Mentally Incapacitated woman executed in Virginia

When it comes to executions, the United States is a land of equal opportunity: black, white, male, female, mentally retarded, and – until recently – juveniles – all can be and have been put to death since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. To be sure, your chances ot being executed are 100-times greater if you are black and poor; and even greater than that if you are unlucky enough to be convicted in the states of Texas or Virginia. (a helpful fact sheet on executions in the US can be found (pdf file) here. 

Executions in the US rarely make the front page of the newspaper, while reports of stonings in Iran elicit cries of outrage among good Christians here.  In the US, we practice "humane" executions using lethal injections to put human beings "to sleep" just as we do with dogs and horses.  In 2010 the machinery of death continues unabated in 35 states with barely an outcry.

Only the year's 39th execution made headlines, since this time the state of Virginia was killing a woman – Teresa Lewis – who had an IQ of 72:

Lewis, 41, was condemned to death for plotting the 2002 killings of her
husband Julian Lewis and his son, Charles "C.J." Lewis, to collect
insurance money. She died by lethal injection at 9 EST tonight. The two
men she conspired with to commit the killings were sentenced to life
imprisonment.

Best-selling author John Grisham has called her execution unjust. The European Union asked the Virginia governor to commute her sentence to life. Bianca Jagger asked for clemency.
Even Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad weighed in on Lewis,
accusing the western media of having a double standard in reporting
Lewis' execution, compared to the coverage of a woman in Iran who was
sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery.

A commentator in the Badische Zeitung points out – correctly – that state-sponsored killing in the US has nothing to do with deterrence.  The sole purpose of executing people is – and this a great irony for a supposedly "Christian" nation – retribution:

Es geht letztlich allein um Vergeltung. Doch Hinrichtungen und die
Achtung der Menschenwürde passen nicht zusammen. Wer für Demokratie
eintritt, sollte sich für eine weltweite Ächtung der Todesstrafe
einsetzen. Dass sich die USA so vehement sträuben, auf die
alttestamentarische Form von Vergeltung zu verzichten und sogar in Kauf
nehmen, in der Debatte um die Todesstrafe mit diktatorischen Regimen
wie dem Iran, China oder Saudi-Arabien in einen Topf geworfen zu
werden, bleibt aus europäischer Sicht nur schwer verständlich.

(This is nothing but retribution. But executions do not conform with respect for human life. Those who stand for democracy must condemn the death penalty everywhere.  It is difficult for Europeans to understand how the US can insist on adhering to an Old Testament form of retribution and accept being included with dictatorial regimes suche as China, Iran or Saudi Arabia in the debate over capital punishment.) 

As this same commentator points out, moral objections fall on deaf ears in the US.  Money, however, can be a persuasive argument. 

Immer wieder hört man, es sei weitaus teurer, einen Kandidaten bis zu
seinem Tod in Hochsicherheitstrakten unterzubringen als in normalen
Gefängnissen. In Zeiten knapper Kassen scheint ein solches Argument
mehr Menschen zu überzeugen, als Proteste und Petitionen aus aller
Welt. Man kann nicht umhin, dies zynisch zu nennen.

(One keeps hearing that it is far more expensive to keep an inmate on death row than in a normal prison facility.  In times of tight budgets this seems to convince more people than all the protests and petitions in the world.  This, to say the least, is pure cynicism.) 

Read my post on Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner, who led the effort to abolish the death penalty in Germany in 1949.