After discovering that the state of Texas keeps an online, public record of the last statements of all executed death row inmates, The Gabbler read through a few of the 500 statements to see if there was anything juicy. Luckily, we found the following statement, of Peter Castillo, executed on April 17th of this year. Castillo was known by the media as Pontificating Pete, due to his over-the-top speeches he would give to reporters who attempted to interview him. He was convicted in 2000 of the murder of Officer Tom Elliott, a Dallas police officer who Castillo claims forced him from his car and assaulted him during a routine traffic stop. Officer Elliott was shot once in the head with Castillo’s Glock 17.
Two score and seven years ago, my mother brought forth in this state of Texas a new man, conceived in an interstate motel for $20 and a pair of new stockings, and dedicated to the proposition of “Peter, you ruined my life, why were you ever born?”
Now we are engaged in a great execution, testing whether that man, or any man so conceived and dedicated, can long endure a lethal dose of potassium chloride. We are met in a tiny execution room in Hunstville, Texas. We have come to methodically strap me to a table and inject lethal chemicals into my veins, and to call it justice rather than murder. It is altogether barbaric and uncivilized that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot methodically destroy—we cannot vanquish—we cannot slay—the act of murder through more of the same. The brave men, now dead, whose hearts struggled against the potassium chloride drip in vain, have successors who will continue to slay, far above your poor power to deter crime through capital punishment. The world will little note, nor long remember what I said here; while it can never forget the inherent racial bias in the use of the death penalty in the United States nor the fact that in 2012 the U.S. executed seven times more people than North Korea did.
It is rather for you, the still innocent and free civilians, you here to watch me die with the same casual indifference that you watch Keeping up with the Kardashians—that from these festering dead murderers, you take increased devotion to the cause of claiming that murder surrounded by carefully worded legal jargon and a complicated appeals process is justice—that you remain highly resolved that the overwhelmingly poor and uneducated and minority death row population will continue to die because you thought it acceptable to give their capital cases to a snot-nosed public defense attorney who barely scraped through the bar last July and who calms his pre-trial nerves through morning tequila shots; that this nation shall have continued miscarriages of justice, and that murder of the people by the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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