Sixteen months.
That’s how long former Gov. Tim Kaine has had to cook up an explanation for his attempt – days before he left office in 2010 – to send double-murderer Jens Soering back to Germany.
It was an astonishing act of gubernatorial nose-thumbing that Kaine reportedly refused to discuss until recently, when he decided to run for the U.S. Senate.
Yet, after all this time, the best excuse Kaine can muster is that he was trying to save Virginia taxpayers a few bucks.
“He is not a sympathetic character, that’s true,” Kaine told The Associated Press recently. “I would never grant him clemency.
“I did feel like Virginians have paid for his incarceration for a very long time – let the Germans pay to keep this guy.”
Danke schön, governor. But honestly, we don’t mind the cost of keeping animals like Soering behind bars. It’s the price we pay to live in a society with laws. Apparently Kaine’s compassion for taxpayers even extended beyond America’s borders. The AP reminds us that “Kaine secretly agreed to a plan that would have kept Soering behind bars for two years” in Germany.
Kaine has some serious explaining to do. Perhaps he should hire a new spin doctor before he makes a stab at it.
Ooops. “Stab” is a poor choice of words. After all, that’s what Soering did to his girlfriend’s parents in 1985.
For those who’ve forgotten, here’s an abbreviated account: In March of 1985, Nancy and Derek Haysom were butchered in their Bedford County home. After the murders, their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend, Soer*ing – who met as students at the University of Virginia – fled the country. The duo hopscotched around the globe until they were arrested for check fraud in London the next year.
Elizabeth returned to America, pleaded guilty to being an accessory to the murder of her parents and was sentenced to 90 years in prison. She has a mandatory release date in 2032, when she’ll be 68 years old.
The son of a German diplomat, Soering fought extradition. He was finally shipped to the States in 1990 after American authorities agreed that he would not face the death penalty.
Soering confessed to the near-decapitation of his girlfriend’s parents. Eventually he recanted and blamed Haysom. A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences.
Because he committed murder in the bad old days before Virginia abolished parole, Soering is a regular at parole board hearings. Yet unless that body collectively loses its mind, Soer*ing will leave prison the way the jury wanted him to: in a casket.
Soering’s story is familiar to those who know what goes on behind bars. Many convicts steadfastly insist that they’re innocent. Once their appeals are exhausted, they inevitably find Jesus and try to enlist the patronage of gullible religious leaders to lobby politicians to get them out of the big house. Catholic clergy took the bait in this case. Like our present governor, Kaine is a practicing Roman Catholic. Perhaps pressure from the clergy had something to do with Kaine’s inexplicable decision to show mercy to this murderer.
What Kaine didn’t count on was that his successor in Richmond and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder would work in concert to foil his plans. As soon as he took office, Bob McDonnell asked Holder to stop the transfer. Several months later, the attorney general did just that.
Earlier this week McDonnell refused to recommend parole for Soering, after a plea to do so from the convict. According to news reports, the governor said he remains convinced of Soering’s guilt.
Soering’s re-emergence in the headlines is bad news for Kaine, who no doubt would prefer to tiptoe away from his peculiar actions during his last week in office.
Heck, Soering may have done him a favor. Kaine now has an opportunity to clear the air with the election still 18 months away.
Even so, it might take an entire team of spin doctors to make any explanation palatable to the public.
http://hamptonroads.com/2011/05/now-...ering-decision
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