“Killer!” “Thug!” “I hope you die for your crimes, asshole!”

Those were the sounds of the umpteen advocacy groups coming out of the proverbial woodwork who's only objective was to watch as people like me met the fine feeling of potassium chloride in the capable and deadly hands of the U.S. government. They would watch, I would convulse, my heart would stop, and as I died laughing, they'd mourn their dead hero. After that, they'd go on with their lives, and mine would come to an abrupt but not necessarily untimely end.

Perhaps I should tell it like it happened, or how I say it happened, or how the District Attorney said it happened, what difference does it make? It seems that the only truth is the one that the most people agree on.

It happened because I was late to work.

You see, three weeks ago, I was running late to work, the pillow seemed a better match for me than carrying boxes in a factory, so the date was set. After twenty straight minutes of hitting the snooze button every three minutes, I dragged myself out of bed and managed to spill almost all of my coffee, I got a call, if I had just got out of bed and gone to work, I wouldn't have gotten the call. “This is a collect call from the U.S. division of corrections, would you like to accept the charges?” Maybe it was a mistake, I thought, briefly hesitant to accept $5.00 a minute that they would inevitably charge. After a careful ten seconds of deliberation I reluctantly gave up my credit card number. “Cousin?” “That depends, what are you charged with?” (My extended family occupies the softest part in my heart) “I got framed, man, they say I murdered a judge, I've never even talked to  the guy!” As I carefully weighed the ten minute drive to the county jail, my compassionate side kicked in, after all, if he happened to get locked up, I would likely be able to take  his TV, and it was a nice TV. “Fine, I'll go bail you out.” 

As he told it, my cousin had been arrested the previous day in church; while his girlfriend worried what the neighbors would think as he was carted off in the customary cuffs, he had been charged with shooting a circuit judge. It seemed that they'd gotten his name from a list of people the judge had encountered, having sentenced him to a DUI five years earlier. Due to pressure from the same advocacy groups tormenting me and a bit of alleged evidence planting, the police had made the charges stick. To hear my cousin tell it, the cops had interrogated him without reading his rights, though their star witness, Officer Rowe, denied this claim and went on to say that my cousin had admitted to the crime upon seeing the police. However, upon appeal my cousin was released, due to competent defense attorneys doing their job and the justice system finally living up to its name.

It was a cold day when I went to pick him up from the holding cell, and I thought that perhaps now, I could get on with my life and he wouldn't feel compelled to call me when he was arrested ever again. As I saw him walking towards me something seemed wrong, and then, in an instant, I lost all faith in the justice system. I saw his body crumple, and blood spilled out from his chest, ironically right above his tattoo of a burning flag draped over an AK-47. It was a shocking moment, it was clear he had been shot, but the assailant's location was unclear. Then I saw the same Officer Rowe standing behind him, holding his service revolver. 

 As the EMT's came and went, and fellow cops showed up to arrest Rowe, I couldn't help but think that there was no use to living in a world like this, inevitably Rowe would be acquitted, “justifiable homicide” they would call it, and nothing would change, he would be back on the street in a matter of days. Then I made a huge mistake, I decided that some things are worth dying for, off the top of my head I could think of donuts, violence in film, and vengeance. 

I pondered my situation, trying to decide if killing a cop would be a wise move. Not that I felt it would be wrong to do unto others, but more because that now I could have his nice television, if I went through with this,  I'd probably be joining him in Valhalla instead of watching reruns of the Munsters on a television big enough to broadcast emergency signals to the city. 

Since my cousin had been arrested in church, I felt it only fair to deal out justice on a sunday, after all, my sunday school teachers had always told me to keep the sabbath day holy, and what better than to go down on a sunday? 

I felt a little like an assasin, but more like an untrained average-joe holding a hunting rifle hoping that no one would notice that someone was laying prone behind a steeple. “The prick even wears his uniform to church” I thought, as I saw my foil in the Greek tragedy that I imagined my life had become walking out with his wife and kids. “Now is it right to murder someone in front of their family?” I bet you're asking, and to that I can only answer that I don't care, he did something that was wrong, and he deserved everything he got, where he got it was rather irrelevant.