Too fat to die

The death penalty is not funny.

When the state uses its ultimate power to deprive someone of life itself, it had better be sure of the justness of its cause.

But there has been no rush for revenge in the case of Richard Cooey, who sits on Ohio's death row, awaiting execution on Oct. 14 for raping and murdering two women in 1986.

That's right -- 22 years ago.

Nothing about that should be amusing.

But it's convicts such as Cooey -- and anti-death penalty advocates and attorneys who help and encourage them to pursue the most absurd procedural appeals -- who threaten to turn justice into a joke.

Cooey has not exactly wasted away with remorse for his misdeeds. At 41 years of age, he stands 5 feet 7 inches tall and has enjoyed his prison diet well enough to balloon up to 267 pounds. He's so obese that prison officials have had trouble drawing blood from his veins for medical procedures.

Yes, you've guessed it. Cooey's tax-paid lawyers have hired a physician to file legal papers pleading with the court that Cooey's weight, coupled with a drug he's taking for migraine headaches, increases the risk that an anaesthetic he'll be given just prior to his execution by lethal injection won't work properly.

The defense argues Richard Cooey is too fat to be put to death.

It's been 22 years. His victims could have been grandmothers by now, if Cooey had not snuffed out their lives. How can a debt be paid to their children never born? Through this kind of mockery of the earnest attempt of the people of Ohio to spare such a man even a few moments of pain?

One longs for a judge courageous enough to cut through the malarkey and order, "OK, give the man what he's asking for. Forget about the lethal injection. Just take him out tomorrow and shoot him."

That's not likely to happen, of course. Instead, the courts will invite more mockeries like this appeal.

Actually, if sentencing a convict to "death" means the taxpayers have to support him in prison for two decades and counting, our judges might want to consider instituting "the Richard Cooey sentence," as an alternative.

Lock up these killers and subject them to a diet of nothing but mashed potatoes and gravy.

Chances are they'll die of heart failure in less than 22 years.