When California released a similar database a few years ago, it completely convinced me of the horrific barbarism that capital punishment is. It is no deterrent to crime, and the risk of killing not just innocent people, but genuinely reformed people, is far, far too great.
Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
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Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#12Many more should be added. Start with Aldrich Ames, Bernie Madoff and Robert Hanssen.
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#13Can anybody explain why the Race column is stil there? What is the relevancy of this statistic? Why not sex, or religion?
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#14When California released a similar database a few years ago, it completely convinced me of the horrific barbarism that capital punishment is. It is no deterrent to crime, and the risk of killing not just innocent people, but genuinely reformed people, is far, far too great.
Skimming the list, it seems only few of them are really repentant and understood the consequences of what they did. But, for the few of them, especially those referring to their family and children, it is hard to see what benefits their death will bring. Maybe some closure for the victim's family, but in some case, it sounds like the guy being executed as not much more in common with the criminal.
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#15The title for this is incorrectly applying the public suffix list (https://publicsuffix.org/) and comes up with "tx.us". That's not the registered domain name here.
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#16We have a word cloud and a "greatest hits" list posted here.
Remember that this is more than 500 separate cases worthy of consideration or at least having enough decency to hit the back button rather than dig into such a heavy topic.
What's not cool is turning these words into a Top 10-linkbait list or a variety show or some other mechanism for insulating yourself from the horror of this post.
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#17We have a word cloud and a "greatest hits" list posted here. Remember that this is more than 500 separate cases worthy of consideration or at least having enough decency to hit the back button rather than dig into such a heavy topic. What's not cool is turning these words into a Top 10-linkbait list or a variety show or some other mechanism for insulating yourself from the horror of this post.
Folks have published 'famous epitaph' books before - is this different? Of course its black humor, all such topics are by definition. Is it just too soon? If they had all been pre-1950 would that have softened the horror?
Or is it just that the Internet is way too slight of a medium to support Any serious topic? I would tend to agree with that.
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#18There are no atheists in foxholes... or on death row apparently.
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#19When California released a similar database a few years ago, it completely convinced me of the horrific barbarism that capital punishment is. It is no deterrent to crime, and the risk of killing not just innocent people, but genuinely reformed people, is far, far too great.
Yeah, a list like this tugs at your humanity.
Then again, these people wantonly killed others (as judged by juries and appeals judges and governors).
Where are the last words of their victims?
[edited for clarity]
Re: Death Row – Last words of every Texas inmate executed since 1982
#20The New York Times ran an article[1] on this in 2009. Here are the last words they picked out - --- Go ahead? Nothing I can say can change the past. I done lost my voice. I would like to say goodbye. My heart goes is going ba bump ba bump ba bump. Is the mike on? I don’t have anything to say. I am just sorry about what I did. I am nervous and it is hard to put my thoughts together. Sometimes you don’t know what to sa…
I am curious why you pasted the entire list of last words from the NYT article in addition to linking to the article? Why not provide a link to the article (maybe a small relevant excerpt) and let people choose if they want stop reading the comments here to read the NYT list?