“Why am I like Britney Spears kids? If the state doesn’t step in, I’m not going to see 2008,” death row inmate Patrick Knight jokes in an article on a local Texan website. The 39 year old is seeking the help of the public, via MySpace, to find the perfect punch line to say for his final statement before he is executed on June 26^th.

My first thought was, this is absolutely hysterical. For one, the man is on death row and he has a MySpace page. Come on over to jail and we’ll give you free internet! But I digress. For two, he’s getting the public involved in his final statement before he dies for the murder of a Texan couple back in 1991.

That kind of stopped me in my tracks.

He’s on death row. For murder. I mean, I hate to be so overdramatic with the italics and all, but that’s pretty much how the thought occurred in my mind. (Yes, I think in italics.) This wasn’t just some funny concept anymore. This is a real man, about to be put to death for the real people he killed. If these were my parents who died, I wouldn’t be happy if their killer was seemingly cool enough with it to be making jokes on his death bed, especially if that bed was one they made themselves by the crime they committed. Knight says the contest, which he’s named “Dead Man Laughing” (no, really), isn’t for him, it’s for his fellow inmates awaiting death row. Knight says that he’s, “not trying to get any money… not trying to get any pen pals or anything like that. It’s just, jokes are needed back there. We need some kind of hilariousness. We need something to ease the tension.”

Knight may very well be trying to bring hilarity to the prison cells, but I am sure the victims’ families find nothing funny about his death or the reason for it, and I very much doubt all of his fellow prison mates, many of whom are terrified of the death they face, find comfort in the darkly ironic humor.

While these men are human and I don’t doubt they “need jokes”, they need to not make them at the price of the people to whom they have already caused so much pain to. To make a joke during a statement in which one should be showing their remorse for the crime committed, and making their peace with the world and with the families, is disrespectful. Though Knight “insists he finds no humor in the deaths he caused or in the prospect of his own,” and says that, ““if you’ve gotta go, go with a smile,”” I wonder if that smile is insulting, unintentionally or not?

Should Knight be allowed to tell his joke?