That's the title of a Dallas Morning News editorial, following Brandi Grissom's Texas Tribune/Texas Monthly reporting on Andre Thomas.
Stripped of the modern trappings of the court system, the saga of condemned Texas murderer Andre Thomas resembles a medieval horror story featuring madness, a family’s homicidal slaughter, the defendant’s self-mutilation and a waiting executioner.
Knowing it’s real makes the story almost too grotesque to stomach.
Still, it was a service by the Texas Tribune and Texas Monthly to render it in stark detail, because it challenges this state’s collective conscience.
Thomas would have a standard death row cell today were it not for his mental instability. With his eyelids surgically shut over empty sockets, he waits in a prison psychiatric unit until a federal judge decides whether he can be put to death.
A reading of the case file is a journey into darkness.
And:
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has deferred to the jury verdict, ruling that Thomas “is clearly ‘crazy,’ but he is also ‘sane’ under Texas law.”
It seems, rather, that the world has gone mad. That this human being is responsible for his psychotic actions is a preposterous notion. To strap down and terminate the life of such a tortured creature is the way a medieval society would deal with its embarrassments.
Earlier coverage of Andre Thomas begins with Grissom's reporting, noted at the link.
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