"There is a handbook to get away with murder...

but Teresa didn't read that handbook."

This was Candice DeLong's quip on the recently executed (2010) murderess who seduced young men into being the contract killers of her husband and stepson.

In other, even more recent news: Texas abolished the "last meal" request. We always knew Texas "wasn't playin" with its death penalty--Texas clearly feels it's there to be used, unlike so many other states where it only seems to be real "on the books." My own state is totally constipated when it comes to actually cleaning out Death Row. But I didn't know Texas would get this mean.

Well one inmate "done pissed them off" and they've banned this "sacred institution" so loved by print journalists--so we lose the lurid fascination of killers' final calorie counts.

Apparently one asshole wasted his food--and it couldn't have been a nicer guy. The article (which also mentions Lewis's choice of last meal) is here.

And I don't use the word asshole lightly. This is one of those two white supremacists who dragged a black man in chains behind a truck until he was in pieces in 1998.

That's the sort of story you never forget if you ever heard it. I remember when that one happened. Went through the nation's heart like a shiv.

I don't know how I feel about stopping the "last meal" tradition. I'm sure the last thing anyone in Texas wants is executions being held up because that thing ends up flopping around courts until it embarrassingly reaches the Supreme Court or something. Although, somehow I don't think it will need legislation outside Texas, which is pretty much its own country.

I'd say still give them their last meal. Who cares if that asshole played a prank on his death's eve. Why punish the "whole school for one badass?"

I'm totally pro-death penalty (when applicable, as for serial killers, cold premeditation, multiple murders). Don't believe in torturing anyone, even monsters who tortured others so think lethal injection is the best we have for now although expect that to be modified into something even quicker in the next few decades. But I don't believe there is any reason on earth for these people to still be breathing air and exhausting resources that could save others.

Every death penalty case is different. There are people who fit the legal definition of mental illness as well as the regular one who should not be executed--even though their acts arouse great rage. Today I found myself conflicted thinking whether I could deliver a death penalty verdict on someone as clearly insane as Sacramento's "Vampire Killer" Richard Trenton Chase.*

Because he hid evidence of his acts, which indicated he was aware his actions were wrong, I realized I would have voted to give him the death penalty. Even though I know how mentally ill the man had to be.

It's so sad that his mother could walk into the home she shared with him, see him dissecting (or vivisecting) a neighbor's cat, his face covered in blood, and then cover for him.

He had been institutionalized before. But when you try to cover up mental illness that severe you're just an accomplice to any future acts (whether you're charged or not).

But there are other horror story examples where it's just not possible to give such a verdict, and some of these are women who killed their own children. Postpartum depression can make women completely insane in the legal as well as the "norma" sense and render them unaccountable for their actions. I've seen actual cases like that. So fucking sad. Medical tragedies. Tragedies of missed diagnosis.

And then there are people who commit murders when they're children and those with extremely low I.Q.s. And when you see the Death Penalty being applied in a racially skewed manner (some states in the past) then you know the Death Penalty is failing us. Then the Supreme Court is right to strike it down.

But when it's working as it should, it's doing the work of keeping the world safer and the culture saner.

I don't care about the varying statistics regarding the death's penalty's efficacy as a deterrent.

If it is a deterrent, great. If it isn't, let's still send those who have ruined countless lives through taking one or more lives up there where your preferred Deity can sort them out.





*Chase was sentenced to death but died on Death Row in 1980, an apparent suicide.

It's interesting that this might have been the result of intense prodding by fellow Death Row inmates, who probably found his insane rants maddening.

There is a pathos here. But I can't quite get to the pathos because I know the horrible nature of Chase's crimes--the torture he inflicted on humans and animals alike.

I can, however, feel the pathos of untreated mental illness and the pathos in the fact that we live in a universe where human beings can stray this far from reality and suffer so much they become monsters like this.

One wonders if the novelist Thomas Harris, in his research for Silence of the Lambs, perhaps decided to incorporate the "suicide by suggestion" (Lecter convinces a fellow death row inmate to swallow his own tongue) after reading an account of Thomas's death?

N.B. Wiki has flagged a few elements of this as "unreliable source"--with a question mark.


In 1979, Chase stood trial on six counts of murder. In order to avoid the death penalty, the defense tried to have him found guilty of second degree murder, which would result in a life sentence. Their case hinged on Chase's history of mental illness and the suggestion that his crimes were not premeditated.

On May 8, the jury in the highly publicized case found Chase guilty of six counts of first degree murder and Chase was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. They rejected the argument that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. His fellow inmates, aware of the graphic and bizarre nature of Chase's crimes, feared him, and according to prison officials, they often tried to convince Chase to commit suicide.

Chase granted a series of interviews with Robert Ressler, during which he spoke of his fears of Nazis and UFOs, claiming that although he had killed, it was not his fault; he had been forced to kill to keep himself alive, which he believed any person would do. He asked Ressler to give him access to a radar gun, with which he could apprehend the Nazi UFOs, so that the Nazis could stand trial for the murders. He also handed Ressler a large amount of macaroni and cheese, which he had been hoarding in his pants pockets, believing that the prison officials were in league with the Nazis and attempting to kill him with poisoned food.

On December 26, 1980, a guard checking cells found Chase lying awkwardly on his bed, not breathing. An autopsy determined that he committed suicide with an overdose of prison doctor-prescribed antidepressants that he had saved over several weeks. It is unclear if he did this because of the inmates' suggestions or his own mental state.