Good morning.
How's the coffee? Bagel? Cream cheese?
Just when I thought I could not abhor the practice of capital punishment in my country any more....that's what I get for thinking.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia last night:
Teresa Lewis, 41, died by injection at 9:13 p.m. Thursday, authorities said. She became the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly a century. Supporters and relatives of the victims watched her execution at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.
Teresa Lewis was said to have an IQ of 72.
SEVENTY-TWO.
One day, I hope, we will collectively awaken and realize that we dehumanize ourselves with each and every judicially-sanctioned homicide.
Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer criticized Gov. George W. Bush Tuesday for making fun of an executed Texas woman in an interview Bush gave to Talk magazine.
"I think it is nothing short of unbelievable that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death," Bauer said of Bush.
Bush is portrayed in Talk as ridiculing pickax killer Karla Faye Tucker of Houston for an interview she did with CNN broadcaster Larry King shortly before she was executed last year. Just before her execution date, Tucker appealed for clemency on the grounds that she had become a born-again Christian.
" `Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, `don't kill me,' "
There, in a nutshell, do we have the mentality of those who support the death penalty.
Do not dare to call it justice. It is nothing of the sort. It is bloodsport, pure and simple. It is revenge, nothing more nor less, and by engaging in this conduct, we cede the moral high ground, that very thing that entitles us to sit in judgment upon such people. Yes, we've heard it all before. But that makes it no less true, and it cannot be said often enough.
And for some reason, like those who rubberneck accidents looking for markers of blood and carnage, we are treated to those morbid little details, each and every time. They haunt.
Lewis appeared fearful, her jaw clenched, as she was escorted into the death chamber. She glanced tensely around at 14 assembled corrections officials before being bound to a gurney with heavy leather straps...Then, as the drugs flowed into her body, her feet bobbed but she otherwise remained motionless. A guard lightly tapped her on the shoulder reassuringly as she slipped into death.
When the door between Bell's cell and the death chamber opened, the inmate thrust his hips backward and wouldn't step toward to the gurney where the lethal injection was administered. Six stocky corrections officers pulled him through the doorway and lifted him onto the gurney...Bell's lawyer, who also witnessed the execution, said a sedative the inmate was given made it difficult for him to walk.
On Saturday, Lewis was moved to the Greensville Correctional Center, site of Virginia's death house. She requested her final meal: fried chicken, sweet peas with butter, German chocolate cake and Dr Pepper, corrections officials said.
The last stop.
LOOK at it. Do not dare to turn away, for this is an instrument of what passes for justice in a supposedly civilized nation.
Utah Department of Corrections director Thomas Patterson told reporters Gardner was pronounced dead two minutes after being shot.
"This is an unusual task but one we have done professionally," Patterson said. "It has been done with absolute dignity and reverence for human life...
Emphasis mine.
I know something about killing. I don't like killing. And I don't think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing. Now, that's just a personal belief that I have.
JOHN KERRY, Wolf Blitzer Reports, CNN, Sep. 17, 1996
(NEWSER) – Georgia officials have delayed the execution of an inmate who tried to take his own life hours before the state was scheduled to take it. Convicted murdered Brandon Rhode slit his wrists and throat before he was due to die by lethal injection yesterday, AP reports. Georgia's Supreme Court granted a temporary stay and the execution has been rescheduled for Friday.
Had enough?
robert otis pierce, convicted of murder, California. Executed April 6, 1956
On his execution day, Pierce slashed his throat with a broken shard of mirror. After wrapping his neck with a prison shirt, he fought guards all the way to the chamber. It took the combined strength of four guards to strap him into the chair, where he continued to struggle and curse.
Witnesses looked on in horror as he bled, wept, and cursed in the gas chamber.
This is what passes for justice in our nation.
Government ... can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.
HELEN PREJEAN, Dead Man Walking
I can't go on.........
Her supporters never said that Lewis was innocent or that she shouldn't be punished. But they said she did not deserve to die because she was borderline mentally retarded, with the intellectual ability of about a 13-year-old, and was manipulated by a smarter conspirator. It was wrong for her to be sentenced to death, they said, when the two men who fired the shots received life terms.
Behold! Justice in America!
I have nothing further.