“Bye. I’m ready.”

            Those were the last words spoken by Bobby Wayne Woods shortly before 7:00 p.m. on December 3, 2009 when he was put to death by lethal injection in the Texas’ death chamber at Huntsville.

            Woods was convicted for the 1997 abduction of a nine-year-old boy and the murder of his eleven-year-old sister after he took them from their home in the middle of the night in Hood County. Testimony at Woods’ 1998 capital murder trial showed he engaged “sexual activity” with the girl before taking the two kids to a remote cemetery where he brutally beat the boy into unconsciousness. He left the boy in the cemetery and he survived the attack. He then drove the girl to another location where he severely beat her before cutting her throat. She did not survive her attack.

            Lawyers for the condemned inmate tried to block his execution on the grounds that he was mentally retarded. Reports placed his IQ from 68 to 86. The retardation issue died with Woods. But there was certainly some evidence of retardation in the confession he gave to the police. He asked the police that if by leading them to the girl’s body, it would “help” him. He then tried to claim that he “accidentally” cut the girl’s throat when she suddenly “jerked real hard” into the knife he had pressed against her throat. Only a retarded mind could produce such a confession.

            But there is also a terrible irony in the Bobby Wayne Woods execution. The execution was not even mentioned in the print copy of the Houston Chronicle and it generated scant media attention elsewhere in the state. Yet the nation has been totally absorbed the car wreck and marital problems of that other Woods – the famous Tiger Woods! People are more interested in whether or not he screwed some cocktail waitress outside his marriage thanr the possible execution of a mentally retarded person in Texas.

            Bobby Wayne Woods committed a horrific crime. There’s no way to minimize that fact. It’s the kind of crime that generates little empathy from people. But what if he was mentally retarded? He had to be either a cold blooded, evil sexual predator or a mental retardate incapable of fully understanding the horrendous nature of his crimes. The evidence suggests the latter—no one with full mental capacity would dare say an 11-year-old girl jerked so hard against the knife pressed to her throat that she in effect cut her own throat.

            Personally, I don’t give a damn about Tiger Woods, his bevy of mistresses, or the wife he just paid $5 million to in order to keep her from leaving him so as not to tarnish a bullshit image Gatorade and Niki need to sell products. And I think it’s terribly callous that a society would give more of a damn about these matters than about a possible mental retardate being put to death in Texas.

            God help us if Tiger Woods’ marital infidelity is more socially significant than the execution of a mentally retarded human being!