We, the Comrades of Unit 1012 will remember 5-year-old
Shaniya Davis on June 14 and November
16 every year. She will be one of The
82 murdered children of Unit 1012, where we will not forget her.
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FILE This undated file photo provided by the National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children shows Shaniya Nicole Davis. The trial for Mario Andrette
McNeill is scheduled to begin Monday, April 8, 2013, in Fayetteville, N.C.
McNeill is charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering Davis in 2009. (AP
Photo/National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, File) NO SALES
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Our View: Shaniya Davis killer revives
death penalty issues.
Mario
Andrette McNeill won’t be the poster boy for getting rid of the death penalty.
We can’t think of anyone on Death Row we’d rather see with a lethal injection
in his arm.
McNeill is
the monster who took 5-year-old Shaniya Davis from her mother in 2009, in
return for a $200 drug debt. McNeill raped the little girl and killed her,
tossing her body into a remote kudzu patch where deer hunters gut their kills.
Shaniya’s
mother got off easier than she deserved, with a 17-year sentence for
second-degree murder. McNeill offered no defense at his trial, saying in 2013
that, “My goal was freedom. I lost my freedom. What
does it matter after that?”
Three years
later, it appears that staying alive does matter to him. And so does freedom.
His lawyers are asking the state Supreme Court to overturn his conviction
because his original lawyers were too cooperative with the police.
McNeill will
get his hearing. All Death Row prisoners automatically get one. And we’ll only
hope — along with most North Carolina residents — that he isn’t set free.
But even
though McNeill is the worst imaginable reason for taking the death penalty off
the books, his case offers another opportunity to talk about it.
Like most
other states, North Carolina doesn’t have much of an appetite for executions
these days. We’ve got 150 prisoners on Death Row — including one who’s been
there for 31 years — but haven’t executed anyone in more than a decade,
owing to a host of legal challenges. It doesn’t appear likely there will be any
executions in 2017, either.
We don’t want
McNeill to have any chance of regaining his freedom. His horrific crime
deserves no mercy.
But it’s also
clear that our society is steadily moving away from the death penalty, as state
after state takes capital punishment off its books. There are good reasons for
that, starting with the potential for mistakes in identification, investigation
and prosecution. And there is the fundamental question of whether anyone —
including the state — should have the right to kill.
We expect
that North Carolina will be one of the last states to formally end capital
punishment. But during this lengthy break from executions, we hope state
prosecutors do all in their power to ensure that monsters like Mario Andrette
McNeill are never let out of their cage.
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