SHOT NOT HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD

Kenneth Biros did a very bad thing eighteen years ago. He became over-served in a bar and later killed a woman he picked up there in a self admitted drunken rage. Normally, the absence of malice aforethought and intent, due to extreme intoxication, would have spared Biros from state sponsored murder. However, the Ohio jury may have been swayed to vote death by Biros' grotesque attempt to cover up his misdeed by cutting up the body and scattering it over two states.

Biros' two decade saga to stay alive rested on his lawsuit claiming that the usual three shot cocktail of lethal drugs was cruel and unusual. Not to be denied their killing, Ohio officials rendered Biros' suit moot when they offered to make him the first person ever to be executed by a single shot lethal injection. The US Supreme Court agreed and Mr. Biros became the pioneer for this new technique on Tuesday, December 8.

Biros' achievement was not given its due, in part, to the weekly news cycle, which focused on the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. In his acceptance speech the President practically bragged that it is OK for America to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to kill untold thousands of innocents in our quest to control two pitiful countries in the Middle East.

For advancing the technology of state sponsored destruction of folks deemed unworthy of continued existence, Kenneth Biros may not be Time's, but he is my Person Of The Year. Had he been given a chance to acknowledge his achievement, his comments would have been shorter and much more honest than those uttered in Oslo:

"One single shot for a man, one giant leap backward for mankind".