Patrick Knight was executed yesterday evening for the murders of his 2 next door nieghbors. He had taken them prisoner for several hours when he and his bud drove them out of town, made them kneel, and then killed them.

At the time, Knight was on probation for burglary. According to many of the smart people in the legislature, this meant he was a "non-violent offender," and not the sort of guy The Great State needs to spend a lot of effort keeping on probation for excessive periods of time, and certainly not someone we should be wasting valuable prison space on.

Seems like a lot of the fellows on death row meet the classification of "non-violent offender," that many of the reformers in the legis. use.

Which leads me to wonder: perhaps being convicted of a non-violent offense is not much evidence that you are by nature a non-violent person. In fact, maybe the fact that you would commit a felony property or drug crime, far from being proof of your reverence for life, is an indicator that you don't think the rules of life apply to you, and you are even more likely to hurt someone, than the general population is.