This country is not about laws … look at it … the green river killer and unibomber get a bye ... they get life without parole because they have something to trade … but every hapless bucky who shot two uncles over a pool-room squabble gets a last meal of cobbler and a gurney hoedown with doctor death because the only thing coming from them was ordinary life … there was no power extending to greatness.… my god, in Texas the newspapers have a reporter devoted to the story every other day, and with especially interesting cases, the coverage begins days or weeks before the axe is to fall.

They keep the accounting of last words ... including the prisoner’s gallow-wisdom of final reckoning pleaded to witnesses no more placated by that killing than what caused it in the first place.

Gene Haynes