Here you can see the last statements of people executed in Texas. There seem to be five categories, some of which overlap.

1. People who deal with facing death by becoming religious.
2. People who apologize and seek forgiveness.
3. People who believe that they were in the wrong, but cannot accept their punishment.
4. People who proclaim their innocence and condemn their executioners.
5. People who say nothing (or maybe these are the ones who freaked out rather then making a formal "statement").

All tolled, I recommend reading a few of these. Its something that people ought to think about. Its like unedited war footage. It is raw data.

This is an occasion to discuss my perspective on the Death Penalty. I've been thinking about it a lot recently as I've been asked to serve on a jury, and whether or not you are willing to meter out such a punishment can determine whether or not you are allowed(/forced) to serve on a jury. I've been thinking about whether I support the death penalty, and if I don't, whether I should meter it out anyway if required as a juror is not a legislator nor a king.

The second question was easier to answer then the first. Conscientious objection now has a fine tradition in our country, and the history of the Second World War makes it clear that one must not allow ones role in society to overrule ones better personal morality.

What's more, the Supreme Court has decided that the ability of prosecutors to find a Jury willing to meter out death penalties outweighs the defendant's right to a jury that really represents their community. Being a systems professional, I'm quite comfortable with the idea that the system of checks and balances in our government can fail. More then three things fail all the time. This is one of the better examples I've seen. If you are moving outside of the local community in order to find people who will execute the law, you've raised the legislative authority of the republic of a wide geographic area above the more relevant perspective of the local community in question. The entire notion of trial by jury seems intended to prevent this precise activity. Why not simply do away with jury trials all together and have the judge (a trained legal professional) make the decisions precisely on the basis of the law?

I think community shopping for this reason ought to be illegal. I think that if I supported the death penalty there would be enough in this to make me tell them I didn't support it. If they are going to shop around for juries who will execute their bidding instead of REALLY turning to the community, then they aren't actually running jury trials. So, what is the point of participating if its just for show?

I've also decided, finally, that I oppose the Death Penalty. It really breaks down into two issues. One is whether I support the death penalty as administered by the U.S. Government, and the other is whether I support the... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Executed Offenders - My thoughts on the death penalty.

] Former Vice President Al Gore -- the Democratic party's
] presidential candidate in 2000 -- has decided to endorse
] former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean for the party's 2004
] presidential nomination, Democratic sources told CNN
] Monday.

CNN.com - Sources: Gore to endorse Dean - Dec. 8, 2003

The idea is not so much to predict the future as to consider the forces that will push the future along different paths, in order to help leaders recognize new possibilities, assess new threats and make decisions that reach much further into the future.

Seeing the Futures

] Are Southerners mainly people who are trying very hard to
] be old-fashioned Northerners?
]
] The phenomenon seems to go back a long, long way, and it
] may have something to do with how the South got to be the
] Bible Belt. Two centuries ago, when New England was the
] Bible Belt, the South had a reputation as an unchurched
] wilderness populated by godless heathens. Knoxville, in
] particular. In 1810, when it was capital of Tennessee,
] Knoxville was described with horror (by a
] Pennsylvania-churched minister) as the only capital city
] in the world without a single chapel of any denomination.
] But later, in that respect, the South became more
] Northern than the North.
]
] A related native of the North was prohibition. The
] American temperance movement started in Massachusetts in
] the 1820s. The idea gained some advocates in Tennessee,
] but they weren't successful in a big way until after
] Illinois reformer Frances Willard conducted her more than
] one crusade in Knoxville. She sometimes made the South
] seem as if it was behind the times because unlike
] some progressive Northern communities, we didn't yet have
] prohibition.

A very interesting observation on the collective psychology of the South.

The Old North

... the much-ballyhooed "orbital space plane" ... [is] the wrong sort of craft ... [and NASA has] shut the door on some of the most innovative current thinking on space technology.

Buzz Aldrin weighs in on the future of NASA.

Fly Me to L 1

] You may recall our post on Monday about a Florida woman
] who was trampled in a mad stampede of people scrambling
] to buy a $30 DVD player at the local Wal-Mart. It was one
] of those stories that perfectly symbolized our nation's
] unhealthy obsession with shopping, right? Well, we might
] be unheathily obsessed with shopping, but there is
] growing evidence that the woman, who is a "frequent
] faller" who has managed to injure herself nine times
] before at various Wal-Marts around Florida, is faking it.
] Over the years she's also filed injury claims against six
] other businesses, as well

Not only are we unheathily obsessed with shopping, we are also unheathily obsessed with liability!!

Gizmodo : Woman injured in Wal-Mart $30 DVD player stampede might have faked it

The Cato Institute takes conservatives to task for their devotion to the Pledge of Allegiance and gives some interesting information about the Pledge's author (the part about the ritual is particularly good):

] It's probably too much to ask politicians to reflect a
] little before they lunge for a political hot-button
] issue. But any conservatives so inclined should think
] about what they're defending. What's so conservative
] about the Pledge?
]
] Very little, as it turns out. From its inception, in
] 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to
] the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was
] written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed
] out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering
] pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the
] Socialist."

What's Conservative about the Pledge of Allegiance?

The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study in 2000. It found:

Low-income families (less than $30,000 annual income) are less likely to have computers, Internet access or newspaper subscriptions. However, they are equally likely to have a video-game player and their children are more likely to have TV sets in their bedrooms.

Family income is an inverse indicator of media use -- children from high-income families spend the least amount of time with media and children from low-income families spend the most time with media.

Kids are plugged in, parents have tuned out, studies show

] Diebold's actions are representative of a growing body of
] abuses through which large and powerful parties unfairly
] intimidate ISPs to remove information those parties do
] not like. In other examples, the claims are not really
] about copyright, but about not showing the parties in a
] negative light, or not allowing consumers to compare
] prices, or quieting religious critics. Powerful parties
] should not be permitted to misuse copyright as a tool for
] limiting bad press and barring access to legitimate
] consumer information.

Hear! Hear!

Kucinich Calls for Hearing on Diebold DMCA Abuse

] A provision of an intelligence spending bill will expand
] the power of the FBI to subpoena business documents and
] transactions from a broader range of businesses --
] everything from libraries to travel agencies to eBay --
] without first seeking approval from a judge.

More on the FBI's new powers. I had a lot of trouble finding information on this when NYT first reported it a week ago. It seems to have been kept a secret to avoid public opposition.

Wired News: Congress Expands FBI Spying Power