Virginia is for Lovers

Go ahead and read this story from WVEC.com. I'll highlight the part to focus for you and make it easy and shit.

Assembly overrides two Kaine death penalty vetoes; one survives

04/05/2007

By BOB LEWIS / Associated Press

The House and Senate on Wednesday easily overrode two vetoes Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a death penalty foe, had made to three bills that would have expanded capital punishment in Virginia.

A third veto to a bill that would have put accomplices to murder at the same risk for execution as the triggerman fell two votes short of the 27 needed in the Senate to overturn it.

Had the bill become law, it would have marked the widest expansion of the death penalty in a state that already ranks behind only Texas in the number of killers put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The two overridden vetoes mean that bills that prescribe the death penalty for people who kill judges or witnesses to influence the outcome of trials will become law over Kaine's objections.

Kaine, a Roman Catholic who acknowledged a faith-based objection to capital punishment in his election two years ago, said in vetoing the bills that the state already had adequate means to execute killers. Kaine has allowed four executions to proceed since taking office.

"Virginia has the second highest rate of executions in the United States and I just don't believe expanding the death penalty any more is going to be the way to go to provide greater public safety," Kaine told reporters after the one-day legislative session to consider his vetoes and amendments.

In both the House and the Senate, supporters of the measure to subject murders' accomplices to the gallows cited both recent Virginia cases and even the murder spree of Charles Manson's cult in California 38 years ago.

"I hope the governor understands who Charles Manson is and what Charles Manson did," said Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah, sponsor of the House bill that redefines the triggerman rule.

Manson's cult followers went on a grisly rampage that terrorized Los Angeles in 1969, slaughtering seven wealthy people in their homes.

"Charles Manson never hurt a hair on anybody's head by anybody's account, but everybody understands that he was ... the driving factor in those heinous murders," Gilbert said. "Were Charles Manson to exist in Virginia today, he could not be convicted of a capital offense."

The House mustered well more than the 67 votes necessary to override all of Kaine's death penalty vetoes. The triggerman expansion veto was overridden on a 79-21 vote. The judicial murder death penalty bill veto was overridden 82-18; and the witness murder death penalty veto was rejected 83-16.

The Senate also voted to override the judicial and witness murder death penalty vetoes, and it overrode Kaine's veto to a Senate version of those bills. But the triggerman expansion veto was sustained on a 25-14 vote.

In the House and in the Senate, supporters of the witness protection bills cited the case of Brenda Paz, a pregnant 17-year-old who had been a member of the violent MS-13 gang, had entered the witness protection program and planned to testify against her former boyfriend.

"At some point they lured her back to the gang and lured her out to a pretty covered bridge (over) the Shenandoah River where they walked her down the river and brutally stabbed her to death," said Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah and the bill's sponsor.

Okay work with me here- first off by SOME accounts, Charlie harmed the hair near the ears of Gary Hinman when he cut it off and the hair on the top of Shorty Shea's head when he decapitted him. So the idiot congressman is, well an idiot. But his analogy, his very point is wrong.

Charlie was sentenced to death for his part in the CONSPIRACY to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders. Conspiracy laws hold you liable for the crime whether you did it or not. Gilbert is screaming about ACCOMPLICES- it is an entirely different law. So the article is stupid and badly researched, but then the people who are drafting these laws are legally incorrect in their underlying arguments.

And do it goes.... (sign off in honor of the late Kurt Vonnegut, RIP)