Texas inmate wants to tell joke at his execution
LIVINGSTON, Texas ‚Äö√Ñ√Æ Condemned prisoner Patrick Knight wants to leave them laughing. Knight acknowledges there’s nothing funny about his likely execution later this month for the fatal shooting of his neighbors, Walter and Mary Werner, almost 16 years ago outside Amarillo. But to help him come up with his final statement, Knight is accepting jokes mailed to him on Texas’ death row or e-mailed to a friend who has a Web site for him. The friend then mails him the jokes. Knight said the joke he finds the funniest will be his final statement the evening of June 26…. “I’m not trying to disrespect the Werners or anything like that,” he told The Associated Press from death row. “I’m not trying to say I don’t care what’s going on. I’m about to die. I’m not going to sit here and whine and cry and moan and everything like that when I’m facing the punishment I’ve been given.
Though sometimes even I have to wonder, I’m pretty certain that the State of Texas doesn’t execute people who’ve bombed at the Improv. No, I’m fairly sure that Patrick Knight is about to hustled off into the Afterlife because he’s guilty of capital murder. In Knight’s case, he murdered two of his neighbors, and it was determined that his guilt merited the death penalty. Now, whether or not you support the death penalty (and I most certainly don’t), I can’t imagine that I’m going to get much of an argument when I present the argument that telling a joke at one’s own execution is the ultimate in bad taste. Never mind the complete and total disrespect the act of trying to be funny shows for Knight’s innocent victims.
No, there is nothing even remotely funny about Knight’s execution, and I doubt that the family of his victims are going to be snickering…until Knight is declared legally dead. He who laughs last laughs best, no?
