SUICIDE BY CONFESSION

First we had suicide by cop, then we had the affluenza defense, and now we have suicide by confession

It wasn’t too long ago that headshrinkers came up with the brilliant idea that some individuals get into shootouts with the police as a form of committing suicide, suicide by cop that is. Now attorneys have come up with another ingenious idea – suicide by confession.

Richard Masterson, 43, was executed Wednesday evening by the state of Texas for the 2001 strangulation of a Houston transvestite. Masterson had confessed to Houston police that he had killed drag queen Darin Honeycutt. He also told his brother that he killed the transvestite. Then, in 2012, he wrote Gov. Greg Abbott, who was Texas Attorney General at the time, that “I meant to kill him. It was no accident.”

Naturally, Masterson’s attorneys filed a last minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing in part that their client was “a severely mentally ill, suicidal defendant” and that his confessions amounted to “suicide by confession.”

That’s some doozie. Suicide by confession comes on the heels of another Texas doozie, the affluenza defense. Our lawyers seem to have a knack for coming up with some really big Texas whoppers.

By the way, Masterson’s execution with a single dose of pentobarbital went off without a hitch.