>>Now, maybe in the U.S. the system is perfect and never makes a mistake, but I'm skeptical.
>>
>>It is a barbaric practice.
>>
>
>My wife did pro bono work for the appeals process of a capital murder case many years ago. A very nasty case. A 17yr old was convicted of murder for the killing of the parents of his 14 yr old girlfriend. 3 affidavids were delivered to the governor from people incarcerated w/ the girlfriend stating that the girl claimed to have fired the shot that killed her mother. Because of the 17yr old's confession, i vaguely recall that gunshot residue and blood splatter tests had not been performed on the guy & girl. From the reading of the court finding, the death sentence was given in part due to the gruesome killing of the mother. As one of his attorneys, my wife was with him on death row the day of execution and he had asked her to be a witness. Not minimizing the crime, but her description of the execution was macabre. Regimented and perfunctory in one sense, grisly in another.

I would think this would change a person. What I can tell for certain is that I would not want to be present at an execution. I certainly couldn't be the person who gave the order or administered the drugs.

It always confounds me what sort of person one must be to look at an individual, tied down and absolutely helpless, and to kill him/her in cold blood like that.

I realise that in most cases the 'victim' is probably such a person himself, but still...

>
>Christopher Thomas [white, Virginia], sentenced to death in 1991 and executed in 2000. His intense relationship with 14-year-old Jessica Wiseman culminated in their plan to kill her parents. Thomas confessed to both murders. He later said he had not fired the second fatal shot at the mother, whose killing resulted in Chris Thomas’ death sentence (he received a life sentence for the murder of the father). The jury never heard evidence that Jessica Wiseman may have fired this shot. She was released in 1997 at the age of 21.