Who says the British are the masters of understatement?

An AP story, dated yesterday but which I only read today, says that a Texas man named Adrian Estrada has been sentenced to death for murdering a seventeen year-old young woman and her fetus. Estrada choked and stabbed the young woman who was pregnant with his child thirteen times.

"Estrada's attorney, Suzanne Kramer, had argued that her client made bad
decisions."

As a way to describe murder, "bad decision" is accurate, as far as it goes, but it just doesn't go far enough. There are bad decisions and there are bad decisions. A man who decides not to lock his car door because he's "just going to be in the convenience store for a few minutes" has made a bad decision. The man who decides to take advantage of that unlocked door by stealing the car has also made a bad decision. Yet only one of these bad decisions deprives someone of his rightful property and can result in jail time; Christians might also note that only one of those bad decisions requires repentance. And I think all of us, including the most ardent car-lovers and property rights upholders, would agree that deciding to attack and murder a pregnant woman is a much worse bad decision than deciding to steal a car. Even people who wouldn't want the fetus listed as one of Estrada's victims would generally agree that murder is a very bad decision indeed.

"It that enough to execute him? Is that enough to kill him?" she asked the jury.

Apparently Texas law and that jury think so.


A question I'm probably not supposed to ask: I wonder if these murderous attacks on pregnant women have become more frequent since the advent of the birth control pill and legalized abortion.