A relative of Billy Ray Adams pleads for sympathy:
"Billy Ray made one stupid mistake, and it cost him his life."
Well. no, it didn't, actually. He's been spending it in prison for the last 39 years, but he still has his life. The same can't be said of Marion County Sheriff's Deputy Tom Settles, whom Adams shot in the head during a bank robbery in 1972 after saying he was going to "waste this pig." The same relative said poor Billy Ray was just another tragic victim of Vietnam, where he learned to "kill, kill, kill" and wasn't deprogrammed because, back in the '60s, "they didn't give you no help for post-traumatic stress syndrome." I didn't get no help for my ptss, either, which makes me violently ill whenever I encounter one of these Crazed Vietnam Killer stories. No deprogramming in the world can pull someone back from the brink of "waste this pig," an impulse which Vietnam may have strengthened but was surely already there.
Billy Ray should have been long dead, too, but he got a lucky break. He killed his cop during that interval after the death penalty had been declared unconstitutional and before legislatures tweaked it back into state codes. Because of that, he keeps coming up for parole. It keeps getting turned down, but the experience is traumatic for Settles' family every time. They're never going to let this guy out -- at least they shouldn''t -- so why keep putting everybody through this?
His brother says Billy Ray has been "rehabilitated over and over again," and a prison minister says he is a "poster child for release from prison" because he's paid his debt over and over. Doesn't matter. Killing a police officer is one of the few capital crimes calling for the death penalty in Indiana, and even cases that went through during the capital punishment hiatus should be treated as special, with no hope of parole, ever. It's not so much that they deserve the extra protection of a stronger penalty but that we must give it to them for our own protection. They're our first line of defense against the thugs and monsters who prey on the rest of us, and we have to let the thugs and monsters know we understand that.
