Texas executes 400th person since 1982
HUNTSVILLE ‚Äö√Ñ√Æ After a lengthy final statement seeking forgiveness, Johnny Ray Conner was executed Wednesday night for the murder of a Houston grocery clerk during a failed robbery in 1998. Conner, the 400th person to be executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982, begged Marie Nguyen to forgive him for fatally shooting her mother, Kathyanna…. “I want y’all to understand,” he said to her and other members of her family. “I’m not mad at any of y’all. Please forgive me.”…. Though he said his execution was “unjust,” Conner, 32, asked his own relatives not to be angry and professed his faith in Allah. His voice trailed off as the lethal drugs pulsed through his veins. After about eight minutes, he sighed loudly and was still. He was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. He is the 101st person convicted in Harris County to be put to death.
I’ve never made a secret of my opposition to the death penalty. Unfortunately, here in Texas, killing people is a cottage industry…and also very politically popular. No one ever lost an election in this state by opposing the death penalty…because if there’s one thing Texans know how to do, it’s kill people. We’re efficient, we’re ruthless, and we don’t much care. I mean, how often does an execution even make the news anymore? Yep, you know you’re in Texas when you find news of an execution above the television listings in the entertainment section of the local paper, eh? Hmm…”Law & Order” is on at 9, right after “Celebrity Prostate Surgery”, and…oh, look honey- another murderer bought the farm in Huntsville….”
Even better is that I live in Harris County, which apparently, while not necessarily the birthplace of frontier justice, it’s certainly where it came to settle down. Yessirree, murder someone in Harris County, and there’s a very high likelihood that the DA is going to bust his butt trying to find a way to fry your @$$. Not that I’m about to condone murder or those who commit them, but while the whole biblical/frontier justice may make people feel safer, no credible study has ever tied the death penalty to a statistically significant decrease in the murder rate. All you have to do is to look at the murder rate in Harris County to understand the truth behind that statement. Of course, no good, God-fearing Republican is ever going to risk his political career by suggesting that perhaps we’re a wee bit TOO trigger-happy when it comes to the death penalty. So maybe we run the risk of executing an innocent person every now and then. And perhaps we might execute a mentally retarded individual once in awhile, but it’s all for the Greater Good, don’tcha know?
Yeah, we might not be able to feed, educate, or care for our children. We may not be able to afford to care for the mentally ill in Texas…but we’ll be more than happy to kill one of ‘em if the need arises.
Welcome to Texas. We suck….
