Who is Troy Kell and why should he be saved? TalkLeft reader Grace Lewis provides this answer:

Troy Kell began paying a steep price for his youthful rage at 18 in a Nevada desert with a life sentence without parole. He was put away with his life oscillating between the banal and the bizarre, existing in a world of repression and violence and racism, a world of killers, rapists, robbers, sexual predators. He continued into this nightmarish existence and, several years down the road, he kills another prisoner, Mr. Lonnie Blackmon, with all the hatred he can bestow.

Both of these prisoners thrown together under these bizarre conditions. - all of the ingredients for a psychic stew designed to deteriorate and erode one's humanity, designed by the State with full knowledge of its effects. Mr. Blackmon certainly deserved better, and through his death we the Citizens can get a good look at what it is like on the inside. His death was not in vain.

Mr. Kell, now backed into a death row corner, the harshest punishment short of death, with solitary confinement, around-the-clock lock-in, no-contact visits, no prison jobs, no educational programs by which to grow, psychiatric treatment facilities designed only to drug you into a coma. He has suffered and will continue to suffer until the day he too shall die...that is certain, and that should be enough. He should not be put to death.

No one should be put to death. As this Sydney Morning Herald editorial stated the other day:

No society grows from its inhumanity; it just diminishes.