This week a bit of the past landed on my desk in the form of a news memorandum from the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
The memo was the standard fare from the communications department. The state plans to execute a person on death row. I looked at the name - John B. Nixon Sr.
MDOC will allow a reporter access to Nixon's execution by lethal injection on Dec. 16.
I watched and reported on Nixon's capture and trial.
I won't attend his execution.
In the early morning hours of Jan. 22, 1985, Nixon, armed with a .22-caliber pistol, and two other men strode into the house of Virginia and Thomas Tucker.
He told the couple he had something for them. Thomas Tucker tried to negotiate the couple's way out of it.
Nixon replied something to the effect that the deal had been cut. Virginia Tucker's ex-husband, Elster Joseph Ponthieux, had hired Nixon and company to execute her.
In the melee that followed, Thomas Tucker tried to run. One of the men shot him in the side. Still, he managed to get into a truck and drive to downtown Brandon.
Nixon stuck the pistol behind Virginia Tucker's ear and killed her with one shot.
Jim Cooper, a reporter for The Rankin County News in Brandon, was one of the first people on the scene. He walked into the room and saw the life blood that had poured out of Virginia Tucker.
The sight touched him deeply.
Most people I've met and talked to say Nixon deserves to die for getting paid to kill a woman and for wounding her husband.
That execution-style slaying is a violation of the sanctity of life, those in favor of the death penalty argue.
What about the families? What will give them peace? Death, proponents said.
Jim and I talked about the death penalty that night. We knew we were in store for a long, drawn-out manhunt and legal process.
This was the first time Jim, who was 51/2 years older than I, had seen death up close and personal. I had worked as a journalist a little longer and had seen the results of some violence.
I've witnessed informal executions in a foreign country, where soldiers bearing American-made M-16s fired slugs into the skulls of a family that had provided rebels with food and water the day before.
At the same time, I've watched the more humane execution of a man who killed a woman he didn't know. He was just a killer.
Both incidences turned my stomach. Sometimes I dream about them and wake up screaming.
A court and jury have determined that Nixon didn't value life and that he took a pistol to kill someone for money.
That behavior is reprehensible.
But I cannot believe that it benefits anyone to see Nixon strapped to a stainless steel table and injected with poison. Nor can I believe that anyone gains any peace from the action.
It is my understanding that the time - if there ever was one - of "an eye for an eye" has passed.
And I really don't understand the true believers who would save an unborn child, only to kill that child if it committed murder as an adult.
As much as I disagree with the Roman Catholic Church on many issues of faith, I respect and hold dear the fact that the church isn't hypocritical when it comes to the sanctity of life.
Many find it's easy to save a child - the cute, helpless figure all curled up in a woman's womb.
But once that child emerges into the world, many find it's easy to ignore the human being.
Once the human - now a grown person - acts in a way we consider inhumane, we're ready to toss the person in with other human debris, objectify them all and murder them in the name of justice.
John Nixon has not lived a productive life. He has destroyed as much as he created.
He scares me. He did in the courtroom all those years ago. His official photograph from the Department of Corrections still makes me uncomfortable.
But he does not deserve execution by the state. His life is as valuable in God's eyes as the one he took on Jan. 22, 1985.
