Don’t some horror movies start with an execution on Halloween?

The silly question in the title of this post is prompted by the fact that two states had executions go forward over the last few spooky days: as reported here by the AP, “Donnie Lee Roberts, convicted in his girlfriend’s 2003 slaying in Texas, was executed Wednesday for fatally shooting the woman and taking items from her home to sell or trade to support his drug habit”; as reported here by Reuters, a “man convicted of the 1990 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl was put to death on Tuesday night in a South Dakota execution witnessed by the victim’s parents, who drove 1,400 miles from their New York home to watch him die.”

I believe that there have now been 36 executions throughout the United States in 2012, and DPIC indicates here that eight more serious execution dates are on the scheduled for the next two months.  If all these executions go forward, there could be a slight uptick (from 43 to 44) in the number of executions this year compared to 2011.