Please Make Me Understand
I read the news everyday. I'm about to stop.
I was horrified to read about a trial involving the carjacking, rape, kidnapping, and murder of Channon Christian and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom.
They were young college students who had ben dating one another for 2 or 3 months. They were happy with bright futures. That all ended on Januar 7, 2007. When they were carjacked at gunpoint by Letalvis Cobbins and his half-brother, Lemaricus Davidson. What follows is the stuff of nightmares. Newsome was taken to a railyard, raped, shot in the head, and burned. When his body was found, it was still smoking.
What Channon experienced in the days before her death, only she knows. When her body was found in her murderer's home, she had been stuffed in a 33 gallon garbage can. She was naked from the waist down. According to the medical examiner, she had been sexually assaulted in every bodily orifice and her assailants attempted to hide evidence of their crimes by spraying her mouth with bleach.
There were two additional co-defendants charged as well, but I am unaware where they fit in the substantive crimes committed against the victims.
I only ask why. What did these families do to deserve this? No father should ever have to hear that his daughter was raped and stuffed in a garbage can. No mother should have to go to a morgue to identify her son in a body bag.
As a defense attorney, I don't understand how how someone could commit a crime like this and call themselves human. What depraved thinking motivated these men to do this? Couldn't they just take the car and let them leave with their lives? No. They had to rape both of them, and do horrible things with their bodies.
Many have cried foul as this story has not picked up national press coverage. The victims were white middle class kids, and the defendants were poor black kids. Some hypothesize that this crime was a hate crime, that the victims were chosen because of their race and that the perpetrators did the vile things they did to express their animus for whites. How else could you explain why they did this? If the victims were black and their perpetrators were white, surely there would be a natural conclusion that the crime was racially motivated.
I don't know what justice can be done here. If these men are convicted, will the death penalty be enough? Or will there be some pitch for mercy to the defendants based on some childhood diagnosis with ADHD? There was no mercy to the victims, they were disposed of like animals.
Something is wrong when two human beings can be slaughtered and abused by two other people who call themselves human. I don't think they deserve to be fed, clothed, and house by the American taxpayer for the rest of their lives.
I was horrified to read about a trial involving the carjacking, rape, kidnapping, and murder of Channon Christian and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom.
They were young college students who had ben dating one another for 2 or 3 months. They were happy with bright futures. That all ended on Januar 7, 2007. When they were carjacked at gunpoint by Letalvis Cobbins and his half-brother, Lemaricus Davidson. What follows is the stuff of nightmares. Newsome was taken to a railyard, raped, shot in the head, and burned. When his body was found, it was still smoking.
What Channon experienced in the days before her death, only she knows. When her body was found in her murderer's home, she had been stuffed in a 33 gallon garbage can. She was naked from the waist down. According to the medical examiner, she had been sexually assaulted in every bodily orifice and her assailants attempted to hide evidence of their crimes by spraying her mouth with bleach.
There were two additional co-defendants charged as well, but I am unaware where they fit in the substantive crimes committed against the victims.
I only ask why. What did these families do to deserve this? No father should ever have to hear that his daughter was raped and stuffed in a garbage can. No mother should have to go to a morgue to identify her son in a body bag.
As a defense attorney, I don't understand how how someone could commit a crime like this and call themselves human. What depraved thinking motivated these men to do this? Couldn't they just take the car and let them leave with their lives? No. They had to rape both of them, and do horrible things with their bodies.
Many have cried foul as this story has not picked up national press coverage. The victims were white middle class kids, and the defendants were poor black kids. Some hypothesize that this crime was a hate crime, that the victims were chosen because of their race and that the perpetrators did the vile things they did to express their animus for whites. How else could you explain why they did this? If the victims were black and their perpetrators were white, surely there would be a natural conclusion that the crime was racially motivated.
I don't know what justice can be done here. If these men are convicted, will the death penalty be enough? Or will there be some pitch for mercy to the defendants based on some childhood diagnosis with ADHD? There was no mercy to the victims, they were disposed of like animals.
Something is wrong when two human beings can be slaughtered and abused by two other people who call themselves human. I don't think they deserve to be fed, clothed, and house by the American taxpayer for the rest of their lives.
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