For the second time this week, Virginia has executed someone for a murder committed as a juvenile. Twenty-three-year-old Steve Roach died by injection last night. He was seventeen in 1993 when he shot and killed a seventy-year-old neighbor during a robbery. His lawyer said that before his death, Roach wrote that he couldn’t understand, “even to his last breath, why we kill people to teach other people that killing is wrong.”

On Monday, twenty-six-year-old Douglas Thomas was executed for shooting his girlfriend’s parents in 1990. He was also seventeen years old at the time of the murders, and he was also killed by the State of Virginia.