When he was 19, Michael Tisius met Roy Vance in the Randolph County Jail, Missouri. During the jail break on June 22, 2000, Tisius shot and killed two of the jailers, Jason Acton and Leon Egley. Tisius was convicted and sentenced to death.
Since his conviction it has come to light that Tisius was neglected and abused as a child. His conviction was followed by “appeals, reversals and a resentencing hearing.” When the Missouri Supreme Court issued a warrant of execution set for 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, Tisius’ lawyers began filing a host of petitions.
One of the petitions claimed that Tisius was only 19 and his brain was not fully formed yet and he was unable to appreciate the consequences of this actions. It begs the question, when does one become responsible for their actions, and how fully formed is the brain of those who think Tisius’ was not fully formed?
It seems our culture has lost the meaning of and reason for the death penalty. The execution of Tisius has brought the issue of the death penalty into specific relief again.
There came a time in the history of man that “the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” Genesis 6:5. This is an accurate description of a society completely corrupted by the absence of law and order. It was this cultural climate that precipitated the flood.
Emerging from the ark Noah and his family were tasked with repopulating the earth and restoring the civilization that had succumbed to anarchy. To do that God gave mankind its first law, “Whoever shed’s man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man,” Genesis 9:6.
If mankind were to survive as a civilized society, it would only be possible established on a sense of right and wrong founded on the principle of justice. So the Father took the most serious of human offenses, murder, to lay a foundation of justice from which all other lesser offenses could be patterned.
God’s reasoning is when a man takes another man’s life without justification; he is destroying the image of God in another person needlessly, and justly forfeits the right to continue bearing that image himself. And He tasked mankind with the prosecution of justice, “by man his blood shall be shed.”
God initiated capital punishment as a just penalty when a man murders the dignity of another. That is clear from the wording of Genesis 6:9. God did not institute the death penalty as a deterrent; He did so to establish societal justice.
If we as a society forsake the practice of justice we may find ourselves sliding down a very slippery slope to the precipice of anarchy. Nothing so inclines people to take the law into their own hands as a legal system that refuses to administer justice.