For years, I was all for it. “You kill, you die.”

Then I was against it, when I found out it’s more expensive to execute death row inmates (due mainly to the cost of required legal reviews) than to keep them alive for life. “Forget you, I’d rather keep my money!”

Then I was against it for moral reasons; and to whatever extent my own mind was still a little cloudy, I relied on the overwhelming preponderance of opinion by people whose opinions I greatly respect on other issues: against it.

Still, I can’t help feeling that in certain cases of the truly most egregious crimes against humanity, capital punishment might be appropriate, after all. I suspect I’m wrong about that (here’s why), but it’s hard not to have that gut feeling.

In the end, in ordinary cases of capital punishment, there is a choice between two different mind sets:

1. We must make sure, at all cost, that no one should ever get by with murder—even if it means an innocent person will fall victim to the system occasionally. That risk is just one of many risks that come with being alive on this planet, in a society that must protect itself by rule of law. You could be hit by a truck, too.

                                              OR...

2. We must make sure, at all cost, that no innocent person ever be put to death—even if it means a guilty person will occasionally get by with murder (albeit remain in prison for life). That risk is just one of many that comes with protecting the lives of the innocent.

I switched from the first mindset to the second. (I was once  a hardened conservative and Christian, like the character Javier in Les Miserables.) Remember, the murderer is still in prison for life, it’s just that our thirst for retribution might not quite be quenched. ...Not that retribution should be a factor in justice.

Proof that the second mind set is the only acceptable choice is found in the many proven accounts of innocent people sentenced to execution by mistake. Grab a box of Kleenex and read about them here.

Note that the only listed cases are those of living people, exonerated while on death row; it is too late to save any lives by examining the the cases of those already executed, and it’s not done just for statistical purposes, either; resources are already too scarce for the living. So we don’t even know how many innocent people have already been executed. Imagine what this number might be in the South alone.

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                                                            Larry Hallock

How say you?