H  TEXAS RECORDS FINAL WORDS, BUT THEIR POWER IS UNCERTAIN 

S1  This article is part of TIMES EXPRESS.
S2 It is a condensed version of a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times.
S3 );

S4  HUNTSVILLE, Texas - Karl Eugene Chamberlain went to his neighbor’s apartment that night in Dallas under the pretense of borrowing sugar.
S5 He returned later, forced her into a bedroom, bound her hands and feet, raped her and then used a rifle to shoot and kill her.
S6 His victim, Felecia Prechtl, 29, was a single mother with a 5-year-old son.

S7  Eleven years after he was convicted of capital murder, Chamberlain, 37, was strapped to a gurney in Texas’ execution chamber at the Walls Unit prison here and was asked by a warden if he had any last words.
S8 “Thank you for being here today to honor Felecia Prechtl, whom I didn’t even know,” he told her son, parents and brother on June 11, 2008.
S9 “I am so terribly sorry.
S10 I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.”

S11  His words did not die with him.
S12 Texas wrote them down, kept them and posted them on the Internet.

S13  The state with the busiest death chamber in America publishes the final statements of the inmates it has executed on a prison agency website, a kind of public catalog of the rantings, apologies, prayers, claims of innocence and confessions of hundreds of men and women in the minutes before their deaths.

S14  The condemned praised Allah and Jesus and Sant Ajaib Singh Ji, a Sikh master.
S15 Three cheered for their favorite sports teams, including Jesse Hernandez, whose execution last year made headlines after he shouted, “Go Cowboys!”

S16  The execution on Wednesday of Kimberly McCarthy - a 52-year-old woman convicted of robbing, beating and fatally stabbing a retired psychology professor near Dallas - was the 500th in Texas since December 1982, when the state resumed capital punishment after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

S17  The state’s execution record has often been criticized.
S18 But three decades of last statements by inmates reveal a glimmer of the humanity behind those anonymous numbers.

S19  “It’s kind of mesmerizing to read through these,” said Robert Perkinson, the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire” and a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
S20 “Most people about to be executed haven’t had a lot of success in school or life.
S21 They’re not always so skilled at articulating themselves.
S22 There are plenty of clichés, sometimes peculiar ones, like the Cowboys reference.
S23 But I think many of these individuals are also striving to say something poignant, worthy of the existential occasion.”

