There is Blood on the Moon. Give me that Meat Axe.

This death thing incites such passions. I have spent the day listening to the play-jurors of Collin County Texas insisting on death. They wanted gruesome deaths. "Well, if we don't give them the needle, at least hang them up and let the families beat them to death."

The polls still put the preference for death at 63%.

Lord help me. For once in my life, I wish I were in the majority. Maybe then, I would get the good feeling of co-religionists all around with a shared view of God and the world. We would all be happy together and the shared happiness would be boosted to a new level. Like Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water, we would bubble over with a new enthusiam and join hands in song.

But it is overwhelmingly difficult for me to join in the song of death.

Derrick Morgan lured a friend to his death and shot him six times in the
head. He was paid $6,000 for the murder. It was a matter of the
invisible hand directing the competition for the sale of narcotics.
Sometimes, a lower price is not the most effective means of
competition.
God bless Adam Smith.

I left North Texas for many reasons, but over all it smelled of death. When an attorney friend took too much heroin on purpose, after the good-hearted judiciary refused to allow him to makejail visits in my cases, the bile just wouldn't stop. Father, forgive them, because I am havingsome difficulty along that line.

How many did George H. W. Bush kill in the turkey shoot? To what are we measuring this evil of Mr. Morgan?

So with this love for death, this fascination with death, (Were the Aztecs really like this? Were those grooves in the rocks really for the flow of blood?) how, in the name of faith, hope and charity can we ever pick a jury who will not kill?

Morgan killed and then twelve jurors chose to kill. What has that miserable little life brought us?

For one, we know the insipid questions of the jury, "Can you follow the law?" "Can you be fair?" "Can you f0llow the court's instructions?" should be frozen in the center of Dante's hell with Satan himself. These innocuous, evil, bland, perfidious, common questions mask the death. The sound of gagging and the sight of foaming at Morgan's mouth is drowned and blinded in the boredom of "Can you follow the law."

Evil is bland. And oppressively stupid.

Any juror who states that he or she will automatically vote for the death penalty without regard to the mitigating evidence is announcing an intention not to
follow the instructions to consider the mitigating evidence and to decide if it
is sufficient to preclude imposition of the death penalty.

Even one, then. Even one juror who will automatically vote for death. Who will not consider mitigation. That one, is enough to preclude death.

What in the world is this animal, a mitigation? A mother's glance. That is enough. Mercy. Yes, that too, is enough. Mitigation is a reason not to kill.