Yesterday, my local newspaper ran a story about a 25-year-old man charged with raping a four-year-old girl. According to the news report, the man, who had a history of indecent behavior with juveniles, infected the child with chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease.
What punishment is appropriate for such an offense?
A few months ago, a 45-year-old man shouting "Free Palestine" set Jewish Americans on fire in Boulder, Colorado. An 82-year-old woman died from her injuries.
What is a just punishment for such a vicious, racially motivated hate crime?
Earlier this week, an assassin killed Charlie Kirk while he was speaking on a university campus in Utah. Kirk, a conservative political activist, was 31 years old with a wife and two small children.
A 22-year-old Tyler Robinson was arrested. If convicted, what should be done with him?
When I was a college student, I took a class in criminology, which included a field trip to the Oklahoma's maximum-security prison. The warden was our tour guide, and he appeared to take pleasure in showing students the prison's death chamber, where the electric chair was displayed.
I recall the wooden chair was fitted with restraining straps and a metal cap with wires attached. It looked like a medieval torture device.
I also remember a viewing area where seated spectators could watch a prisoner being electrocuted. Over the chair was a large sign stating "Crime Doesn't Pay."
All the students were shocked by the scene. I, however, was overcome by nausea, physically sickened and frightened by what I saw.
From that moment until this week, I've been opposed to the death penalty. Gazing on the electric chair, I was overcome by the brutality and ugliness of capital punishment. I felt coursened by the sight of that chair and by the fact that I lived in a society that would kill a man in such a way.
This week, however, I re-examined my stance on capital punishment. I asked myself whether there are some crimes so heinous, so destructive to moral order, that the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment. Does society have the right and even the duty to signal its repugnance to certain violent acts by killing the perpetrator?
This morning, I was prepared to believe that a man who rapes a child deserves the death penalty as does a man who sets people on fire out of racial hatred. And I was certainly prepared to believe that the man who killed Charlie Kirk in cold blood should be executed.
But then I saw an image of Tyler Robinson, the man who was arrested on the charge of murdering Charlie Kirk. So young, so confused, so obsessed with violence.
If Robinson is convicted of this killing, he certainly deserves to die, and society has the moral right to execute him. Nevertheless, I hope the state of Utah doesn't inflict the death sentence because killing Tyler Robinson coursens us all.
Rather. I hope he is sentenced to a very long prison sentence, perhaps life in prison. After all. as Pope Francis observed, a life sentence is a death sentence, and that should satisfy society's sense of justice.
