On this date in 2005, Richard Cartwright was executed in Texas for robbing and murdering a gay man in Corpus Christi.

Cartwright attained some recognition (if not exactly a plausible purchase on clemency) as the writer of Uncensored from Texas Death Row, a sort of death row blog.

(As befits a blogger in the early 2000s, Cartwright also had a MySpace page, which remains active. “Chi-town” grew up in Chicago. He played youth hockey there, for this club. This is the sort of thing one learns about bloggers.)

Cartwright was admittedly involved in the robbery-murder, though he insisted he wasn’t the one who did the murdering.

Whatever one makes of that, his fairly prolific “Uncensored” series over the last six months of his life furnish a sometimes bracingly personal chronicle of a man among the lowest of the dead … and drawing nearer and nearer to a fate he realizes he cannot avert.

People are looking at me differently, like they are trying to instill into memory or something. They don’t mean to, but they do, and it is spooky. Like I am already dead.

On this day..

• 2020: Walter Barton, coronavirus milestone
• 1893: Ai Yone
• 1883: Not Alferd (sic) Packer, #nerdprom attendee
• 1732: Petrus Vuyst, governor of Dutch Ceylon
• 1558: Three reformers at Norwich
• 1865: Not Lambdin P. Milligan, ex parte man
• 1864: Nikolay Chernyshevsky's "civil execution"
• 399 BCE: Socrates
• 1998: Wissam Issa and Hassan Abu Jabal
• 1942: Shimon Cohen, ladykiller
• 1817: Three criminals in Rome, as witnessed by Lord Byron
• 1536: Anne Boleyn