Kill him quick

While the justification for the death penalty is as debatable as the justification for shooting one’s employer in the back of the head, Jimmy Dale Bland, sentenced to die for the latter, has added a new element to the arguments for the former. Having exhausted his appeals, the 49-year-old Bland was in a race against time. But even had the clock stopped ticking down on the hour of his death by lethal injection at the hands of the Oklahoma justice system, Bland was a goner. His body full of cancer, doctors had given him no more than six months to live.

With prosecutors and the victim’s family calling for Bland’s death, his attorney, David Autry, argued that months of chemotherapy had left Bland’s veins in no condition to handle a mode of termination already of questionable humaneness. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals voted 3–2 to deny Bland a stay, with one dissenting voice saying rejecting a stay was tantamount to “exacting mindless vengeance.”

Autry made a final unsuccessful plea to the U.S. Supreme Court prior to Bland’s execution on Tuesday, hoping the decency that afforded Bland one final meal of spicy chicken and chocolate cake would also afford him a cancer-riddled death.

by Scott Saxon