Ohio Wins Race To 1,000

As noted here, yesterday Ohio earned a somewhat dubious distinction.

In executing convicted murderer Marvallous Keene, our state correctional system dispatched the 1,000th inmate executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in America in the landmark Gregg v. Georgia case in 1976.

Four years prior in 1972, the Court had made history in suspending all death penalty laws in the U.S. as cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment in Furman v. Georgia.

Apparently whatever qualms they had about the cruelty of the death penalty were solved just four years later.

So, Georgia got all the case law recognition, and yesterday Ohio executed the 1,000th inmate to die under the new legal regime.

Somewhere, Texas is very, very jealous.

The U.S. is the only member of the G-8 list of wealthy, industrialized nations still practicing the death penalty. Methods employed in the U.S. include lethal injection, electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging, and firing squad.