Yesterday, while driving to work, I was listening to the radio and heard about Lawrence Reynolds Jr., a death row inmate in Ohio who was scheduled to be killed on March 9th but instead took a drug overdose on the 7th and had to be taken to a hospital for resuscitation. Once they were sure that he was back in stable condition, the Ohio state prison system promptly scheduled his death by lethal injection.

Huh? What? Do we even know what we’re doing anymore? How about just letting the guy kill himself by not reviving him? Wouldn’t that have been a small, humane act within an inhumane system?

“I’m going to kill myself before you can kill me!”

“No, you’re not. The only way you’re going to die is if WE kill you. Because if you die at your own hand, the victims of this crime and the people of Ohio won’t feel satisfied. You’ll only be dead, not KILLED.”

He was sentenced to die for the 1994 killing of a 67-year-old neighbor woman. OK, really, really not OK. Deserving of severe punishment. Deserving of death maybe, I’m not trying to get into a death penalty debate… but if he could have accomplished what the state was going to anyway, and more cheaply I might add… well, WTF?

His first date for lethal injection was postponed while Ohio messed around with their chemical formula for the injection. This is from the Huffington Post: “Ohio has switched from a three-drug process, which opponents said could cause severe pain, to the one-drug system. Reynolds lost a bid to have the execution delayed so he could challenge the new system when federal appeals court on Friday denied his request. Three inmates have been executed with the state’s new, one-drug new method, and in each case death came in just a few minutes.” (italics my own)

Well, there is that, at least. Ohio did away with Reynolds yesterday. His final words were, ” I came in like a lion and go out like a lamb.” A nice statement for a March execution, don’t you think?