I knew Brenda Blanton Lane, the victim whose murderer has been on Tennessee's death row for fifteen years but who now has an execution date set. Brenda was a talented, gentle, quiet, and kind young woman who worked as a reporter at The Shelbyville Times Gazette when my mother was the editor there.

Brenda was abuducted from a parking lot by a crazy man, who stabbed her repeatedly with a butcher knife, ran over with his car, and left her to die in a remote middle Tennessee location on a freezing winter day. I was a teenager when Brenda was killed and her murder affected me very deeply and was hard on my mother, who was very fond of Brenda.

Today my mother is the media relations spokesperson for the Tennessee Supreme Court and as such, she is charged with handling all of the public communications regarding Brenda's murderer's pending execution. It's a really sad irony and lately I have been thinking unimaginable it would have been to Brenda and my mom that one day Brenda would be long dead at the hands of a murderer and that my mother would have to discuss it with the press on a weekly basis.

So sad.