GEFANGENER
                      By CindyET 

FBI data shows that ten of the twelve states without capital 
punishment have homicide rates below the national average. 

Opponents of the death penalty often cite that capital 
punishment is not a deterrent to murder, those executed are 
usually poor, and many innocent people have been wrongly 
sentenced to death.

Tell it to someone who cares. 

Gerald Thomas Schnauz -- house painter, drywaller, murderer -- got lucky. He killed Alice Brandt in Traverse City, Michigan, 
and Michigan happens to be one of the twelve states without 
the death penalty.

Special Agent Fox Mulder has not seen Gerry Schnauz since 
testifying at his trial. He isn't sympathetic to the fact that 
Schnauz is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, who, according 
to his court-appointed lawyer, belongs in Melvoin Psychiatric 
Hospital, not a maximum security prison.  

Fox Mulder wishes Gerry Schnauz had committed his crimes in 
one of the forty states that gas, electrocute or inject its 
serial killers.

E. Michael McCann, a district attorney in Wisconsin -- another 
compassionate state without the death penalty -- prosecuted 
Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered and dismembered seventeen boys and men, and ate the flesh of at least one of them. Despite 
the heinous nature of the crime, McCann was not dissuaded from his feelings about capital punishment. "To participate in the killing of another human being, it diminishes the respect for 
life. Period."

Being a doctor, Special Agent Dana Scully might have agreed 
with him, if she hadn't undergone a transorbital lobotomy at 
the hands of a madman in October of 1996. Gerry Schnauz 
kidnapped her, duct-taped her to a dentist chair, inserted a 
leucotome into her eye socket and proceeded to cut out her 
brain while she begged for mercy.

Many aspects of Schnauz's crime haunt Agent Mulder. Scully was his partner. He stayed behind at the Traverse City Drug Store, while she went for the car, where she was abducted. He tried to locate her, but didn't arrive in time to save her. The worst part though, the thing that still gives him nightmares, is 
knowing that she understood exactly what was happening to her when Gerry Schnauz excised her mind.

Which thoughts went first, Mulder wonders. Worse yet, which 
went last? The cases they were working on? The errands she was planning to run later in the day? Memories of her mother? Her brothers? Thoughts of him? Had she been hoping he would rescue her? Was she thinking of him at all? Was she disillusioned when he didn't burst through the door and stop Gerry Schnauz before it was too late?

He straightens a dying flower in the vase beside her bed. She 
is lying motionless on the pillows, a doll tucked in the crook 
of her arm and a vacant look in her eyes.

Argue with me, he wishes. Prove me wrong. Tell me I'm crazy, 
Scully, so I can start to breath again.

Physically she's right there in front of him, yet the Scully 
he knew vanished in a motorhome at the edge of a Michigan 
graveyard on an otherwise perfect autumn day.

The sun is balanced on the horizon outside her window. He 
bends over her and softly kisses her cheek. "See you 
tomorrow," he says, same as always. Sorrow sucker-punches him when she doesn't answer, although she hasn't uttered a word in nine years. 

Dana Katherine Scully is a permanent patient in Baltimore's 
Center for Long Term Care.

Today 2,572 inmates are serving sentences of life without 
parole in the state of Michigan. One of them is Gerald Thomas 
Schnauz.

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