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It might strike many as a paradox, but Mr Crenshaw believes that in a culture that values human life above all, the right to take that life away is an essential tool of justice.

Either life is sacred, or it is not. But in our culture, it’s not the killing that counts, it’s who you’re killing that counts. Innocent Iraqi’s are okay, because we’re pursuing the ‘terrorists,’ first-world babies, even the products of rape or ones that would kill their mothers in childbirth are not (babies that die as collateral damage in Iraq are cool too. The U.S. military does not do body counts… unless they’re ‘militants’ they’re hoping on scoring some media points with. Look at us, we got the bad guys. Rawr.). Murderers, even ones that may have been falsely convicted, are cool. As long as you get someone, even if it wasn’t the right person, you have justice for the family because they feel a sense of vindication when the ‘murderer’ dies.

Now, in this case, the death penalty was overturned twice before he was finally convicted in 1990. There is no physical evidence linking him to the scene of the crime, but he was convicted anyway. DNA evidence, which has exonerated many, many death row convicts, even ten, twenty years after their crimes were committed, will not be allowed in this case, because Alabama politicos have been hot-nuts to have this guy killed for the last twenty years, and don’t want to appear as wrong-headed blood-thirsty bastards if he was truly exonerated, as his daughter believes DNA evidence will show him.

Some more choice quotes:

Alabama’s governor has made it clear he wants Arthur to die as soon as possible, and that the current furore over the chemicals used to deliver the ultimate punishment is an annoying distraction.

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“What do we have to do? Put a mask over them and just take away their oxygen? I want justice,” she [Miriam Shenane] said, in her office in the state capital, Montgomery.

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Tommy Arthur’s daughter, Sherrie Arthur Stone, was still a teenager when her father was first sentenced to death.

For years, she thought he was probably guilty, and deserved the jail time he spent earlier in his life.

But now she is convinced of his innocence, fuelled largely by her disillusionment with a judicial system she views as callous and incompetent in Alabama.

Articulate and earnest, but clearly scarred by years of legal and emotional battle, she stopped living in the state a long time ago.

“I was basically told by investigators, if I didn’t leave the state, I’d be found dead on a back road,” she told the BBC.

“They clearly want to murder my father, which is what this is going to be. It’s not going to be an execution, it’s going to be a murder.”