Word: alabamas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exceptions include Iran, Iraq, China, Yemen and some former Soviet states--Americans seem to want more of them, with fewer appeals and delays. Thanks to Congress and the courts, they're getting their wish--especially in the "Death Belt" states of Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, which together account for 78% of the executions America has seen since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty...
...Alabama has been doing doing its bit to hit the target. The state implemented measures to speed up execution of some of the 153 people on death row, even threatening to set execution dates for those who have not completed their appeals. So far this year, the state has put just four men to death, but even with such limited numbers, there is a no-big-deal sense to the proceedings. "We keep it real low-key," says veteran corrections officer Charles Bodiford...
Last Friday at 12:10 a.m., it was Henry Francis Hays' turn to die. His execution was cause for some self-congratulation in Alabama because, unlike most of those who have been put to death before him, Hays is white. What's more, he is the son of a Ku Klux Klan leader who, the prosecution said, ordered him to lynch a black as a "show of strength" in 1981, after a jury failed to convict a black man accused of killing a white police officer. Hays and a friend snatched 19-year-old Michael Donald off a Mobile street...
Outside, in the impenetrable Alabama night, nobody had bothered with a protest...
...execution chambers, even the most antiseptic, stand as silent, smirking answers that blanch the irony out of St. Paul's question "O Death, where is thy sting?" Death comes in several varieties. It can be incongruously vibrant like "Yellow Mama," the electric chair in Alabama used last week for the execution of ex-Klansman Henry Hays. Or death can have the rustic decrepitude of the gallows in Delaware, which remains in operation. But on every chamber hang the words inscribed in Dante's Inferno: "Abandon all hope you who enter here...