The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Editorial notebook: Circuit Judge James Colaw, a circuit judge in Bradford County,  the county just north of Gainesville, the county whose largest town is the aptly named Starke, where Florida’s gulag hosts its death row and its frequent state-sanctioned killings (murders by other definitions, as Clausewitz might put it), wrote in a 20-page decision Sunday that Jeffrey Hutchinson is “sane and competent to be executed” Thursday. The News Service of Florida used the phrase to headline its brief (because the condemned are generally awarded nothing more than a brief in the run-up to their last breath). Sane and Competent to be the latest cog for an insane and incompetent machinery. I recall a motion I just read last week in our local circuit court, this one against the killing of Jermaine Williams (he faces the death penalty for knifing his wife to death in Bunnell; he doesn’t deserve life. But he should not be murdered, either). “Plainly,” the motion reads in its futile effort to spare him death (something he could do for himself if he pled to life in prison), “there is a disturbing history and one which the defense is now bringing to the attention of the Court and the prosecution so there can be no principled argument in the future that similar problems with lethal injections were not foreseeable. The injection of etomidate, rocuronium bromide and potassium acetate are guaranteed to produce a horrifying and agonizing death unless the prisoner is fully anaesthetized and remains anaesthetized throughout. This, in turn, depends wholly and solely upon the nonmedical personnel accurately measuring out and then successfully administering an adequate dose of all three drugs. Even a slight error in dosage or administration can leave a prisoner conscious but paralyzed while dying, a sentient witness of his or her own slow, lingering asphyxiation.” Sane and competent.

—P.T.

I said to myself: Since I have something to write with, why not do it? But what to write? Stuck between four cold, bare stone walls, with nowhere for my legs to take me, no horizon to look at, my only occupation being to spend all day mechanically watching the slow progress of the whitish square that the spyhole in my door projects onto the dark wall opposite and, as I was just saying, all alone with an idea, an idea of crime and punishment, of murder and death! Did I have anything to say, I who have nothing more to do in this world? And what is there in my empty withered brain worth writing about? But why not? If everything around me is drab and colourless, isn’t there a storm, a struggle, a tragedy going on inside me? Doesn’t the obsession that has hold of me appear to me every hour, every second in a new form, more monstrous, more bloody the nearer the final day comes? Why don’t I try and tell myself about all the violent, unfamiliar feelings I am having in this situation of abandonment? There is certainly no lack of material, and as short as my life may be there is still enough in the dread, the terror, the torments that are going to fill it from this moment till the last which can wear out a pen, run an inkwell dry. Besides, the only way not to suffer so much from this dread is to examine it; describing it will take my mind off it.

–From Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829).

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