Retribution
The death penalty is a complicated issue. The criminal justice system is flawed. Deterrence is vague. Juries may be biased. Forgiveness is often the greater good. Life in prison without parole is often sufficient. However, sometimes the death penalty is clearly justified.
The crimes of William George Davis is one such situation. Davis was a cardiac intensive care unit nurse at Christus Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas. According to his arrest affidavit, hospital surveillance footage captured him entering the rooms of patients, and the patients’ conditions deteriorated immediately after he visited their rooms. Davis killed John Lafferty, Ronald Clark, Christopher Greenaway and Joseph Kalina, after injecting air into their arterial lines, resulting in brain damage.
Prosecutor Chris Gatewood said the former nurse “enjoyed” injecting the patients with air. Gatewood told KLTV:
“He likes to kill people. He enjoyed going into the rooms and injecting them with air. If you watch the video on Kalina, he set at the end of the hall and he watched those monitors and he waited. That’s because he liked it.”
A jury convicted him of capital murder. Davis fatally injected four patients with air to cause their death. The jury sentenced him to death.
According to The Tyler Morning Telegraph, the jury decided he “has a probability of being a danger to society and found there are not sufficient mitigating factors that would hinder him from receiving the death penalty.” The death penalty is the right call.
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