I couldn't agree more. The fact that the state feels it necessary to kill at all is fairly abhorrent to me, but the fact that we've seen fit to kill a man so clearly ill is beyond disturbing. It also brings to the fore the extreme problems with th legal definitions of competency. To be competent one must only (1) know that they are going to be executed, and (2) know why. Greg Thompson knows that he's going to be executed but simultaneously believes that he can survive electrocution because when he touches his tv he gets shocked. He knows that he murdered Brenda Lane, but he simultaneously believes that she is alive and working at Riverbend Correctional Facility where he is held. If this doesn't call us to re-examine our definition of "competency" I don't know what will. Thanks for signing the petition! I hope more people do so.
 

I'm a bit late in adding a comment for this blog post, but I still remember the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty annual Conference as though it happened yesterday; it was such a powerful experience that memories of it are not as evanescent as ripples in water but fresh in the crevices of my mind and has had a lasting effect.

As I marched with over a hundred people to the Governor's mansion downtown to protest the death penalty, I noticed the irony of us being escorted by the Austin police. I held up my sign, "I oppose the Death Penalty" as high as my arms would reach, in the faces of the motorcycle police, in the direction of on-coming traffic and towards the rubber-neckers standing on the street corners.

I held my sign with an unfledging hope that the death penalty will one day be abolished, while hundereds of fellow abolitionists did the same, in front of and behind me. I was brought to tears at one point, overcome with emotion of the fact that one day, my friend on Death Row in Tennessee may be executed, not to mention the hundreds of others whose lives will one day come to an end by the hands of the State in which they live.

The march turned an otherwise insipid Saturday, where I would normally be back in the 'boro eating cornflakes, to one where I was deep in the heart of Texas, a.k.a. 'the capital of capital punishment' doing the single most important thing I think I have ever done in my life: taking a public stand against such a terrible abberation along side many other supporters of ending the Death Penalty. The last thing I shouted before I left the outside of the Governor's mansion, which we had wrapped in yellow Crime Scene tape, was "Governor Perry, you can't hide, we charge you with homicide!"

I want to thank the Jesuit Volunteer for doing such an outstanding job during the march by belting out chants of protest while the rest of us chimed in contemporaneously with his passionate shouts for justice. Each TCASK affiliate who attended the protest was instrumental in making the collective cry against the execution of mentally ill death row inmates heard loud and clear.