[chaps]

  Now this is interesting. A black man in Texas raised Catholic is a rarity. He's got some pretty overt martyrdom symbolism going on here. His birthday is coinciding with Holy Week? If you're not familiar here's the significance

I stopped reading here. He wasn't black. Again, you should attempt to do some basic research before you make assumptions about people you know nothing about.

[pnf]

That's an honest mistake. There are several links floating around in the HN parent thread and quotes without attribution. I mistakenly thought we were talking about this man linked above: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Quintin_Jones

Turns out we're actually talking about this fine gentleman? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosendo_Rodriguez

I was mildly sympathetic to the first guy, who only killed his great aunt. This guy killed two young prostitutes, one pregnant, the other 16 years old. Confessed to the crimes, the. Spent 20 years trying to get off on a technicality. Nice guy. Really going to take his last words at face value.

It would have been more interesting to learn about someone with an unusual background (black catholic texan) and whether that played a role in his story, but it's an incidental aside to my argument about catholicism. Those arguments stand. Do me the honor of reading them.

Thanks for correcting my mistake, though. This guy is even more suspicious in his appeals to catholicism and his lack of public repentance. His unmentioned victims even more glaring tells than an old dead aunt. Not as curious, not a rarity, but even more "damning".

To your point, I do know one important thing about this person: He was executed for a capital crime. That's a pretty significant fact. I'm not obligated to learn much more about him to make assumptions about the truth value of his last words. I may be wrong in my suspicions, but my point was that I don't have to go digging into the details of every inmate's case to be suspicious of their claims. It's the sensible default stance. All liars say true things.

If you don't want to address the psychological substance of my argument that's your prerogative but nothing about googling a specific felon is going to change a justified bias against taking their claims at face value. Innocent until proven guilty, ok. Presumed innocent after found guilty? No way.

[chaps]

Hey man, all I'm saying is that if you did some diligence before you posted a mountain of bleedingly ironic text, you wouldn't need to try to defend some pretty racist looking shit. Take it as a lesson and move on.

[pnf]

Thank you for the lesson, but I'm not exactly clear on what was racist-looking about my text. Please explain if you can, I would like to know so I can avoid unintentional apparent racism. Was it pointing out the rarity of black texan catholics? I never considered that noticing something unusual about someone is racist. Was it clicking the wrong link above and not realizing I had the wrong murderer? As you say, I should have read more about the personal history of the person and then crosschecked his final words with the parent comment. But that would be against the spirit of my whole argument. Something else?

[chaps]

It very much looked like you were assuming the person was black because of their conviction. Ignoring the appearance of racism, it also completely voided everything you wrote because you were talking about the wrong person, making it all effectively meaningless.

Just putting this out there: I once worked with a man who, when he was 17 and in a gang, shot and killed another man execution-style. He spent a long time in prison. He was also the most humble person I've ever worked with, who had a genuine understanding of who he was and what he did, and had an undeniably deep appreciation of the second chance he was given. Try to consider that your feelings and thoughts towards people who do bad things spills over into characterizations of other people. These days, as part of my job, I talk with a lot of people who, for example, have spent years in jail and found not guilty of crimes they were accused of. Their lives were ruined. Not just because of the time they lost and all that comes with that, but also because of the apathetic cruelty that was inflicted on them during their time in jail. It's absolutely heart-wrenching. The way you speak, by minimizing people you don't know and never will, reminds me of the people I've talked to on the side of the jail who calmly rationalize their own cruelty.

Anywho, have a good life.

[pnf]

I can see why you thought that but, no, I was assuming he was black because I followed the link for a different person.

I hate to beat a dead horse about this or to seem to contradict your experience; I can and do have sympathy for many people in prison. But you're attacking a straw man. My observation was about my response to final words by death row inmates in general. If you're saying there are exceptions to the rule that violent offenders in prison are often liars with behavioral pathologies, then sure, of course. If you're saying that's not a general heuristic one should have when encountering the claims of violent offenders on death row, I disagree. In my opinion, it's an especially useful heuristic for people who don't express any remorse for their victims, as in the quoted example. It makes no difference to the point you rushed in to correct me about, i.e., that a simple google search would void my argument. Maybe I won't seem so heartless to you if you consider that my sympathies are more with the victims of violent crime rather than the perpetrators. I used to think more along the lines of you and most people on HN. When I started to investigate the subject and think it through, my opinions changed quite a bit. Thanks for the debate. Good luck to you.

[chaps]

  Whoa, that's weird. He expresses no concern for crimes committed by his fellow inmates but does want to point out the malfeasance of the state. This makes a kind of sense, whether it's true or not. I do wonder how much he knows about this. Does he know a lot because he was claiming this as part of his appeal and he believes he is innocent? Is that credible? Does the fact of malfeasance mean the crimes weren't committed or only that civil rights of criminals (due process) were violated?

okay one last thing. Yes, in an appeal before the state killed him, they raised the issue that the medical examiner's office made an error, which seems pretty plausible considering everything that happened. If they won that appeal, then he would still be alive. He wasn't saying that he was fully innocent, just that the set of charges would have been different such that he wouldn't be on death row. So no, it's not weird for him to bring it up or to have an understanding of that office. His life literally depended on it. Your heuristics have lead you to bad assumptions.