Death Penalty

Yesterday, the State of Georgia conducted the first execution in the country since the Supreme Court ruled last month that lethal injection was not unconstitutional. Despite last-ditch appeals by the Board of Pardons and Paroles and the courts over the past few days, William E. Lynd, 53, was put to death by injection for the 1988 killing of his girlfriend, Ginger Moore. It was the first execution in the United States since last September, when the court began deliberating this issue. Lynd was pronounced dead at at 7:51 p.m. Tuesday.

Georgia has been averaging about two executions a year over the past 25 years. Lynd was the 41st man executed in Georgia since 1983, the 19th by lethal injection. The execution is expected to be followed soon by several more in Georgia and other states. There is one scheduled in Mississippi for May 21 and in Virginia for May 27, and more planned throughout the summer in Texas, Louisiana, Virginia and Oklahoma.

Although there were no last-minute, court-issued stays in Lynd's execution, there was a 34-minute delay while the state's lawyers made final checks with various courts.

About a dozen death-penalty opponents stood in quiet protest about a mile from the prison, holding signs reading "End state killing" and "Not in my name." They also stood in a circle while they sang and prayed.

In other news, the death count from the cyclone in Myanmar may reach 100,000, the worst human disaster since the tsunami of 2004. Words cannot express the sorrow I feel.

Finally, despite being all but mathematically eliminated from the nomination (or already being mathematically eliminated according to some sources), Hillary Clinton has vowed to stay in the race, and even loaned her own campaign $6.4M of the Clintons' own money to support her campaign. Isn't it usually the man in a marriage that squanders the family fortune on some ego project? Or as the question was succinctly put in The Note, "Does Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton see a distinction between the good of the Clintons, the good of the Democratic Party, and the good of the country?"