The original article is located here and is a better read since it includes many hyperlinks, the following is just an excerpt.
By Nicholas Stix
"What do you have to do today to get the death penalty?" asked Channon Christian’s father incredulously.
Letalvis Cobbins, a black man, was convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering the 21-year-old white girl in the January 2007 Knoxville Horror. And yet the jurors sentenced him to "life without parole". [Letalvis Cobbins found guilty in Christian—Newsom murders, WATE, August 25, 2009.]
Since murderers have been known to be released from prison sentences of "life without parole", and prison is for the most violent black and Hispanic offenders a felon’s paradise, replete with cable TV, weight lifting, and ample opportunities to deal and buy drugs and gang-rape white men, Cobbins’ sentence is both misleading and of dubious punitive value.
The jury’s pretext for not sentencing Cobbins to death for the most heinous crimes ever committed in Knox County: laughable "mitigating" factors, which it asserted outweighed any aggravating factors: "[A] horrific childhood, the pleas of his relatives and his alleged role as subordinate to an evil mastermind".
