No doubt I’ll be bombarded with howls of indignation and angry venom for writing this, but Lance Mason should have committed suicide BEFORE he took the life of his beautiful wife Aisha, the mother of his two darling daughters. He alleged drank a bottle of bleach after he killed her, but he should now take the first opportunity to do the job right and spare all of us that cared about her (and him at one point) the pain and hurt he’s causing us right now from his demonically selfish act.
In that way he spares us months and months of headlines and gory details, when we already know what the outcome will be: He’s either going to a mental institution (from which he will never emerge) or to a maximum security prison — again, from which he will never emerge. Who needs the kind of continuing pain the saga of his trial and conviction will bring? If he does the manly thing the case will disappear into a distant memory within a week — a month at most.
And even though I’m unalterably opposed to state-sanctioned murder (which is all the death penalty is), if his lawyers are clever they should hope Mason gets such a sentence, since life on death row is much more comfortable that being in the general prison population. For one, residents of death row are single-celled, and if you’ve ever served time, you know that having a cell all to oneself is as close to heaven as a prisoner can get. And allegedly, the food is also better. Besides, he’d die of old age before Ohio executed him.
But I digress.
We’ve known that Lance was suffering from some kind of deep-seated mental condition ever since he brutally beat Aisha back in 2014. But most of us deluded ourselves into thinking the incident was some kind of one-off, an aberration, that would never again be repeated. But we were so wrong. Even though he was raised in stable, middle-class surroundings (and had every advantage as a child), something happened and he didn’t get the help he obviously needed. He was among the millions of Americans known to mental health professionals as “the walking wounded” — people who can function relatively well day-to-day, look normal, but are ticking time bombs on the inside.
And while I might be sympathetic towards anyone with any kind of medical condition such as mental illness, I certainly prefer they hurt themselves before they hurt others. My God, this was the mother of his two children!
So yes, if I could slip into his cell with a noose I would not kill him myself, but I certainly would try to coax into using it. Spare the living.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.