The death march.

• Position: Timothy McVeigh trial and capital punishment - Editorial

The death penalty has lost its sting. Americans as a people are committing premeditated, state-sponsored murder at a record rate. Few seem to care -- even though the rationale for capital punishment has changed. No longer is the deterrent argument circulating, bogus as it was. Instead, we are opting for vengeance straight up.

Timothy McVeigh's sentencing came as no surprise. He's the poster boy for the death penalty. He killed 168 people and showed not an ounce of remorse. But what good will come of executing Timothy McVeigh? It won't make the next madman think twice before blowing up a building. It won't bring back those who perished in Oklahoma City. And it may not salve the psyches of the victims' families, which is an increasingly popular justification for the gallows.

Listen to Bud Welch, who lost his daughter, Julie-Marie, to McVeigh's Murrah building bombing. She was twenty-three.

"Every day for a year. I'd come by the fence that enriches the footprint of the Murrah building, where it once stood, where she died. And during the first few months after the bombing, I was not opposed to the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh," he wrote in Time magazine. "But, as time has gone on, I've tried to think this out for myself.... There's been enough bloodshed where this fence now stands. We don't need to have any more. To me the death penalty is vengeance, and vengeance doesn't really help anyone in the healing process."

The McVeigh jury, though, was stripped of anyone who might share Welch's viewpoint. During jury selection, anyone who voiced opposition to the death penalty was excused. While the Supreme Court has ruled this legal, it raises the question of whether a defendant receives a fair trial. Is it really a jury of one's peers when the 20 percent of Americans who disapprove of the death penalty are forbidden from participating?

The other procedural question the McVeigh trial raises is the question of victims testifying at sentencing. There weren't a lot of Bud Welches there. Instead, the jury heard from witness after witness who had lost loved ones to McVeigh's barbarity. This inevitably prejudiced the jury. Who would not be moved by such testimony?

But does such testimony have any place at sentencing? Again, it's settled law, but it doesn't sit well. Victims and their families cannot be dispassionate, and understandably so. Almost anyone who has been preyed upon would be tempted to seek revenge; it's human nature. Yet the purpose of a...