Face it: Death holds no sting, not when you die peacefully in your sleep after 25 years on death row for killing two women in robberies that netted you $1.

If dead people can laugh, I'm betting Leroy McNeil is guffawing over the fact that he cheated the hangman's noose -- OK, the executioner's needle -- and never paid the price "we the people" ruled he owed for killing Deborah Jean Fore and Elizabeth Faye Stallings.

If the dead can laugh, then surely they can cry, too. If they can't, we should all be crying for McNeil's innocent young victims.

McNeil, 68, lived longer on death row than he probably would have on the street. He certainly lived there longer than any of his three victims lived on Earth. He was convicted of two murders and charged with another.

Fore was 23 when McNeil shot her in the head and left her on a dirt road off of Rock Quarry Road.

Stallings was 18 when McNeil shot and stabbed her. Irene Harris was 18 when McNeil allegedly stabbed her to death, concluding -- as far as we know -- his murderous six-day rampage in 1983.

Keith Acree, spokesman for the N.C. Department of Correction, said that, since 1983, 13 inmates -- 14 if you count the one who had just been removed and was awaiting re-sentencing -- have died on North Carolina's death row without being executed. On Correction's Web site, McNeil is listed as having died a "natural death."

Regardless of whether you oppose the death penalty or clamor for the state to exact its pound of flesh, you could see how some people feel that this dude, above all others, wasn't supposed to die a natural death. You would also have to admit -- wouldn't you? -- that justice is mocked when a man convicted to die is allowed to chill for a quarter century.

One of the irrefutable tenets of our legal system is that justice delayed is justice denied -- unless, death penalty advocates might argue, the state's aim was to kill McNeil softly by feeding and coddling him to death.

Stallings' family does not begrudge McNeil his relatively peaceful death.

"He died a slow death," Valencia Stallings-Howard said. "If they'd executed him, he would've died a fast death. He had 25 years to think about what he'd done."

Stallings-Howard, speaking for the family, recalled her sister, known as Faye, as "a very loving person. She held the family together. She was the hairdresser and the cook of the family. She was a student at Wake Tech and wanted a career as a hair stylist. ... We still miss her."

The family expressed no bitterness, no outrage that McNeil was not executed.

"The death penalty wouldn't have brought our sister back," she said. "We think justice was served."

Whatever outrage the rest of you felt when McNeil escaped the ultimate punishment will no doubt be repeated in coming years. There are 43 inmates who've been awaiting the dirt nap from 14 to 23 years. Because of challenges to the death penalty -- among other things, whether or not doctors should be involved -- no one has been executed in the state since 2006.

As Kenny Rogers sang in "The Gambler":

"Every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser / and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

That's especially true after you've spent 25 years on death row for murdering two women for a dollar.

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