In case you haven’t heard, Shawna Forde has been sentenced to death for the murders of Brisenia and Raul Junior Flores:

Ms. Thomas and fellow jurors were told during the trial that Ms. Forde and accomplices gained entry to the Flores home with the expectation of finding drugs there, which could be sold to finance Minutemen American Defense’s border-control operations. Finding no drugs, the intruders made away with inexpensive jewelry but, prosecutors said, not before fatally shooting young Brisenia and Mr. Flores. Both victims were American citizens born in the US.

“I see Shawna Forde as someone who would have liked to have been the face of a movement,” Thomas says.

Arriving at the death sentence was difficult, Thomas says, but it was aided by a picture of Brisenia presented during trial that was etched in her mind: “A little girl, with bright red fingernails; she’s wearing a white T-shirt and turquoise-colored pajama bottoms. She’s on a love seat. It’s a perfect, innocent picture until you realize that half of her face has been blown off.”

Read Terry Greene Sterling’s jailhouse interview with Forde (from last week) here:

I know in her mind,” Forde said of Gonzalez, “I am guilty and she hates me. I know her tragedy is extremely sad.” But on the other hand, she said “people shouldn’t deal drugs if they have kids.” (No drugs were found in the trailer.)

Forde told me she’d “lost a daughter” and she knows from experience Gonzalez will feel pain “the rest of her life” and her “tragedy is extremely sad.” “I wish I could say I was sorry it happened,” Forde said. “I am not sorry on my behalf because I didn’t do it.”

Monstrous. I don’t think anyone deserves the death penalty, but I am entirely unsurprised that the jury decided in favor of it.

Warning: GRAR ahead.

Last month, Slate published an article titled The Decline of the Serial Killer. “Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn’t keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since,” the author states.

Is this really so? I’m not a criminologist. But neither is the guy who wrote this. And of the two “experts” he quotes*, one of them authored a shitty, shitty book that offers little more than pop-psych analysis and “insight” from people like James Dobson and Dr. Joyce Brothers. We don’t have a lot of perspective on what motivates serial killers, which is why the criminal profilers you see on TV are basically snake oil salesmen. Anyhow, I’m not here to discredit these bozos, I’m just saying: Just because the US crime rate dropped overall and you have a shoebox full of clippings that confirms what you already believe doesn’t necessarily prove that there are fewer active serial killers.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that yes, there are fewer active serial killers now. But here’s where the article gets into some happy horseshit.