Death Penalty Defended

* Robert B. McLaren, in his March 9 “Orange County Voices” column opposing the death penalty, presents the crux of the abolitionist case on four grounds: unfair application; the absence of a clear deterrent effect; the possibility an innocent person may be executed; and the glorification of acts of violence in the larger culture by example of the state’s administration of the death penalty.

My answer is we must keep the death penalty both to deprive the murderer of his life and protect the innocent from his depredations.

Insofar as the death penalty has been unfairly applied, the solution is to apply it more equally and not drop it. Even if it should not be absolutely equitable, I prefer unequal justice to equal injustice.

No one has ever claimed that the death penalty deters everyone; if it deters just one person from contemplating murder or killing another human being, it’s moral worth has already been established.

The possibility that an innocent person may be executed can be prevented or minimized through DNA testing, requiring testimony from multiple witnesses, presentation of corroborating evidence and other safeguards.

However tragic the remote likelihood of executing an innocent person may be, the real horror is there is a massive blood bath in America today. Murderers killed innocent people and destroyed their families and loved ones.

The state’s execution of murderers does not constitute glorification of violence in the larger culture, since putting a murderer to death is society’s way of proclaiming that murder is the ultimate evil.

McLaren would have readers believe that executions are a dead end, accomplishing nothing. I assert executions in our society serve a principled moral goal: ensuring that a murderer will never again be able to kill someone else’s loved ones and that he will receive the same deprivation of life that he himself inflicted upon his victim.

NORMAN F. BIRNBERG

Long Beach