When a particularly heinous crime has been committed, there is a deeply felt need to punish the perpetrator. A crime has been committed and someone should pay for that crime. If the crime is murder, the murderer should pay for it with his or her own life. On the face of it, that is a pretty good argument, but there are other factors to consider such as the following:

Taking a human life whether by murder or by the state cheapens all of life. The taking of a person's life--whether premeditated and particularly gruesome (Jeffrey Dahmer comes to mind) or sanctioned and carried out by the state--is ugly and destructive and all of us are tainted by it in some way.

Once a death sentence has been carried out, there is no possibility of reversal or setting the conviction aside in light of new evidence that might prove the person innocent. The fact is mistakes do happen. Our judicial system is not perfect.

DNA testing is a relatively new and powerful tool for establishing guilt or innocence in many cases. In several recent celebrated cases, DNA testing established the innocence of inmates on death row. It was enough to cause at least one state governor, a strong supporter of capital punishment, to suspend all scheduled executions until this matter could be looked at more carefully to determine on a case-by-case basis if DNA testing would uncover any other wrongly convicted inmates waiting execution.

There is a disproportionate share of poor and minority people on death row. Good legal representation takes more money than poor people can possibly afford. Justice is not served when those who cannot afford a reasonable defense are executed and those who can are not.

Often many years elapse between the date of conviction and the time the convict is finally executed. The convicted person files motion after motion in an effort to put off his or her day of reckoning. Most are frivolous but each motion must be considered. That takes time and clogs up the system. The meaningfulness of execution gets lost in the muddle.

In many ways a more appropriate sentence would be life in prison with no hope of parole. A judge in Wisconsin, a state which does not use the death penalty, put it in meaningful terms when he sentenced a young bank robber, who had taken a bystander hostage and murdered a police officer, to "death in prison." In some ways that is a more satisfying punishment in terms of

(a) taking a persons’ freedom away for the rest of his/her life and of 

(b) removing the possibility of that person ever committing another crime outside of prison.

There is scant evidence that capital punishment works as a deterrence to crime.

Prosecutors have much latitude in deciding whether to seek the death penalty in a murder case or not. Within a single state this can vary widely county by county.

On balance, capital punishment, while it may provide fleeting satisfaction, is not good for a civilized people. In Genesis 4 we read that God spared the life of Cain after he murdered Abel. Certainly, that is an example worth noting. The first task of faith states that we are to protect life. That includes protecting even the life of someone who has taken the life of another human. If we abrogate the principle ourselves by allowing the state to take lives in our name, what moral superiority does that convey?

-- John Gugel