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Enclosed is my response to your special issue on capital punishment. Thank you for sending me your thought-provoking magazine.

-Haven Bradford Gow

Eudora, Ark.

Capital Punishment: A Moral Issue

by Haven Gow

An AP story in the January 5, 1999 Delta Democrat-Times, Greenville, Miss., pointed out that "Self-described serial killer Donald Leroy Evans...died from stab wounds at the state penitentiary.... The Galveston, Texas drifter in 1993 was sentenced to die for the strangulation death of Beatrice Louise Routh.... In July 1995, Evans pleaded guilty in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to the 1985 killing of Ira Jean Smith."

In this connection, Pope John Paul II recently made a significant statement condemning the death penalty for promoting a culture of violence and killing, he linked his opposition to capital punishment with opposition to abortion, terrorism, and the spread of nuclear weapons.

Concerning the morality of capital punishment, Jerry Baw, a social critic in West Monroe, LA, observes: "If they [murderers] are put to death they can never kill again. They can never escape and kill me or my mother or my best friend or my son or my daughter I may one day have." She adds: "I suggest those who feel compassion for a serial killer or rapist that they educate themselves by reading about actual serial killings.... The killers themselves would have no compassion if it were you they were following home from the grocery store or out of the mall."

Regarding the argument that the death penalty works against black people, David Price, a legal journalist in Washington, D.C., pointed out in the November 19, 1998 USA Today that "According to a 1985 analysis by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, whites who are arrested for murder or manslaughter (other than negligent manslaughter) are more prone to be sentenced to death than blacks arrested for those offenses: 1.6 percent of whites vs. 1.2 percent of African-Americans." Moreover, "White death-row prisoners are more likely than African-Americans to have their death sentences carried out. From 1977-1996, 7.2 percent of white prisoners were executed, compared to 5.9 percent of African-Americans."

Despite the presence of sadistic murderers in our society, some insist that, if and when these murderers are captured and convicted, they should not be executed but, instead, should remain imprisoned the rest of their lives and perhaps even be rehabilitated. These critics of capital punishment insist that the death penalty is barbaric, uncivilized, and cruel and unusual punishment.

Some thinkers, though, see the moral issue of capital punishment from a different perspective. For example, the eminent Christian man of letters C. S. Lewis observed that it is because we do respect the inherent dignity of human beings and the sacredness of human life that we must support capital punishment. There is a big difference, he said, between charity and effeminate sentimentality, between kindness and generosity, on the one hand, and weakness and lack of moral courage, on the other hand.

People who make excuses for vicious criminals, Lewis noted, really are denying that criminals are rational beings who possess the inherent capacity to make free choices and judgments; they are, instead, saying that human beings are no better than animals, that human beings are victims of their environments or biological appetites; they are denying that human beings have the God-given ability to distinguish between right and wrong, and act accordingly.

In a conversation with this writer, the former Vatican scholar Father Malachi Martin, S.J., pointed out that "strict justice" demands the executions of murderers. Punishment, if it is just, must "fit the crime," that is, be proportionate to the crime committed. As St. Thomas Aquinas noted, the only fair and just punishment for premeditated murder is the death penalty.

Mr. Gow is a TV and radio commentator and writer

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