Murder as Sport

A few posts back, I leveled some criticism at one of our more affluent suburbs with a well-documented racist past because city employees were running a "Dead Pool" guessing the total number of KCMO homicides for 2005. It's going to be a record number. It already is, and there are still a few weeks to go, and trust a trauma team member on this one: Homicides do increase around the holidays.

One of the (anonymous) comments after that post dismissed the murder victims in Kansas City as "criminals anyway" as if we shouldn't care that blood is running in the streets because the people bleeding don't matter. I was offended by that comment. I left it up, but I was offended none the less.

Well, I hope Mr. or Ms. Anonymous heard about this: A man shot to death while riding his bike home from work early Sunday morning was apparently killed for fun, court documents reveal.

Robert W. Osborn, 43, was returning home from work at the Hy-Vee Food Store, where he stocked shelves at night, when two young men, bored and armed with a shotgun, decided to kill someone just for fun. They fired at him twice and missed, so they got ahead of him, closed in on him, shot him in the head then kicked him to make sure he was dead. Psycho-killers personified, it sounds like to me.

This is the kind of stupid, heinous crime that I could get behind the death-penalty for. It pisses me off that prosecutors use it so zealously that innocents are commonly sentenced to death, as a few student hournalists have proven. If they would reserve it for cases like this, there would be a lot fewer death-penalty opponents. If they reserved the use of capital punishment to cases like this one, I would cease to harbor objection.