ShareThisIt's not enough to quote the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," to end the argument about capital punishment. After all, we swat flies, hire exterminators and dine daily on the flesh of God's creatures without compunction. As a nation, we abort one-third of all pregnancies and take the lives of our enemies in war.
Fortunately, God's command is more specific. "Lo tirtsach" in the original Hebrew text proscribes murder, not mere killing, and the distinction is helpful up to a point. In my state, juries can opt to execute murderers, defending their decision as the application of justice on behalf of all Virginians.
Because executions are rare and confined to the states that allow them, capital punishment does not tax the nation's conscience as slavery did in the years leading up to our Civil War. Slavery had its Christian defenders, and not just in the cotton states. The last slave owners in our nation's capital were a group of nuns.
The tragedies of 9-11 exhumed the moral controversy over the death penalty, taxing the consciences of the nation confronted with the mass murder of utterly innocent men, women and children.
"Vengeance is mine," proclaimed the God of the Old Testament. But Jehovah often wreaked vengeance indirectly by human hands. Even defenders of capital punishment shy from any pretense of being God's agents, nor do all of them cite vengeance as their motive.
Rather, they argue that in a moral universe there must be justice; otherwise evil will ultimately prevail. Nor do advocates of the death penalty condone personal revenge. As a society, we have long since condemned dueling and lynching. We decry mob justice and hold vigilantes to be criminals themselves.
When Jesus urged his disciples to love their enemies and turn the other cheek to their persecutors, he was urging a personal morality on his closest followers, nearly all of whom were subsequently martyred for their personal pacifism. Notably, Jesus gave no special instructions to government, and most Christians over the centuries have gone to war prepared to kill, convinced that their duty was to justice and self-defense.
What does capital punishment seek to accomplish that prison does not? Prison surely punishes the murderer, and life imprisonment is as effective a deterrent as the death penalty. Incarceration removes the enemy from our midst, protecting society from further harm. But unlike execution, prison also offers the offender the possibility of rehabilitation. DNA tests offer the possibility that new evidence will prove the prisoner's innocence.
Of course, maintaining an enemy in prison for life has been more expensive than ridding ourselves of a malefactor once and for all.
Recently, however, California looked at the economics of the death penalty and discovered that today it is much more expensive to execute a criminal than to imprison him for life. So, in future, the issue of capital punishment may be decided on the basis of economics rather than morality.
(David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Single Life: Keys to Successful Living on Your Own" (Praeger). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31(at)verizon.net.)
AMAZING GRACE
