John Skillicorn: Another example of how wrong Capital Punishment is.

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http://www.pitch.com/2009-05-14/news/missouri-is-about-to-execute-dennis-skillicorn-the-state-s-death-penalty-may-not-outlive-him-very-long/

Skillicorn's days are numbered, but Missouri's death penalty might not outlive him by much: Two bills in Missouri's Legislature have proposed a moratorium on the death penalty and a review board to examine issues such as cost, fairness and the risk of wrongful execution.

Skillicorn could be the last criminal put to death in Missouri, which is ranked fifth in the country for most executions per capita. His execution could also be the state's most regrettable.

Despite the individual's responsibility

WE

weren't there with the right stuff, when

WE

HAD A CHANCE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE JOHN SKILLICORN.

Skillicorn, then 35, met 22-year-old Nicklasson at the Salvation Army rehabilitation center in downtown Kansas City. The older man was staying at the shelter as a condition of his parole; he had already spent 13 years in prison for the 1979 murder of an 81-year-old Missouri farmer, killed while Skillicorn and two others robbed the farmer's home in Levasy.

Skillicorn was a 19-year-old junkie at the time of the farmer's slaying. In prison, his addiction worsened. Desperate for drugs, which were plentiful in prison, but already deep in debt to other inmates, he used a table saw to slice off the top of his right middle finger, hoping to get a morphine drip in the infirmary.

At the Salvation Army rehab center, Skillicorn stayed clean until he met Nicklasson, who had done time for beating his stepfather with a baseball bat when he was 19. Nicklasson hooked Skillicorn on a whole new high: methamphetamine. On August 24, 1994, the two men, plus Tim DeGraffenreid, a 17-year-old friend of Nicklasson's, set off in DeGraffenreid's parents' Chevrolet Caprice and steered south to score a brick of meth.

The Caprice broke down near Kingdom City. Drummond pulled over to help. The men pulled guns on Drummond, and forced him to drive. On a road in Lafayette County, Nicklasson ordered Drummond out of the car and walked him a quarter of a mile into a wooded area. Skillicorn, still in the car, thought the plan was to tie the man up and leave him there, far from the nearest phone. But Nicklasson, angry that his hostage didn't try to fight back or escape, shot Drummond twice in the head.

If the objective is to punish people for being bad, consider how loss of FREEDOM for life is a much greater punishment than death and in John Skillicorn you have the added benefit of someone who has been trying to make reparations for his life, while in prison, by ministering to other prisoners.

Please consider calling Governor Jay Nixon on behalf of John Skillicorn, today.

"If a guy wants to come in here and be a hardhead, if he wants to have bad behavior, they got a place for him," Skillicorn explains. "It's not a pleasant place. They got a place that's literally spending your days in a cage, no comforts whatsoever. It might be a consolation to some people on the street to picture that. But people who do want to be well-behaved, there are things available to them, too."

Skillicorn's certainty in his heavenly reward is based on his good works at Potosi. In order to sit in this open area, Skillicorn had to take a break from his job with Set Free Ministries, a Christian ministry outreach program with an office at Potosi. He's on-call for the prison's hospice, where inmates comfort and care for terminally ill inmates. Hospice at Potosi was in its infancy when Skillicorn arrived in 1996; under his watch, it has blossomed into a nationally recognized program. He is the editor of Compassion, a bimonthly magazine sent to death-row inmates and 4,500 readers around the country. The money collected from subscriptions funds scholarships for college-bound kids who have lost family members to violent crime. The magazine has awarded $36,000 in scholarships since 2001.

[able1]

1. Why we kill people who kill people

To show people that killing is wrong.

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3. I know! It's incredibly STUPID and ultimately only creates more of the very thing that we say we are

trying to end.

I am hoping for an America in which prisoners have respectable work and those whom we find guilty of horrible crimes are imprisoned for life without parole, so they have a chance to make reparations the way John Skillicorn is doing it. This way, if someone turns out to be innocent, they can be set free and we won't become murderers ourselves by killing them. Even for the guilty life without parole makes sense, because there's always the chance that they will change and help others while they serve out their time. This IS a no brainer practically speaking and MORALLY speaking.

[sui generis]

2. Capital punishment is a barbaric solution to crime

And worse, it essentially says that state sanctioned murder (quite premeditated) is more acceptable than personal murder, even if done for exactly the same reasons or under the same constraints of evidence.

A civilized society should be willing to lock these guys away for good, and I'd even go one further:

A real "life row" that places a guilty prisoner in solitary for the remainder of their natural life, no books, no TV, no internet, no letters, visitors, exercise, no human contact, and just a pot to piss in and a one-use pill if they're ready to take matters into their own hands.

It doesn't punish murder with murder for the incorrigible, and it would absolutely be a deterrent.

The ugly fact is, sane people don't murder other people, no matter how much we want to rationalize insanity. No matter what, if someone is willing to kill another human, either in person or by moral outrage of the mob, sanctioned by the state, they're sick in the head.

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4. And Hypocrisy is NEVER lost on our Young; it is SEVERELY damaging to our ability to influence

their decisions as they become more and more independent from us.

Hypocrisy is concretely and Fundamentally damaging to social relationships, especially between generations.

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5. "sane people don't murder other people" = we ARE hardwired to know this: Killing causes Killing.

period!