Death penalty

[Douglas <dougwils@moscow.com>]

Dear visionaries,

Tom Hansen asks if I support the death penalty for abortion clinic
bombers, if the bombing results in the deaths of any inside. The answer
yes, I do. At the same time, I do not support the death penalty being
applied to children in those same clinics. In short, I support the death
penalty for those guilty of a capital crime, provided there has been a
fair trial, two or three witnesses, etc. I oppose the death penalty being
applied to the innocent. In these postmodern times, this is sometimes
represented as a contradiction. "Guilt? Innocence? What strange
concepts these fundamentalists have!"

I believe I did not make another point clearly enough. Both Rosemary and
Sunil misunderstood my position with regard to everyone "supporting
the death penalty." I did not mean by this that everyone supports
the death penalty being applied by the state after a criminal trial. Of
course, there is obvious disagreement about that. Rather my point was
this: with the world in its current condition, either we employ lethal
violence on those with a demonstrable contempt for human life, or (with
our current court system) we leave those same people alive to employ
lethal violence ad libitum.

In short, in our society, how many people have died at the hands of a
murderer who had been previously convicted of another murder? The
number is not a small one. Everyone who opposes the death penalty for
murder after a first conviction is in principle supporting the death
penalty for this murderer's future victims. 

When you find a cockroach in your salad, you do not decline to kill it
because of uncertainty as to whether it will deter the others. You are
just interested in deterring that one.