It’s been interesting seeing the public reaction to tonight’s scheduled execution of John Battaglia, the Dallas accountant who in 2001 shot to death his two young daughters because he was upset with his ex-wife, the girls’ mother. For 15 years the response around here to the brutal crime has been angry and visceral, befitting such a monstrous act. It took a Dallas County jury all of 19 minutes to convict Battaglia. And, on a local TV news report last night, the prosecutor in the case said Battaglia simply needed “to be put down” at long last. Which, of course, he does. Because the sad and perhaps regretful fact is, as a Texas Ranger is alleged to have famously said, “some people” — like this particular jackass — “just need killin’.”
At the same time, the reaction to another cold-blooded Texas killer has been far, far different. I’m referring to Bernie Tiede, the Carthage funeral director who gunned down a rich widow in 1996, hid her body in a deep freezer for months under some frozen vegetables, and spent her money. There’s actually a lot of sympathy in “enlightened” circles for the plight of this confessed and convicted murderer, whose story was made into a popular Hollywood movie. The genial rascal was even released early from prison pending a sentencing retrial, in part because he supposedly suffered abuse as a child and was having some sort of flashback when he shot the woman to death (in the back, no less).
Meantime The Dallas Morning News, whose editorial board has railed against the “injustice” of capital punishment for a decade, has been strangely mum about the Battlaglia case. No hand-wringing editorials (at least that I could find) about the “outrage” of tonight’s execution. That’s probably smart, because too many people agree in their gut that this guy deserves the needle. So the question is, why him and not Tiede and hundreds of other Texas killers? If the people’s gut is just, is the double standard simply because Battaglia’s victims were so young? So heinously murdered? Because he wasn’t a “good daddy”? Why is he any more or less deserving of execution than someone who blew away an 81-year-old widow? The answer is, he isn’t. He’s equally deserving.
And that goes to the heart of the timeless logic of the death penalty — and shows why the DMN continues to be out of touch with the majority of Texans on this issue: If you violently deprive another human being of his or her life —whether a 6- or a 9-year-old girl in Dallas or an immigrant 7-Eleven clerk or an Irving cop or a wealthy widow — in the state of Texas you are going to find yourself at risk of losing your life, too, just like the guy who’s going down tonight—and rightfully so. Sorry, Charlie. Ain’t life a bitch.
UPDATE: A federal appeals court issued a last-minute stay of execution for Battaglia this morning in order to pursue claims that he has mental health problems.
