A BBC news report has several twists on the death penalty issue.
A white supremacist convicted of racially motivated murders three decades ago in Florida has been executed by lethal injection.
Mark Asay is the first white man in state history to be executed for killing a black victim, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The 53-year-old had been found guilty of two 1987 murders in Jacksonville. The execution took place at 22:22 GMT.
It was the first time a new drug cocktail was used.
A jury found that Asay shot his victims - Robert Lee Booker, a black man, and Robert McDowell, 26, a white-Hispanic man - on the same night after making racist comments.
emphasis added
It’s difficult to figure out how to take this. The disparity in which people of color receive the death penalty at greater rates than white people is well known, let alone for when people of color die at the hands of a white murderer. It took Florida 30 years to get around to this. Progress, of a sort?
That the man is identified as a white supremacist is relevant to the recent news stories after Charlottesville.
And then there’s a gender issue. One of his victims was identified as a white hispanic man:
...Prosecutors said that Asay had hired McDowell, who was dressed as a woman, for sex, and shot him after discovering his gender.
Also part of the story was the use of a new drug cocktail used for the execution for the first time.
His execution began with him being given etomidate, an anaesthetic never before used for a US execution, which will replace midazolam, a drug abandoned over fears that it was causing unnecessary suffering.
Concerns were raised after a number of prisoners appeared to suffer agonising deaths, eventually leading Florida to abandon the drug in January.
While the BBC news account is fairly straightforward in identifying Asay as a racist, the Daily Mail offers up a different take.
...They also said that his white supremacist tattoos, including one that read 'supreme white power,' proved his prejudice.
However, he denies that he's a white supremacist and says he only got the ink done because it was the only way to survive 'in a hostile prison environment', when he was locked up for a burglary and auto theft, aged 19.
'They are not representative at all of who I am, but they are tattoos, and they're not easily removed,' he said.
The Daily Mail also mentions he’s undergone a religious conversion while in prison:
...Asay, who is a born again Christian, says that his faith is giving him comfort in the hours before his death, and that he is ready to die.
'I'm loved by the Lord. I'm 100 per cent confident that if I'm going to get relief here, it's because of the truth,' he said.
This story is liable to get lost as Hurricane Harvey dominates the news, along with all of the Friday Trump atrocities. It shouldn’t, because it’s at the intersection of so many issues America is struggling with at the moment: race, religion, capital punishment, violent crime, what news to believe...
“We pray for mercy because we would all be fools to pray for justice.”