Buzz Bissinger: Gosnell should be executed - brutally

I HAVE READ the 281-page grand-jury report twice now. I have forced myself to look at the pictures no matter how grotesque. I cannot rid myself of them.

I know a grand-jury report is a one-sided document, under the control of District Attorney Seth Williams. But when I see the pictures of babies, one 32 weeks old and curled up as if vainly trying to protect itself, another 28 weeks with a red dagger across the neck where the spinal cord was severed, the word that comes to mind is "monster."

It is a lousy description. It does no accurate justice. But it is the only word I can think of. Monster. Over and over. The Monster Dr. Kermit Gosnell and the abortion clinic he ran at 38th and Lancaster. The American Mengele.

I have never read a legal document that has affected me as much as this report, and I have read thousands of court records.

How could anything like this exist, so craven in its disregard for pain and suffering and the apparently routine killing of innocents?

How could there be such filth inside the clinic of Gosnell, the permeation of the cat urine, the feces on the stairway, the blood on the furniture and the blankets, the toilet cleaned once a week where fetal remains sometimes clogged the pipes and had to be scooped out, the jars with tiny feet turned white, the moaning of helpless women in recovery rooms that plays in my head like a thousand wails.

And then those remains. Stuffed into a freezer like leftovers. Or left out overnight like rotting vegetables.

Everything I have described comes from the grand-jury report. That, once again, does not make it gospel. There is a presumption of innocence in our legal system. But I believe the grand-jury report because of the thousands of pages of documents examined and the 58 witnesses who testified.

I believe that Gosnell deserves to be executed right now.

There is no need for months of delay. Nor is there any more need for why-did-this-happen stories. The culprits are always the same and always will be - state incompetence, local incompetence, the abortion politics of Harrisburg, regulations that are written up only to convince the public that the bureaucracy is actually doing something besides sending threatening letters that your tax payment is off by a dollar. It has happened before. It will happen again. Pure evil always overcomes its obstacles anyway.

I am against the death penalty. I think it is barbaric, an American stain. But I would pay to watch. In the absence of that, I would pay to have his trial begin next month, not next year. I know that won't happen because the system of justice is a system of delay. Justice is no longer justice.

Gosnell, charged with the murder of one woman during a botched abortion and the murders of seven babies, deserves his day in court.

He is very lucky. He is represented by perhaps the best defense attorney in the city, Jack McMahon. I have known Jack for 30 years. I told him I thought Gosnell should be executed. I wondered why he would touch a case like this. He quickly e-mailed me back.

"What your [sic] missing is something we have in America called the presumption of innocence," he wrote. "Thank god our justice system in America is not as naive and simplistic as you appear to be."

On the basis of his grammar alone, Jack is not convincing me. I still believe his client should be executed.

There is a problem with executions in Pennsylvania: No one is ever executed. So it is my hope that when Gosnell comes to trial, and if he is found guilty, he be sentenced to life and placed in the general prison population. I hope inmates enter Gosnell's cell one night. I hope they replicate as best they can the conditions of the hellhouse Gosnell operated as described in the grand-jury report.

I hope they hold him down on a bloody blanket and stuff his mouth with a cloth soaked with cat piss. I hope they ask him if he wants painkillers, and when he pleads that he does but has no money, they say he is out of luck because he has to pay for them. I hope they produce a weapon honed into a makeshift pair of scissors. I hope they plunge it into his neck and sever his spinal cord.

Then at least there will be some semblance of justice.

Buzz Bissinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, the author of the best-seller "Friday Night Lights" and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His column will appear from time to time. Contact him at buzz.bissinger@gmail.com