Death

penalty opponents have gathered considerable ammunition

in recent years as numerous convicts have later turned

out to be innocent.

One state

has enacted a moratorium on executions following two

well-publicized incidents of having the wrong man on

death row surfaced. One poor chap had his conviction

overturned just hours before he was to die for someone

else's crime.

I've always

been a death penalty advocate, for two reasons:

1. Despite

arguments and skewed statistics to the contrary, I

believe a death penalty promptly and properly

administered would make criminals think twice about

whether to kill their victims to "eliminate

witnesses." The fact that such a deterrent seems not

to exist is attributable more to the rarity of executions

and the length of time between crime and punishment than

to any lack of deterrent factor.

2. Even if

the death penalty doesn't deter future criminals from

committing murder, it certainly deters the person

executed from committing any more.

Still, the

number of false convictions does give one pause.

As a

longtime observer of the law enforcement process, I'm not

so naive as to believe that they always get their man.

Sometimes they get the wrong man.

There is a

natural tendency among law enforcers to form an opinion

about who is guilty, and then ignore all evidence to the

contrary, especially in high-profile, high-pressure cases

in which the public is demanding a head on a platter...

anybody's head.

A wife

disappears and the husband is automatically the number

one suspect. Some people are a bit eccentric, or

belligerent, or shy. Once a husband is a suspect, any

personality quirk is interpreted as evidence of guilt.

"We

know who did it... we just can't prove it yet." How

many times have you heard that one?

If you

can't prove it, you don't know.

So, should

we throw out the death penalty because the justice system

is fallible?

Not in my

opinion. But we certainly need a complete overhaul of the

entire process of putting people on death row. And if we

don't get that, I feel certain we eventually will do away

with the death penalty, and that will be a shame.

We should

reserve the death penalty, not for the most heinous of

crimes, but for those in which the evidence is the most

ironclad.

All murder

is heinous. If there is torture or rape, all the more so.

Funny how

we tend to coddle the professional killer, as if for some

reason the fact that he kills purely for business reasons

- it's nothing personal - makes his crime less

horrific for the victim. If a person can kill another in

cold blood, then that person should not live.

But if

there is the slightest reason to doubt, then life in

prison should be the penalty, not death.

Juries

should not make that decision, because they're too easily

swayed by emotion. Judges, perhaps a panel of three,

should weigh the quality of the evidence and decide the

sentence based on carefully written criteria designed to

eliminate any possibility of executing the wrong person.

I'm well

aware of the arguments that humanity is debased by the

death penalty, and that our justice system becomes no

better than the killers it executes.

Emotionally,

I'm even drawn to such an argument.

But on the

other hand, a society is further debased, in my opinion,

if it suffers cold-blooded killers to live.