Outside view: Death not solution
The following editorial appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Wednesday.
The 12 North Dakotans who decided the fate of Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. have weathered quite a storm. Residents of a state that long ago renounced capital punishment, they were nevertheless obliged to honor a federal law promoting precisely that penalty. And once the tale of 22-year-old Dru Sjodin’s horrific murder was told, even jurors initially reluctant to hand down a death sentence were convinced: For the predator who kidnapped, beat, bound, stabbed, raped and murdered the young college student, life in prison seemed a pallid punishment.
For Rodriguez, it seems clear, the path to death has been paved with steppingstones of incredible brutality but also happenstance.
Examples abound: Had the killer driven west rather than east after seizing Sjodin in Grand Forks, he’d never have crossed state lines – and thus never faced a federal jury or the prospect of death. Had his jury truly reflected existing North Dakota state law on capital punishment (the selection process blocked the seating of death-penalty opponents), Rodriguez might not now be gearing up for appeals that will cost taxpayers millions.
Now that the passion surrounding this case has subsided somewhat, these details merit mulling, for they raise questions about the way death penalty sentences are meted out. Executing Alfonso Rodriguez, it turns out, will do next to nothing to shield women from violence.
Who says so? Virtually every criminologist in the land, all of whom know that “stranger rape” is a rare phenomenon – and rape-murders rarer still.
Of the 300,000 sexual assaults American women experience each year, strangers are responsible for a small share – about 16 percent.
This is the story of American sexual violence – a tale so common most people don’t stop to think of it. It’s a crime much more prevalent in kitchens and bedrooms than in parking lots and ditches.
And while all human violence is horrible, the torture dispensed by a partner behind drawn shades occurs far more often and usually lasts far longer than crimes committed by strangers.
It may seem soothing to regard Alfonso Rodriguez as a monster – the ultimate emblem of the danger women face. But such thinking obscures an essential truth: Each year, about 2,000 American women are murdered by lone men. Nearly always, a woman’s killer is someone she knew; almost two-thirds of the time, her murderer is her partner.
Even among the 1 percent of female homicides classified as “rape-murders,” a victim is most likely to have died at the hands of someone she knew.
No one doubts that Alfonso Rodriguez committed an unspeakable crime. But few seem ready to grant that Rodriguez is but one member of a very large club that thrives on the suffering of women. Taking his life won’t close down the club or banish the sexual violence that haunts far too many families.