Comment & Debate
David Gelernter. “What do Murderers Deserve?”. commentarymagazine.com. March/April 1999 – In executing murderers, we declare that deliberate murder is absolutely evil and absolutely intolerable.
Don Feder, Boston Herald Columnist. “McVeigh Makes the Case for Capital Punishment”. 21 May 2001 – Executing a murderer is the only way to adequately express our horror at the taking of an innocent life. Nothing else suffices…A murderer sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole can still laugh, learn and love, listen to music and read, form friendships, and do the thousand-and-one things (mundane and sublime) forever foreclosed to his victims.
“Death Penalty Speaks Society’s Moral Outrage”. New York Times, Letter to the Editor. July 19, 1991 – The death penalty is the only appropriate punishment that expresses society’s moral outrage at those who commit murder. Those who oppose the death penalty are guilty of a misplaced sense of mercy that erroneously equates retribution with vengeance.
Lord Justice Denning, Master of the Rolls of the Court of Appeals in England said to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1950: – Punishment is the way in which society expresses its denunciation of wrong doing; and, in order to maintain respect for the law, it is essential that the punishment inflicted for grave crimes should adequately reflect the revulsion felt by the great majority of citizens for them. It is a mistake to consider the objects of punishments as being a deterrent or reformative or preventive and nothing else… The truth is that some crimes are so outrageous that society insists on adequate punishment, because the wrong doer deserves it, irrespective of whether it is a deterrent or not.[1]
“The Death Penalty – A Defense”. YesTheDeathPenalty.org – It comfirms the punishment as such, and do that in a more visible and more powerful way than any other penalty.