I loved Spoon River Anthology when I was in high school. A series of poems that are the epitaphs of various residents of Spoon River. Tonight, while skimming various blog posts I saw a link for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice which reminded me of that book.
On the site, they listed the offender information and last statement for the executed offenders since 1982:http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm I am not posting this to further a discussion on whether capital punishment is right or wrong. Some of the crimes these people committed are horrific. But reading their last statement first and then their crime, somehow lends more sympathy for them. It may not be of interest to all of you (or any of you), but that's how I've spent my evening, solemnly reading last statements and then records of crimes.
Some of the crimes seem unbelievable, like a made for tv movie, one man had a 160 mile crime spree killing family members and random other people at one point kidnapping a family of five and forcing them to drive him across a border. Some of the crimes are so senseless, a person murdered in an armed robbery that only resulted in getting a six pack. So basically a life (two if you think of the death penalty as murder) all traded for a six pack of beer, there's no mention of whether the criminal actually consumed it or not. Some of the crimes are heartbreaking, one man attacking two people as they left church, stealing $40 from a woman who he then shot and attempted to cut her face with a carpet knife as she prayed to God to forgive her attacker.
I don't know how to explain this fascination I have for this site, the humanizing affect it has on otherwise faceless criminals, the empathetic urges it produces both for the criminal and for the families left in the wake of these crimes. . .
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3 comments:
Okay, I don't know about the rest of those stories, but one of them is clearly From Dusk Till Dawn, are you sure you were at a real site?
There are also sites devoted to prisoners' last meals. It's interesting to see what people request, but also sad because many don't get what they asked for.
I KNOW, I just found out that they don't all get what they ask for and that in virginia they get a choice of 28 meals that rotate every month. I think that's terrible. I mean yeah, I guess that they committed a crime and if the death penalty is legal then we can just consider not getting their last meal choice as one more result of their crime, but somehow it just seems wrong. I read that once chef tries to make the closest thing he can. . . sometimes it's not terribly close.
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