They're still waiting....

Christopher Scott Emmett escaped the needle again. While the U.S. Supreme Court continues to decide whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual" Emmett will breathe. He will sleep. He will curse. He will laugh. He will talk - however limitedly, with the other men on death row. And there are many others.

They’re all still waiting. Twenty in Virginia. Three-hundred and ninety-three in Texas, One hundred and seven in both Tennessee and Georgia and 41 in Kentucky. The future of 3,350 death row inmates in 37 states now appears to rest on a U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding two inmates in Kentucky. As of January those are the numbers Reported by the Death Penalty Informaiton Center. There are hundreds of websites with the numbers of those on death row. It’s easy to find out how they spend their day, who visited them, how long they’ve been on death row.

Romell Broom, Ohio’s next execution, scheduled for the 18th, was stayed. Jack Alderman of Georgia also got a reprieve from his Oct. 19 death date for the 1974 murder of Barbara Jean Alderman. Curtis Osborne of Georgia, scheduled to die Oct. 23 for the murders of Arthur Lee Jones and Linda Lisa Seabourne may actually be executed.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Osborne’s execution date is proceeding as planned, although his attorneys are expected to plead for a stay pending the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the Kentucky case. Both Georgia inmates have exhausted their appeals.
In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen commuted Michael Joe Boyd’s death sentence for the murder of a man during an armed robbery to life without parole. Alabama’s Daniel Siebert is still waiting for word on his 25th death date. And in Mississippi, the day before Halloween, Mississippi will have to make a call on Earl Wesley Berry’s execution date.

Their crimes range from Christopher Scott Emmett’s bludgeoning of his friend and roommate with a brass hotel lamp to the strangulation, shootings, stabbings and brutal and often prolonged deaths of their victims.

And while the men and women on death row wait – so their victims’ families. For those whose loved ones were raped, shot in the eye or the back of the head – like Jones and Seabourne, or bludgeoned with a lamp like Gene Langley there are no statistics.

There are no numbers of the amount of birthdays that have been missed. No record of the milestones the victims have missed – weddings, grandchildren, graduations, children, summers, holidays with family members. No one keeps track of the grief counseling, the broken marriages, the nightmares, the broken lives.

But for at least another month – the U.S. Supreme Court will debate, argue and wonder if the three minutes of pain caused to an inmate strapped to a table for a violent murder – constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.