simpson's gloves. Several pieces of forensic evidence for the defense were excluded by Ito, a former prosecutor, because they were too prejudicial to the prosecution's case.

For justice to prevail, the public's cry for blood in high profile crimes must be mitigated by an honest prosecution in which the State actually places on trial the right person—based on the evidence and not public opinion. Once the guilty person—and only the guilty person—has been convicted of a capital offense, justice should then be swift—and final. But first, an appeals process must be established to examine every aspect of the prosecution and defense to make sure the accused did have a fair trial in which all of the evidence—for or against a conviction—is fairly weighed.

A new appeals process

We need a new appeals process in the the United States because the one we are using doesn't work—and hasn't for almost a century. Appellants applying for new trials may not offer new evidence as a basis for questioning the verdict that convicted them. Appeals must be based solely on the argument that a legal error was made by the trial court. In other words, if the prosecution excluded exculpatory evidence this is not grounds for a new trial since the excluded evidence will be viewed as "new" evidence. The sole exception to that rule today appears to be the use of DNA to prove innocence. DNA evidence is allowed in old convictions only because the technology was not generally available when many of those now appealing were convicted.

Far too often those accused of crimes are forced to use public defenders—most of whom are inexperienced recent law school graduates who are "getting their feet wet" in the legal system—many times at the expense of their clients who, particularly if they are accused of capital offenses, are not getting adequate representation. In capital cases, the appeals process should weigh the quality of the defense received by the accused as it examines the character of the prosecution.

In order to revamp the appeals process to make sure that those convicted of capital offenses—and sentenced to death—received not only a fair trial, but an honest one, it must be the responsibility of the judicial system itself to thorough vet not only the conduct of both the prosecution and the defense but the judge as well, since county and State court judges—particularly those who are obligated to stand for election—like prosecutors, are influenced by public opinion.

To expedite the appeals process in order to swiftly carry out the death sentence on all persons convicted of rape, pedophilia or murder—and to assure complete impartiality—a 9-member panel from a jurisdiction at least two counties removed from the jurisdiction which tried the case will establish an appellate panel to investigate the conduct of the prosecution and the defense, and to reexamine the evidence offered by both the prosecution and the defense, in particular, all forensic evidence. In the case of rape or pedophilia, all DNA evidence must be weighed. If DNA was not processed, the death sentence cannot be imposed. In far too many instances convictions have been overturned in cases of rape when DNA evidence is examined. DNA evidence is now widely accepted as the standard forensic technique for the detection of a wide variety of crime types from murder and rape to simple cases of burglary. Any probative biological sample—even those which have been stored or frozen, regardless of age—may be used to provide an accurate DNA profile.

Because the Mike Nifongs and Janet Renos of the world have conclusively proven that we can no longer trust the motives of prosecutors—most of whom are building their careers on ladders of convictions—we must assume that personal motives play a role in the decisions prosecutors make in what evidence they will present to a jury and what they will conveniently ignore, hoping the defense fails to capitalize on it, or that a judge will bar the defense from using it. (In the British legal system, all evidence comes in, and it is up to the jury to sort through it and determine what is pertinent and what is not.) In the US court system, judges strive to mold juries into virtual pawns of the court, to do the biding of the judge, not as the final arbitrator of right and wrong. Judges now instruct juries about what evidence they can consider—and which they must ignore. This is contrary to common law. The power of the people in a republic is found in the inalienable right of the jury to unilaterally decide the fate of any accused person who sits before them—and to nullify laws they feel are unconstitutional by acquitting those charged with violating them. Judges may not tell juries they are obligated to convict.

You now have an idea of the complexity of the rule of law. Nothing is black and white. Sadly, the legal system is contorted even more by a myriad of special agendas by the social progressives who believe the rule of law is too inflexible to make allowances for "special people" under "special circumstances." In their view, the rule of law cannot be "one size fits all." To eliminate crime in America, it must be.

When people rob, they must be forced to make reparations to their victims before they can be released from prison. Those who kill, rape or assault children must suffer death. However, before the death penalty can be carried out, society—understanding the flaws of human nature—must establish, without even a grain of doubt, that the person accused of that murder, rape or act of incest on a child, did carry out the deed for which his or her life is to be forfeited.

The appeals process should be automatic—and one that not only looks for procedural errors, but bad faith prosecutions as well. A State supreme court-appointed appellate panel of three circuit judges, three prosecutors and three defense attorneys (with no connection to the case) should examine the transcripts of the trial looking not only for procedural error, but for evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the prosecution, the defense or the judge which would have robbed the defendant of a fair and honest trial. Specifically the three judges would vet the judge, the prosecutors would vet the prosecutor and the defense lawyers would ascertain that the defendant had competent representation (if he or she was using a court-appointed attorney), and that the defense attorney was able to present, to the jury, any and all evidence that would either exonerate the defendant.

If three of the nine panel members—which must include at least one judge, one prosecutor and one defense lawyer—agree that some irregularly took place in the capital offense case, the death penalty is immediately suspended and the case is referred to an appellate court for a formal hearing based on the findings of the appellate panel to determine if the findings merit a new trial. The appellate court would have the authority to order a new trial or commute the death sentence based on the evidence offered by the appellate panel. If the appellate panel finds the defendant received a fair and honest trial, and the DNA evidence supports his or her guilt, the panel would approve the death sentence and forward their findings to the appellate court which would confirm the death sentence and affix the time and day of the execution—to be carried out with 45 to 60 days of the findings of the court. There would be no more reprieves.

No convicted murderers, rapists or pedophiles would ever get out of prison. Nor would they have the luxury of living on the taxpayer's dime, applying for appeal after appeal for ten to twenty years.

Ending crime as we know it

As long as thieves believe they can profit from crime, they will continue to steal. Stealing is easier and less time-consuming than working. It is when the cost of crime becomes exorbitant that thieves will stop stealing. Take the profit out of crime and criminals will stop breaking laws.

And, while including rape and pedophilia into a trifecta of capital offenses with a mandatory death sentence may increase the possibility of rapists killing their victims when they finish with them, a legal system that not only requires the life of the violent rapist or pedophilia, but will exact that punishment within 60 days of a review of their trial will deter rape. (Since most pedophiles kill their prey, it is not likely that making pedophilia a capital offense would adversely alter the statistics—except once they are caught they will never attack another child.)

When we consider criminal behavior, we need to look at it in terms of the external stimulii which trigger the emotional responses that control our deeds. The four basic human emotions are: love, ego, greed and fear. All other emotions are adjunct to them. While we traditionally view "love" as the strongest human emotion, it is weakest. The strongest human emotion is fear. Greed is second. Ego—or the love of self—is third. Crimes are generally triggered by greed or some egocentric reason. Crime is generally a profit-centered venture. Thieves are motivated by greed. Someone else owns what the thief wants but is not willing to work for. The rapist and the pedophile are motivated by love of self—ego. The "profit" in rape or pedophilia is sexual gratification.

The "profit" in murder is greed or revenge. Revenge is egocentric. Most killings (except hate crimes and crimes of passion, which are also egocentric) are usually incidental to another crime or criminal lifestyle—a robbery, a drug deal gone bad, or gang turf warfare. Fear enters the crime equation in the form of punishment. Since fear is the strongest human emotion, we know, if it is used properly, fear will serve as a catalyst to deter crime.

In today's social progressive society, the criminal is not seriously deterred from committing a crime since the odds of their being caught is remote. If caught, the odds are better than even that the charges will be plea bargained, lessening the odds prison time. Once in prison, the odds are better than even that, due to overcrowding, the prisoner will be released as criminals convicted of more serious offenses arrive in the overcrowded prison population. None of this is lost on the felon—before he ever shoves a gun in the face of the frightened store owner and snarls, "Give me all the money..." The odds are in his favor.

Dramatically increase the "cost of doing business" to the thieves by forcing them to pay reparations equal to three to ten times what they stole before they can rejoin society, and thieves will find a new line of work. In the case of the capital crimes trifecta, Increase the execution fear factor from a "maybe" to a sure thing—and eliminate the 12-plus years the convict has to launch endless appeals at the expense of the taxpayers—and you will reduce the number of first degree killings, first degree rapes and acts of pedophilia.