“It’s ripping the family to pieces. He’s sitting on death row, just laughing and taunting them. Everybody should read this letter and see what’s happening with death row in this state.” Gaston County Dist. Atty. Locke Bell
North Carolina death row inmate Danny Robbie Hembree in an undated photo. In a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper, Hembree boasted that he’s likely to spend many years in prison as a gentleman of leisure, watching color TV and enjoying frequent naps.
Danny Robbie Hembree considers himself a gentleman of leisure. He enjoys color TV, air conditioning and abundant food. He naps pretty much whenever he feels like it.
He also happens to live on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C. But that’s not a bad thing, he wrote in a taunting letter to his hometown newspaper, the Gaston Gazette.
In fact, Hembree wrote, the state of North Carolina has taken the “death” out of death row.
“Kill me if you can, suckers. Ha! Ha! Ha!” Hembree gloated in his letter, portions of which were published by the Gazette on Tuesday.
Hembree, 50, was sentenced to death in November for suffocating a 17-year-old girl in 2009, and is accused of killing two North Carolina women. But no one has been put to death in the state since 2006 because of legal challenges over lethal injections and whether a physician must oversee executions.
“Is the public aware that the chances of my lawful murder taking place in the next 20 years if ever are very slim?” Hembree wrote on lined notebook paper in what he described as an editorial.
[…]
