To Be Fair, Justice Must Also Be Swift

Michael Bernard Bell, 54, was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Starke on Tuesday, July 15th at around 6:25 PM. Bell was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to death in the killings of Jimmy West and Tamecka Smith.

According to court records, Bell spotted what he suspected was the car of the man who had killed his brother earlier that year, unaware that the man had sold the vehicle to West. And so, when Bell saw the car carrying West, Smith, and another woman leaving a club in December 1993, he approached the vehicle and opened fire with his AK-47.

West died at the scene and Smith succumbed to her injuries on the way to the hospital. Thankfully and miraculously, the other woman was not injured. Witnesses reported that Bell also fired at a crowd of onlookers before fleeing the scene. He was apprehended and arrested the following year.

Not surprisingly, these were not Bell’s first felonies, let alone his first murders. He was later convicted of three additional murders that occurred before he shot West and Smith, including the fatal shooting of a woman and her toddler in 1989, and the murder of his mother's boyfriend in the summer of 1993.

All of which begs the question, why did it take 30 years to execute this five-time killer after his 1995 double homicide conviction?

Over the course of those three decades of imprisonment, Florida state taxpayers shelled out an estimated $600,000 in incarceration costs plus millions in legal expenses during Bell’s various appeals. How that jives with the Sixth Amendment’s provision of “a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed”, I don’t know.

I mean, what is the sense of a speedy trial if it takes 30 years to carry out the sentence?

Shouldn’t justice – in order to be fair – also be swift? And what about the family members of the victims? Why should they have to wait three full decades for the man who killed their loved one to be brought to justice?

It is high time for our criminal justice system to be re-examined and reformed because in its present condition, it is broken beyond recognition and repair.