I also acknowledge that justice is not something we can easily achieve. Whenever men are involved there will be imperfections and difficult problems such as faulty witness memory, over-zealous prosecutors, institutional racism, and the failure to provide exculpatory evidence. Such problems by themselves are more than enough to occupy the talents of our elected officials. That is one reason why I think we need to limit the role of government to its essential functions.

Only God achieves perfection; the best we can achieve is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Do I detect a bit of sarcasm?

As a society we do exercise judgments through the power of the state. We have the God given right to work together to defend ourselves and to protect each other.

Ethics can be very personal. Whether your heart bleeds is for you to decide. The problem is motivation, and what motivates people to promote (or fight) the death penalty varies.

Vengeance I think most would agree is immoral. Based upon the need for self defense, the deterrence argument, however, has a certain indisputable validity. Once a killer is dead, it is rather difficult for that killer to kill again.

As to whether the death of a killer deters other possible killers, I do not know. I do not think our society makes any serious effort to use the execution one killer to deter other killers. We conduct executions in private (to avoid any appeal to our worse instincts for vengeance).

In any event, how does one measure motivation? What motivates killers? What constitutes valid statistical data? On such subjects, I tend to find statistics based conclusions dubious and unconvincing.

Although I think one can make a rational argument for the death penalty, I think the practical problems of implementing this penalty argue against it — in our era. Because of strong and emotional opposition, the death penalty has become too costly and troublesome. To be enforceable, a law requires broad public support. The death penalty does not have such support; our society is troubled by killing livestock for food. We execute so few murderers that the death penalty has little practical effect on crime. Thus I argue that Republicans should drop their support for the death penalty.

What does have broad public support is locking up murderers and tossing the key. Such support makes life imprisonment an effective deterrent. So I think it best for our elected Republicans officials to stop worrying about executions and to concentrate on keeping violent criminals in jail. Republicans should leave the theatrics of the death penalty to Democrats and focus on their duty to protect the public.