Death for Those Who Inflict Death: "When law breakers and murderers are not held accountable for their behavior, law-abiding citizens are cheated.".

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.

On the heels of the intended mass murders in Milwaukee after a Bucks' playoff game, incidents in which 17 were shot, and preceding the lethal killing and injuring of innocents outside a California church, much of our attention was on the massacre of 10 innocent people in Buffalo, N.Y., driven to in three hours by a hate-filled racist. This outrage, as well as perhaps many others, unmistakably calls for the death penalty. His intention was clear. We know he committed the cold-blooded murders, so the criminal act also is clear. There is no reasonable doubt. He did it; he must pay for his acts. Most important of all, however, the public must be protected from him and his kind.

Surely, this is an example of evil personified. This was not caused by his nauseating racism. He enjoyed killing. He fired indiscriminately in a supermarket. According to eyewitness accounts cited in The Washington Post. the shooter "dropfped] to his knees and surrendered] to police.... He was laughing while he was being arrested.'' Clearly, there is no remorse, no contrition--and, of course, there were the requisite friends who said they could never imagine that such a "normal guy" could do such a thing. That and related sentiments are irrelevant. It does not matter why he did it. What, then, must we do?

The true purpose of punishment in the criminal justice system is to protect the public from such monsters. It should not be retribution, revenge, or rehabilitation. As the late head of Maryland prisons remarked, we cannot change these people--bad people never change.

Let there be compassion for their victims and protection for future victims. The murderer has chosen to abdicate his right to live and know freedom, in any setting.

In one of the better pieces favoring the death penalty, Charles Stimson, deputy director at the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, wrote a Heritage Foundation piece titled 'The Death Penalty Is Appropriate," to the effect that, while there are historic problems with the ultimate penalty, and, of course, aversions to the state's taking anyone's life, the public always has supported it conceptuallymore so when horrible murders are in the news, and there are cases which seem to demand it, such as the pre-planned murder and torture of four-year-old Genny Rojas by her aunt and uncle in California, when that state allowed the death penalty.

When law breakers and murderers are not held accountable for their behaviors, law-abiding citizens are...