by Rowland Nethaway

About the author: Rowland Nethaway is the senior editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald, the newspaper of Waco, Texas.

The porno videotape of mass murderer Richard Speck taking drugs and living it up in prison makes a piercing argument for the death penalty.

Speck says aloud what many law-abiding Americans fear most about their prison systems.

‘‘If they only knew how much fun I was having in here, they would turn me loose,’’ Speck said. Actually, had they only known how much fun he was having in prison, a lot of people would have wanted to take Speck out and shoot him.

Speck was a criminal drifter who broke into a Chicago nurses’ dormitory in 1966. He rounded up eight student nurses. He bound and gagged them and took them one at a time...