Wednesday, November 16, 2016

IN LOVING MEMORY OF 5-YEAR-OLD SHANIYA DAVIS (JUNE 14, 2004 TO NOVEMBER 16, 2009)



            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. 

  

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




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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