Morality's Muddy Waters by George Cotkin

Author:George Cotkin [Cotkin, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Philosophy, Ethics & Moral Philosophy
ISBN: 9780812222494
Google: z2h2IvZwo7MC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-03-21T01:07:16+00:00

Chapter Five

Just Rewards? Capital Punishment

“A Man Full of Murder”

Max Jensen’s summer job in 1976 was as an attendant at a Sinclair gas station in Orem, Utah. It was unexciting work but necessary to pay the bills. He worked the 3 to 11 P.M. shift. Married for one year, with a three-month-old baby, Jensen was a law student at Brigham Young University. He and his family lived in a trailer. While money was tight, the future looked bountiful for this hard-working, devout Mormon. Until Gary Gilmore barged into his world.1

Thirty-six years old, Gilmore had spent eighteen of his last twenty-one years incarcerated. Bright and wily, violent and willful, Gilmore had been released only three months earlier from the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. The odds of his hewing to the straight and narrow after a slew of arrests for robbery and assault were slim to nonexistent. A friend who had served some time with him in prison remarked that Gilmore “was full of hatred, and he knew no boundaries. . . . You could tell that he was now a man full of murder.”2 Robbery and murder were on his mind that July evening in Orem.

Jensen offered no resistance, only a willingness to do as he was told and a desire to live to see his wife and daughter again. Brandishing a .22-caliber Browning automatic pistol, Gilmore told Jensen to get down on the bathroom floor, a surface Jensen had cleaned earlier that day. Jensen was prone, his hands beneath his stomach; he was no threat to Gilmore. Although Gilmore often was in a liquor- and drug-induced haze, that evening he was sober. He thrust the pistol against Jensen’s skull and said, “This is for me.” The gunshot reverberated in the green-tiled bathroom. A moment later, still not satiated, Gilmore announced that the next bullet was for his girlfriend, Nicole. He fired again, at point-blank range, into Jensen’s skull. Gilmore then hurried from the gas station with cash from the register and change from Jensen’s coin changer. He left behind an innocent man lying in a pool of blood.

The next evening Gilmore struck once more in similar fashion. His victim, Ben Bushnell, was married, with an infant and another on the way. Majoring in business administration at Brigham Young University, this gentle giant of a man had worked various jobs to support his family and pay for his schooling. When a position managing the City Center Motel in Provo opened up, it seemed an ideal opportunity because it included free housing. Things changed in the flash of a gunshot, as Gilmore stood over the prone Bushnell and shot him in the head. He left this victim writhing with pain, slowly descending into death.

Within hours of the second shooting, Gilmore was captured. He readily confessed to his crimes, even if he was unable to explain why he had chosen to snuff out the lives of both men. Perhaps he saw the terror and hope in their eyes: the terror that gave Gilmore

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