According to the Supreme Court, the Constitution does not allow for “cruel and unusual punishment” but does allow for an individual to be confined in  a room for years awaiting their execution. In the case of a recent botched lethal injection in Oklahoma, these executions are sometimes tantamount to torture, and arguably, always inhumane.

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.

Watkins explained that the backlash against Wilson’s execution inspired him to seek the death penalty in the Rodriguez case. Rodriguez, who allegedly possesses an extremely advanced understanding of chemistry, is accused of using poison to murder his younger sister, his mother and a classmate.

“If mental age is a determining factor in whether or not someone should be executed, as everyone claims in the case of Wilson, then we must look at Rodriguez not as an immature child, but as the cold-blooded adult killer that he is,” Watkins told the crowd of reporters who had gathered.

Rodriguez is, in fact, a highly gifted child who is given individual instruction in most subjects, as he is well above his fifth grade classmates. At the time of the murders, he was studying chemistry at a college level, and was able to use his knowledge of the subject to create the poisons he allegedly used to kill his victims.

“Rodriguez has an understanding of chemistry that far exceeds that of the average American adult, whose knowledge of the subject most likely begins and ends with the fact that H₂0 is water. His knowledge and mental capacity are clearly those of an adult, and so he should face the consequences of his actions as any adult would,” Watkins said.

Watkins, when asked to comment on the fact that the Supreme Court declared capital punishment of minors unconstitutional in 2005, said that “the Supreme Court’s decision still allows the individual states to determine the definition of a minor. Mentally, Rodriguez is clearly not a minor, so legally, in the state of Texas, he is not a minor.”

The trial is set to begin next Monday.