Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The endless case of Lee Stephens

The Maryland Court of Appeals has rejected a pre-trial appeal by Lee Stephens. He is one of the two inmates accused of murdering Maryland House of Corrections CO David McGuinn in July 2006. No trial date is set, but it sounds like the judge is free to schedule one now that this appeal has been dismissed. Stephens's co-defendant still has a pre-trial appeal pending.

1 comment:

ppatin said...

I kept my editorial commentary out of the actual post, but now I have to rant. By the time this case goes to trial it'll have been half a decade since David McGuinn was brutally slaughtered by these two animals. What the hell kind of a broken legal system do we have? I don't care how complex a case is, for someone as dangerous as this the wait between the crime and the trial should never be more than a few months at most.

Even Stephens is convicted and sentenced to death there is essentially zero chance he'll ever be executed, which means that we'll punish this lifer with what amounts to another life sentence. That'll show him alright! Maybe if he kills someone else we can give him yet another life sentence! Nothing like meaningless punishments to deter the most violent inmates in our prison system! The only realistic way to protect COs and other inmates is to throw Stephens into Supermax-style isolation for the remainder of his life, but I'm sure the ACLU, Stephens's loathsome lawyers and various other hand-wringing whiners would throw a fit about the "cruelty" of that as well.