A new bill in Virginia will allow the state to force death row prisoners to be executed in the electric chair, due to shortage of lethal injection drugs.  Currently, prisoners can choose between the chair and the needle for their last few moments; this new bill would mean that if there are no lethal injection drugs available, Old Sparky gets to take a run at it.

Because there always has to be a loophole, please note that if the bill does not pass, it also means that prisoners can basically postpone their own execution indefinitely by demanding lethal injection when there are no drugs available.  Oh, about that execution thing…I want to take the gurney nap.  What?  You have no drugs?  It’s cool, I’ll wait…on the taxpayer’s dime.  To paraphrase Eddie Murphy, someone’s always gotta mess it up for everybody.

The shortage of lethal injection drugs isn’t news.  Several years ago the Danish company who makes part of the three-drug cocktail refused to sell it for that purpose anymore; at least one state attempted to use propofol instead but now they can’t get that either.  Propofol, in case you don’t remember, is the drug Michael Jackson overdosed on—which leads me to ask the obvious: How is it that MJ could get enough to use it as part of his nightly bedtime ritual but these fools can’t get enough to put down a few killers and rapists a year?  Must be that government efficiency again.  Oh, that’s right…they’re putting all their energy into finding and disarming lawful gun owners…but I digress.  The Guardian even breathlessly mentioned that some states are considering bringing back firing squads.  Dear God, the horror.

Naturally the warm and fuzzy kumbayah folks who think execution is inhumane are yapping about the cruelty of the whole process, pointing out that murderer “Michael Lee Wilson was heard to say “I feel my whole body burning” 20 seconds after being injected with a version of the drug created at an unnamed phamacy.”  Poor baby.  What did Wilson ever do to deserve such savagery?

Before the crime, [Wilson and his three accomplices] loitered nearly an hour while waiting for customers [in the convenience store] to leave. Once they were gone, they struck Yost with an aluminum baseball bat 54 times in 131 seconds. They jostled a safe while removing it, but Wilson posed as Yost when a security company called to check an alarm.

And to dampen suspicions among middle-of-the-night customers, Wilson put on Yost’s uniform and worked the cash register as Yost lay dying in a pool of blood, beer and milk behind the cooler doors.

Obviously a pillar of the community.  Why we would execute such a man is beyond me. In fact, he should get a Nobel Prize.  I hear they’re in Cracker Jack boxes now.  Two folks have already found one.

Thankfully, there are people around who can combat the stupid with their first-hand observations:

Debra Gardner, chief deputy director of the Department of Corrections, who says the method leaves only “minor burns, just barely noticeable.” Ron Elkins, the commonwealth’s attorney from Virginia’s Wise County, said “Having been there and watched it, it was not as dramatic as it’s portrayed on television.”

Sorry, liberal harpies and overly weak-stomached Republicans: Electric chair execution isn’t a spongeless Green Mile exercise.  It’s a just desert for the evil among us.  Here’s hoping the law passes, and people like Michael Lee Wilson are still able to simultaneously meet their Maker and disappear from our society.