Blind justice spares a killer and fails the victim's family
Appeals courts must be dispassionate arbiters and dispensers of blind justice, but in fulfilling that role, courts -- even the highest court in the land -- can do an injustice to the victims of crime.
And so it was Tuesday when the 6th District Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States refused to intervene in a lower court's ruling that stayed the execution of Kenneth Biros.
Put plainly and simply, it is an affront to justice the Biros gets even one more day during which he can draw a breath. His execution, which was scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday, will now be delayed until a date uncertain.
Biros got to digest his "special meal" of pizza, salad and pie, while the relatives of the woman he brutally murdered got to wait for hours for a court decision that robbed them of the closure that they had reason to believe they would finally receive.
We understand that interpreting the law is a cold and calculating business and that judges and justices have to read the law that is before them without thinking about the mother, sister and brother of Tami Engstrom, waiting in Columbus for some measure of justice. The details of her brutal murder more than 16 years ago were not germane to the sterile legal issues before them.
Grounds for appeal
Still, it is incongruous for Biros to be seeking mercy on the grounds that lethal injection would be cruel and unusual punishment, given that he stabbed and beat Mrs. Engstrom more than 90 times, sexually mutilated her, strangled her and dismembered her body. What kind of coward does that to a woman and then seeks protection against death by medication as "cruel and unusual?"
Even more incongruous was a second legal appeal by Biros' lawyers claiming that he was not convicted of an offense that merits the death penalty. There are a few other inmates on Ohio's death row who deserve their fate more than Biros, but only a few. His crime combined torture, assault and murder, after which he added abuse of the corpse in a calculated effort to hide his crime.
Biros had as good a week as a murderer of his ilk could hope to have. He took a motor trip from Youngstown to Columbus, he got to spend more time with his family than any death row inmate in recent history, and he got his requested meal.
Today, he'll be brought back to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, where he will get to spend more time awaiting his date with justice. And Tami Engstrom's family will have time to wonder what has gone wrong with a system that allows Biros to avoid the execution that a jury of his peers determined him to have justly earned in 1991.