[DanaC]

Those details did make it over yes. I think they made the debate all the more interesting. Its easy to look at someone who has done something in a flash of anger and found themselves on death row and wracked with remorse and think ...."Its wrong to kill that person." Less easy to accept, is why someone who has thrilled to the kill and then tried to con their way out of the system by playing on the emotions of the devout, should not be killed.

The fact that people saw her conversion as fake and directed their derision at her for it ....isnt really something I have a problem with. Its not how I would respond to someone in extremis, however they arrived at that point....but each to their own.

Bush however is not just one of the people he was the man who had the right to let her live or die. That is an enormous amount of power for one individual to hold in law over another. When he mocked her pleas, he was not mocking the back and forth wrangle of her attempts to have her sentence commuted. He was mocking the direct plea made by a fellow human being to him for her life to be spared. If I believed in God I would be outraged at a spiritual level as it is I am outraged at a human and political level.

I dont subscribe to the death penalty, but I can conceive of living within a society that did and I would hope if that were the case that the people chosen to discharge such a final judgement at the very least gave the appearance of taking it seriously and recognising the gravity of their duty. I suspect that the Judge who sentenced her held it a grave task to do so.