On Sept. 23, Virginia executed a 41-year-old woman, Teresa Lewis ("12th woman executed in U.S. since 1976," Sept. 24). As an Englishman who has grown to love the United States and the decency and generosity of the American people, allow me to say how profoundly saddened and ashamed I was to hear this distressing news. Why is it that America, the nation of Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights that are the envy of the world, is almost alone among industrialized nations in persisting in the barbaric practice of taking living, breathing human beings, strapping them to gurneys, and injecting them with chemicals until their hearts stop pumping and their lungs cease to function? A woman's life was taken in cold blood and in squalid circumstances, and many decent Americans, especially those who helped put this woman to death, were just a little bit corrupted, and the honor of a great country was tarnished. BERNARD CARPENTER, CHANHASSEN