Too Big to Die

By Scoop Cooper
Crime Reporter
COLUMBUS, OHIO - A convicted murderer, who claimed to be too fat to kill, has cheated the executioner.
     He was found guilty of fatally shooting a clerk during a 1983 robbery.  While waiting on death row, he put on a great deal of weight.  Why not?  If I were going to die anyway, it'd be chocolate eclairs and bacon pizza 24/7.  However, his lawyers claimed the prison food was fattening, and his back and knee problems made it difficult to exercise, especially after the exercise bike in the gymn broke under his weight.
      The fat man's mouthpieces argued that he could not be humanely killed back in September, when he weighed in at 480 pounds.  They feared he would crush the gurney when they rolled him out for the lethal injection.  However, the warden released photos of the execution gurney supporting over 500 pounds of dumbbells.  Apparently, the prison gymn has more exercise equipment than just one bike.
     The legal arguments bounced off the prisoner's invulnerable armor of blubber.  Prison doctors really did have a hard time finding his veins beneath the flab.  If they injected the poison directly into his muscles, the execution could take several days of intense pain.  Alternately, they could uncover his veins directly by cutting down through the fat in a process that sounds too grisly to explore.
     The January 16, 2013 execution was finally canceled.  On Monday, Governor John Kasich commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment without parole.  Ironically, weight was not the issue.  The governor found that in the original trial, the fat man had poor legal representation.  Really?  His legal team seems pretty good to me.  They staved off execution for almost 30 years while their client ate his way off death row.
     However, this is still a cautionary tale.  Be careful what you wish for.  After all, the convicted murderer put on all that weight for nothing.  Dieting is hell.  Now, he's trapped, with a bad back and a bad knee, in a prison with limited exercise facilities until the day he dies ... and at 53 years old and 480 pounds that won't be long.
     Justice may be blind, but she has a twisted sense of humor.