A pig just took flight in Texas and winked at Kenneth Foster and all the hard working abolitionists in Texas.

Governor Commutes Sentence in Texas; be sure to read that article from the New York Times and listen to the back story by the article's author Ralph Blumenthal. In the back story, Ralph talks about the significance of this event and the momentum that the anti-death penalty movement is experiencing right now. I can feel the momentum, can you?

Capital Punishment in America: Revenge begins to seem less sweet; also be sure to read this great article from The Economist as one of the most important publications in the world focuses on this flawed public policy. I especially liked the perspective of Howard Morton at the very end of the article:

In Boulder, Colorado, Howard Morton tells a different story. His son Guy disappeared while hitch-hiking in the Arizona desert in 1975, when he was 18. For more than a decade Mr Morton continued to search for his son. Then, in 1987, a retired deputy sheriff read about Guy in a newspaper, and recalled finding a skeleton in the desert in the year he had disappeared. The medical examiner had mislabeled it as belonging to a Hispanic woman, but dental records proved it was Guy. He had been found with a broken knife blade in his chest. The murderer was never caught.

Mr Morton discovered that over 30% of murders in America are unsolved, like his son's. He found out, too, that the states spend millions of dollars putting a handful of murderers to death while detection is under-financed and thousands of murderers walk free. He became an ardent abolitionist. Anyone close to a murder victim “wants the son of a bitch who did it to die,” he says. “But you've got to catch the son of a bitch. That's more important.”