A Texas man who unsuccessfully challenged the safety of the state’s lethal injection drugs and raised questions about evidence used to persuade a jury to sentence him to death for killing an elderly woman decades ago was executed late Tuesday.
Jedidiah Murphy, 48, was pronounced dead after an injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the October 2000 fatal shooting of 80-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham of the Dallas suburb of Garland. Cunningham was killed during a carjacking.
“To the family of the victim, I sincerely apologize for all of it,” Murphy said while strapped to a gurney in the Texas death chamber and after a Christian pastor, his right hand on Murphy’s chest, prayed for the victim’s family, Murphy’s family and friends and the inmate.
“I hope this helps, if possible, give you closure,” Murphy said.
Like I said, we aren’t there yet, and may never get there, any hypothetical death penalty cases that would meet that standard would have to be decades if not centuries into the future with the benefit of all the scientific advances that come to us in that time. It’s probably more likely that we’ll have a 100% effective way to treat and rehabilitate people by then, but if we ever do reach a point where we have hit a complete dead end in psychology/neurology, in some hypothetical far-off, post-technological-singularity future where we can definitively say that we have exhausted every possible avenue for rehabilitation, then we can consider the death penalty.
And I disagree that it can only be applied to current and immediate threats, because people who have shown that they are likely to harm people again would then have to spend the rest of their lives restrained and/or in solitary confinement if they’re unable to be rehabilitated, and arguably I think death may be a more humane sentence.