ABSTRACT
On June 14, 1988, Edward Byrne, Jr., 28 years old, was executed in Louisiana for murdering a woman during the robbery of a gasoline station. This case was not especially notable, except for the people involved. Byrne was the 100th person executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1977, and Louisiana is only one of 37 American states that now exercise capital punishment. Nor were the facts of the case particularly dramatic. Byrne had dated the woman he killed, planning to rob her because he knew she handled large sums of money on her job. He insisted, though, that he had not intended to murder her. When he carried out the robbery, he maintained, he had only wanted to knock her unconscious with his hammer.
