In a Post-Dispatch story out today, we reveal that a member of the death-row execution team for the Missouri and the federal prison system has a criminal past. In fact, the licensed practical nurse from Farmington had to get special permission from top state and federal prison officials to travel to the lethal-injection execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh because at the time he was on supervised probation as a convicted stalker.

The nurse had pleaded no contest in St. Francois County to misdemeanor counts of stalking and tampering with property of a man who had a relationship with the…

An Associated Press story on the news wires today says that anti-death penalty forces have been gaining momentum in past years.

The story, Studies say death penalty deters crime, reminds that a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey, are slowly leading the country away from the death penalty.

But what gets little notice are a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument - whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder.

The…