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| Kelly Gissendaner, 47, the only woman on Georgia's death row was executed early Wednesday morning by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. She was sentenced to death after being found guilty of conspiring to murder her husband in 1997. The man who carried out the kidnapping and murder, Gissendaner's then-boyfriend, Gregory Owen, received a life sentence. Dozens of supporters and death penalty opponents kept a vigil outside the state prison as Gissendaner awaited her fate. Pope Francis, an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, had urged officials to commute her death sentence. Gissendaner's execution marks the first death sentence carried out against a woman in Georgia in 70 years. She was the 16th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. —Yahoo! News |
Through human veins,
Through what yellow flesh
Remains on the bones of
Consistency and justice,
In frozen groves of orange
Peaches, with worms---
Pious robes and study
Have no paradisial power
Against the iron hammer,
The wheels
The powerful pistons,
Pulsating levers of leveraged
Machines that will not,
cannot, work. Callous
Callousness collides. Thrice
came the ice, no
Small dice of the role
To entice and
Fatten the leech---
Till the red of his blood
Turns black and cold,
Old---till she sings her
Song sorry, to be
Told and retold.
Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer and writer. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His writing has appeared most recently in The Montucky Review, The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News.