Some people are simply monsters.

Like Richard Dwyer.

He’s the unrepentant rapist and murderer who buried a woman seven months pregnant, Donna Paradis, in a shallow grave behind the Promenade Mall last year. In being sentenced to life, Dwyer maintained his innocence, saying he hopes the guilty man is caught some day.

Well, denial is the first step.

Getting a life sentence in Maine is rare; to earn the maximum punishment for murder under law, a perpetrator must have committed most heinous acts. The sentence from Justice Thomas Delahanty is testament to the abhorrent nature of Dwyer’s crime, and of Dwyer himself.

Yet while Dwyer is serving a single life sentence, he should be serving two. After all, he stole two lives – that of Paradis and her unborn child. Maine law is silent on the latter, though, which is a testament to inability of lawmakers to parse justice from the socially and politically charged issues surrounding abortion.

These are separate matters, which should be addressed as such. An incoming Legislature now generating ideas for new laws has an opportunity to do so.

Absent federal action, like reconsideration of the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, abortion, as a legal issue, remains static. And whatever might happen to alter this situation in the future will take place in Washington D.C., not Augusta or anywhere else.

Despite this, something, perhaps reluctance or even cowardice, has prevented lawmakers from declaring that willfully ending the life of an unborn, during a criminal act, is the equivalent of committing murder. It is, without equivocation.

Yet the Legislature has tripped over separating the proper punishment for ending a life, with engaging in the multi-layered debate over where one begins. Prior attempts have ended in either stalemate or weak lawmaking.

The worst outcome is MRSA 17-A, chapter 208, which states that any attack on a pregnant woman that seriously injures or kills a fetus is “elevated aggravated assault.” This seems appropriate, at least, if the mother and fetus survive said attack.

But why is it so difficult to say killing a mother and her unborn child is the same crime?

Yes, without question, abortion – the natural corollary for legislation regarding the unborn – presents contentious, polarizing debate. But this should lack bearing on the just notion of ensuring killers are punished for who they kill, and nothing else.

Because for the victims of those crimes, and those they leave behind, nothing else matters.