McMahon: Time out
Mar 29, 2011, 7:49 PM | Updated: Jun 5, 2012, 3:27 am
How often we hear people debate about whether they would want to know the date and time of their death. Both sides have interesting arguments. But perhaps we should ask the one person who found out Tuesday.
Eric John King was executed by lethal injection sometime after 10 a.m. Tuesday.
Eric John King was 47, but he was only 25 when he committed the crime. In 1989, he and an accomplice held up a Phoenix convenience store and King shot and killed two employees. The robbery netted $72.
King had been waiting all this time, through trials and appeals — and most recently questions about the kinds and number of chemicals that should be used in the lethal injection.
One of the reasons for these delays has been a question about an anesthetic no longer available in the U.S. that must be imported from Great Britain. The debate, and I couldn’t make this up, is centered on the quality of the import. They were going to kill a guy Tuesday in Florence, but they were worried that the foreign stuff that would do it might not be up to our standards. Capital punishment just gets more and more absurd. The laws must have been written by Monty Python.
