Mary Carol Winkler is free and it’s about time. She was forced to spend five grueling months in jail and two more months in some dirty old mental institution, and for what? All she did was blast her preacher husband to death with a shotgun while he slept.
That seems like fair punishment considering all the stress she must have been under. But she doesn’t have to worry about all that stress now because she was treated for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder during those two horrific months at the mental health facility. Now she’s all better, yay!
On the other end of insanity sits Kenneth Foster and Genarlow Wilson. Foster sits on death row in Texas and is scheduled to die on Aug. 30. Feel free to check your calendar at this point in time because Aug. 30 is either really close or long gone depending when you’re reading this. The big catch is that Foster didn’t murder anyone, nobody disputes that. But Texas has this odd thing they call “law of parties” which blurs the distinction between principal actor and accomplice.
The story went something like this. On the night of Aug. 14, 1997, Foster, who was 19 at the time, joined up with three other friends and acted as the driver in two armed robberies. The details that lead up to the murder are debated, but it started when, as Foster claims, they were flagged down by a girl named Mary Patrick. His accomplice, Mauriceo Brown, got out of the car and walked with Patrick some 80 to 100 feet away from the car and out of Foster’s sight. While they were waiting, Brown got into an altercation with Patrick’s boyfriend Michael LaHood, and shot him dead.
Brown testified that Foster didn’t know of any intention to murder LaHood, but none of that matters in Texas. Mauriceo Brown was executed last year and Foster’s last hope sits with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Unfortunately for Foster, according to ABC News, the TBPP has only recommended sentences be commuted twice in its history. So we’ll have to wait and see if he gets to live in the state that kills a person roughly once every 13 weeks.
In a way, the case of Genarlow Wilson is even more disgusting. Wilson is serving a 10-year sentence in a Georgia prison for aggravated child molestation. Sounds bad until you realize that he was a drunk 17 year old having consenting oral sex with a drunk 15 year old. This kid, who was an honor student and an athlete, has been in prison since early 2005 for this insanity. A judge recently ruled that Wilson should be set free because the crime should have been tried as a misdemeanor, but Georgia’s Attorney General, Thurbert Baker, filed appeal to stop Wilson’s release. So not only is it possible that Wilson will have to serve more years in prison, but he will also have to register as a sex offender when he eventually gets out.
If these cases can be considered justice, then it’s a perverted justice that can only be rationalized by an unsound mind. This is not the South that I am proud of and this is not an America I am proud of. Because if we don’t have the humanity to see this sort of disgrace, then we are no better than our worst enemy.
