One thousand deaths, an unknown number of "oops"
BY Leonard Pitts
Miami Herald
Welcome to the death watch.
Early Friday morning, the thousandth execution since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976 took place. North Carolina executed Kenneth Boyd for killing his estranged wife and her father.
One thousand is one of those numbers that inevitably gets media attention. It's big and round and carries the weight of milestone. But I think we're concentrating on the wrong numerical signpost here. We are obsessing on the thousand. How about sparing a word or two for the one?
As in, the first person definitively proved to have been wrongly executed. The first innocent known to have been put to death in your name and mine.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002661011_pitts04.html