HIS gray-tinged mustache mirrored the majesty of his baritone voice.
And then the quiet voice became suddenly deafening.
“Sure, I would like to see him executed,” Rodney Andrews Sr. was saying.
He was talking about a weed called Ronell Wilson.
Wilson is accused of killing Mr. Andrews’ son, Rodney Jr., an undercover cop who was executed along with his partner, James Nemorin, on March 10, 2003, in Staten Island.
Andrews Sr. has seen way too much of Wilson these last weeks in Brooklyn federal court.
Now, executing two cops surely deserves the death penalty. But the Staten Island DA couldn’t prosecute a death-penalty case against this lowlife Wilson because the criminal-loving nitwits in Albany can’t get their act together and pass a death-penalty law that gets past the courts.
So the case has to go to the federal level – where they can execute him for carjacking and murder in aid of racketeering.
Except that no federal case out of New York has led to an execution since the 1950s – we’re talking the Rosenbergs in 1953 and a bank robber named Gerhard Puff, who offed an FBI agent in 1954.
And a grand total of only three executions have resulted from a federal prosecution anywhere in the country since 1963.
What a grim joke. What are we gonna do, beat him to death with wet noodles?
If we caught Osama bin Laden in a Greenwich Village bathhouse, he would still dodge the death penalty.
Mr. Andrews added, with ironic understatement: “It does seem that New York takes a long time getting around to the death penalty.”
Try never.
What would you do if you were left alone in a room with Ronell Wilson, I asked.
Again, in the modulated voice of a gentleman, the retired 16-wheeler truck driver said: “I think he’d be in a little trouble.”
Please tell me why in bloody hell we have a so-called death penalty on the books if we never use it.
A grim joke.