In August, I read this diary by JR about Todd Willingham, the Texas inmate executed in 2004. The diary linked to an ABA Journal article that said in part:
... Craig Beyler, reviewed the case of Cameron Todd Willingham for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, created to investigate allegations of forensic mistakes, the Chicago Tribune reports. The newspaper obtained a copy of his report.
Willingham was convicted of murder for the deaths of his three children who perished in the fire. Beyler is one of nine top fire scientists who have reviewed the case and found that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore, the story says.
Beyler wrote that the state fire marshal investigating the case "seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created."
JR’s diary led me to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Death Row page where the last words of the executed are available for all to read. It’s gut wrenching to go through them one-by-one and yet I did starting with Todd’s and finishing with Reginald Blanton, executed just a couple of weeks ago on October 27, 2009.
The content of these statements surprised me. I guess I’d expected bitterness, fear, and anger. Instead, what I read was about family, love, God, and apology. I decided to make a word cloud to get a clearer picture of the last words of the condemned.
I copied and pasted each of those statements into a large file. Using the JAVA app at Wordle.net, I got the frequency of occurrence for each of the over 1500 unique words in the file. After eliminating the most common English words, (e.g., to, at, of, etc.) I used the app to create a cloud of the 100 top words. Here it is:
I don’t know how many of the executed were innocent, like I genuinely believe Todd Willingham was. Nor am I sure what, if anything, this exercise demonstrates. Are the condemned sincere or is it last-chance bargaining with a higher being? Who knows?
What I do know is that reading the last words of those condemned to die gives pause. It reinforces in me the belief that no society that claims to be humanistic can, at the same time, justify the institutional killing of its citizens.
I’m a first timer who has lurked regularly for a few years and who has made a few inane comments along the way. This sobering exercise has lead me to step out of lurk mode to remind us that what we do to others, we do to ourselves as a nation. Thanks to JR and the others who keep the death penalty issue in the diaries.