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It took eight minutes for convicted child killer Terry Clark to die, the lethal cocktail of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride shooting through his veins at the crux of both elbows in New Mexico's first execution in 41 years and its first ever by lethal injection.

It took somewhat longer than that for the official word of his demise to reach the conference room at the Penitentiary of New Mexico outside Santa Fe where we journalists covering the big story of 2001 were allowed to hole up.

But I remember that at 7:10 p.m. Nov. 6, 2001, the moment I sensed was Clark's last, I briefly bowed my head and whispered to no one, "Goodbye, Terry."

That was the only personal moment I allowed myself in those busy days leading up to and following the execution of a man I had come to know arguably better than any other journalist in the state and likely more than most people would ever care to know a man who could rape a 9-year-old girl, shoot her three times in the head, then bury her in a shallow grave.

That's what Clark had been convicted of: raping and killing Dena Lynn Gore of Artesia on July 17, 1986, in a single, sordid, inexplicable moment of depravity that few could argue didn't deserve the death penalty — if they believed the death penalty should be used at all.

This week, arguments were heard before the U.S. Supreme Court over whether the triple-drug lethal-injection method used on Clark and in 34 other states is cruel and unusual punishment. That decision, and one expected on the death penalty case of Michael Paul Astorga, accused of killing a Bernalillo County sheriff's deputy, could change our stance on executions — in that rare instance when we might deign to execute again.

(With only two men on New Mexico's death row and at least another appeal for each of them, don't hold your breath.)

Once again, though, such discussions prompt us to consider what side of the death-penalty debate we fall on, which way we felt when Clark said a prayer, uttered the cryptic last words of "15 minutes," puffed his cheeks, let out a breath, a light gasp, a hard grimace, a gush of air, a gurgle, then nothing.

I have never come to terms with my own feelings on the matter, despite having come to know Clark in the two years preceding his state-sanctioned death as a genial, contrite, thoughtful man — as a human being put to death by other humans for his having taken the life of a very small, very innocent human in far more horrific fashion.

I've always thought that to be a good thing, the right thing for a journalist trying to maintain objectivity and fairness. But as a person, as a human, it feels like cowardly indecision.

In the weeks before Clark died, we spoke once by phone and, in the end, by one hurried fax the prison folks were kind enough to deliver to him for me.

He had made his peace, he told me, and because it was his wish to die and to call off his attorneys who didn't want him to, he knew clearly on which side of the debate he fell, though perhaps his reasons were far different.

He never tried to convince me of which side I should stand on, nor did he seek any sympathy.

"I'm ready to go home," he said. "I have no fears. I've been forgiven."

I simply listened, scrawling in my notebook the last words of a dead man walking.

My biggest regret was that I could never convince him to tell me why things had happened as they did, why Dena Lynn, why a child, what had broken in his life to end it this way.

"Enough," he told me simply, "has been said already."

In his last days, he began making many more calls to my home, but each time I was either out on assignment or just not there, and it was left to my then-husband to chat, albeit unwillingly, with a child-molesting, child-killing condemned man.

I always wondered whether Clark might have changed his mind, might have wanted to explain himself after all.

I will never know.

Nor will I likely ever know what I truly believe about the death penalty, no matter what the courts finally decide, no matter who kills or is killed.