The Death Penalty

Mark Creech's latest column examines "A Christian Response to Death Penalty Issues."

An astute analysis of the current state of the use of the death penalty in our country today:

...death-row inmates receive super due process of law that accounts for an average of 12 years of appeals, and...there exists no solid evidence of even one innocent nationwide being executed in over a hundred years

On the subject of those who like to twist the Scriptures to mean things they were never meant to say (you can confirm this contextually), Creech brings out an excellent point that I've never heard expressed before:

While anti-death penalty proponents from the faith community like Shirley Burns push for abolition and a moratorium on capital punishment in North Carolina, calling for citizens to forgive, they seem to forget that the persons with the greatest reason to forgive cannot because they've been murdered.

As one of the foundational characteristics of justice is the attempt to balance the scales for the person who has been wronged, Creech speaks to this as well:

Moreover, family members like Janice Hunter, whose 27-year-old daughter, Adrien, was brutally stabbed to death by serial killer Nathaniel White, can easily identify with her statement: "I have to go to the cemetery to see my daughter. Nathaniel White' s mother goes to jail to see him and I don't think it's fair."

To even think that capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" or anything of the like is utter nonsense. Cruel and unusual? It's as close as our imperfect society can get to balancing the scales of justice for the wronged--the victim and his/her family. Cruel and unusual is what we do to the loved ones of the victim when we prolong their agony by pussy-footing around justice.

Finally, he addresses this commonly heard statement that sounds so noble but is in essence completely asinine:

One final quote by William H. Baker best addresses the main concerns of abolitionists and moratorium advocates: "Some claim it would be better for a guilty man to go free than for an innocent man to die. Such an ethic must assume that the failure to apply justice is better than the misapplication of justice. Must we be faced with a choice of equal evil over against equal injustice? The issue is that anything less than death is not the full measure of justice; thus, anything less than death is an injustice.