Indiscriminate disease and accidents have claimed the lives of many of my friends and family. Each of these losses brought sadness and pain, but none generated such shock, pain and anger as the death of Brenda Blanton Lane.

Brenda's death was no accident. It was not disease that killed her. A murderer took the life of my friend, an evil man who abducted her and stabbed her in the back with a butcher knife for no other reason than that he wanted her car.

Brenda and I began working at the Times-Gazette in 1978, she fresh out of college and me fresh out of the house as a former full-time mom. We held the same job titles as staff writers, but while she was filled with enthusiasm about plying her newly-earned journalism degree, I was overwhelmed with a job for which I knew I was under-educated and under-qualified.

It was Brenda who encouraged me in those early years, refusing to let my fears and self-doubt lead me to giving up. We remained friends after she left the T-G a few years later to work in Nashville. I attended her wedding, and shared her joy when she told me during our last phone conversation a few weeks before her death that she and her husband were thinking about starting a family.

After Brenda's tragic, senseless murder on Jan. 1, 1985, at the hand of Gregory Thompson, he was eventually captured, confessed to the crime and charged with first degree murder. Following a jury trail, he received a capital sentence on Aug. 22, 1985.

Twenty years later, Thompson's attorneys and death penalty opponents are still challenging that sentence.

"Thompson is incapable of making rational decisions" so should not be subject to execution. He had a "troubled childhood," it's claimed, and my heart goes out to that little boy who is said to have witnessed beatings of family members and the brutal beating and rape of his mother.

But Thompson is no longer a little boy, nor was he in 1985 when he murdered Brenda.

According to the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, Thompson "hears voices, suffers from severe delusions, is often suicidal, has eaten his own feces, and does not appreciate that Brenda Lane is dead or that he is about to be executed."

Yet, in March 2004, when asked by a Times-Gazette reporter during an exclusive interview at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison, where he is on death row, if he knew why he was subject to execution, Thompson replied: "Yes, the murder of Brenda Blanton Lane. I laugh about it all day."

Perhaps the most ludicrous claim by opponents, however, is one made by a Tennessee Black Caucus group that Thompson "should not be executed because racism and bad lawyering taint his death sentence."

I don't know about the lawyering, but despite the injustices blacks have suffered in our judicial system throughout American history, Thompson was not convicted because of the color of his skin. He was convicted because he murdered a compassionate, 28-year-old woman who would have befriended him without a second thought about his race, his religion, his mental capacity or anything else.

Should Thompson be executed? Brenda would be the first to forgive him. I'm not quite as forgiving. Yet I would not, could not, be the one responsible for implementing that lethal injection.

But I am convinced that a man who has murdered, is often suicidal and eats his own feces -- especially this man -- should be fitted to a straitjacket and thrown into a permanently-locked solitary padded cell.

Kay Rose is editor of the Times-Gazette.