In July 1997, Kimberly McCarthy murdered an elderly neighbour to feed her crack habit. Last night, justice caught up with her.
Kimberly Lagayle McCarthy was scheduled to die earlier this year, but literally hours before being strapped to a gurney and injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs, she was granted a stay of execution. The grounds for this were...That she is really innocent? That she is criminally insane? Nope. That she was the victim of, you guessed it, racism. There is no question about McCarthy’s guilt because she has been tried twice for the same murder. No, this was not a case of double jeopardy; her first conviction was quashed on a technicality. She was retried and convicted again.
You can find the Texas district court decision in her July 2012 appeal here.
The idea that a jury should have some sort of racial composition is truly bizarre, as is the notion that most blacks are opposed to the death penalty. Anyone who thinks they are should ask the families of Anthony Sowell’s victims.
If McCarthy had claimed one victim then a strong case for mercy could have been made, but although she was not tried for them, there is no doubt that she murdered two other women as well. In any case, life imprisonment without parole is a far from appealing prospect for any convicted murderer, even those who are not held under a clearly inhumane supermax régime.
With the ghoulishness which is unique to America, Rebecca Lopez of local news station WFAA and a witness, reported live on last night’s execution.
As well as anti-death penalty protesters, the daughter of McCarthy’s last victim, Donna Booth was present. McCarthy was said to have had a last meal of peppersteak, mashed potatoes, vegetables and cake, and to have cracked jokes as she awaited her execution. It remains to be seen if any of these jokes were about crack, her addiction to which accounted for her predicament. Her execution was scheduled for 6pm local time, midnight here in London.
A couple of minutes behind schedule, Miss Lopez and the other spectators were escorted to the witness area.
At 00.45 London time, Miss Lopez reported: “Kimberly McCarthy said God is good just before she died. pronounced dead at 6:37. Took about 20 minutes from Time the injections started.”
McCarthy has now set a record of sorts by becoming the 500th person to be executed in Texas since 1982. Hopefully, Linda Carty will soon join her in the record books, and wherever unrepentant murderesses go when they depart this world.
[The above op-ed was first published June 27, 2013 [UK time], not June 26 as shown on the archived version.]
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