Capital Punishment; Capital Idea

In her testimony at the trial taking place in London Ontario, where Michael Rafferty is being tried for the abduction, rape and murder of an eight-year-old little girl, his partner in that unforgivably grisly crime against decency and humanity is making an excellent case for the death penalty.

Capital punishment does, after all, have its place and its need, in a society where there exists such depths of depraved criminality.

A clever, friendly, blond-haired Victoria Stafford who just could not resist the allure of seeing a puppy that a stranger who behaved as though she knew her, wanted to show her. Little girls and puppies are a natural. This was a bouncy, happy little girl who loved her life, her family, and everything and everyone around her was welcome to share in her joyful appreciation of life.

Tori Stafford and her brother Daryn are shown in an undated family photo in Woodstock, Ont. (Dave Chidley/Canadian Press)

Of course, she wants to see the puppy, of course, she will go with the young woman who gently pulled her along by her hand. Woodstock is a town where everyone likely knows everyone else. Certainly Tori Stafford's mother had an acquaintanceship with Terri-Lynne McClintic. And it is entirely possible that Tori had, at one time or another, glimpsed Terri-Lynne on the street, or in a supermarket.

Terri-Lynne didn't want much out of life. Just the love of a good man. And she thought, for some inconceivable reason, all to do with dire emotional need, that Michael Rafferty might be that man. But she had to prove herself to him. Not by demonstrating her capabilities as a cook, and pleasing his stomach, but by providing him with a victim whom he could use as a plaything, then destroy.

A child, sacrificed for the grisly pleasure of a sexual deviant, a psychopath of the first order. So what does that make of Terri-Lynne McClintic? An enabler of evil, a supplicant at the feet of a personality so base and disgusting that she should have been revolted and run for her life. Instead, together, they represent as a desolating symptom of failed humanity, beyond the extremes of the pale.

A trusting child abducted by a woman who cannot not have known would be dead very shortly because of what she was doing, leading her to someone who meant to destroy her. So why is it again that we must, as a society treat these miserable vestiges of failed humanity with compassion and allow them to live?

A woman who, when a child that has been traumatized by pain and anguish pleading for her help, instead dutifully helps the man who has committed the most heinous offence possible against a child. A woman who witnessed the painful atrocity of a grown man flaying a child's trusting nature by brutalizing the child repeatedly.

Neither of them responding to the little girl's anguished cries for rescue from her living nightmare and the pain being inflicted upon her. Each too busy with what mattered to them, to care about what they were doing; each prepared to murder a little girl whose childhood they had already destroyed.

Does it really matter which of them actually wielded the hammer that crushed Tori's skull? What is this pantomime of justice being played out in a Canadian court of law?