June 10, 2000

8:30 PM

texas death row inmate severs chaplain's arm with razor: "A Texas death row inmate Friday grabbed the arm of a volunteer chaplain, tied it with a sheet to a toilet and nearly sawed it off with a razor blade. "It was just hanging by some threads," said a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
posted by palegirl (14 comments total)

thanks for the post...

this was really not necessary!!!!!


posted by efader at 8:35 PM on June 10, 2000

Now that, is just plain evil...
posted by Dean_Paxton at 9:46 PM on June 10, 2000

Time to switch death row inmates over to an electric razor :)
posted by fusinski at 9:06 AM on June 11, 2000

Well, the fact that the Texas Death Penalty pretty much only applies if you have the poor taste to not be born white might have something to do with it. I'm not, sure, though. Does anyone know if he was one of the ones represented by a disbarred attorney or not?

Still, gotta wonder why he didn't go for a guard or somebody a bit more important. Slashing an elderly chaplain's arm off...somewhat pointless, as well as brutal and stupid. I guess they can't all be innocent.
posted by Ezrael at 12:14 PM on June 11, 2000

Now I guess I just sit back and wait for the hate mail. "How can you suggest that it would be okay if he slashed a guard's arm?" They will howl.

Here's my warped, twisted, misanthropic logic. They're going to kill him, and they let him know it, and then they lock him in a box. Any animal, even a human, has a basic survival instinct. Once we decide that we're going to execute a man, we have to expect that he will attempt to oppose us. The guards are the only ones he can get to. If, as some suggest, 40% of the people on Texas's Death Row were railroaded there, that means for every sixty murderers you execute, forty people die without benefit of due process. If a quarter of those people are innocent, that's ten dead innocents. Without access to DNA testing and competent attorneys, those people are doomed.

I don't support the death penalty, but neither will I weep for the 60% who are tried and convicted by full due process. The 40% who get shafted, however, I worry about. While this razor-wielding maniac may or may not be one of them, this case just brings it up again for me. (But cutting the chaplain's arm off...let's just say it doesn't do much for his credibility.)
posted by Ezrael at 12:21 PM on June 11, 2000

kill him
posted by efader at 12:31 PM on June 11, 2000

Maybe here's a new process.

Step 1: You really don't plan on executing an inmate, you just "tell him" he's on death row.

Step 2: You lock him up in a box with an easily-accesible razor blade and a secretly armed chaplain.

Step 3: If the inmate goes for the chaplain, the chaplain draws his gun and carries out the execution. If the inmate doesn't do anything, you lock him up and treat him like a white collar criminal.

Hows that for Due Process? heh.
posted by fusinski at 12:37 PM on June 11, 2000

the inmate has since been moved to a more restricted area within the prison.
"We're pretty much shipping daylight to him by FedEx," Fitzgerald said.
I'd venture a guess that the new area is "without bars" and could be confused with the Pine Box that he gets a one-way ride in somewhere down the line of Justice in Texas.
posted by Almac at 1:41 PM on June 11, 2000

I hear the inmate wants to grow a beard now.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 2:00 PM on June 11, 2000

re: chaplain v. CO slashing -- probably a CO would know better than to allow such a thing to happen, but a chaplain may be more naive or at least susceptable to such violence.
posted by palegirl at 4:07 PM on June 11, 2000

I think the inmate was probably a rabid Republican, trying to help Bush and his death penalty stance.
posted by PaperCut at 4:30 PM on June 11, 2000

What are they waiting for? They should've killed him then and there. Hell, just kill them all!
posted by Nyarlathotep at 8:58 PM on June 11, 2000

"Slashing"?

No, that's called "sawing."
posted by solistrato at 7:42 AM on June 12, 2000