A commenter recently shared under one of my posts on the death penalty:

“Some people need to die.”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that sentence. Because maybe it gets us closer to the real argument over the death penalty than statistics ever will. Some people need to die. Okay.

Who decides?

You? Me? A prosecutor? Twelve jurors? A judge? The government?

And what happens when they’re wrong? Because we already know they’re wrong sometimes. Since 1973, more than 200 people sentenced to death in the United States have later been exonerated. Not had their sentences reduced. Not gotten off on a technicality.

Exonerated.

People our justice system had declared guilty enough to kill, who were later cleared. That’s not evidence that everyone on death row is innocent. It is evidence that the machinery we entrust with deciding who “needs to die” is capable of being catastrophically wrong. And prison has one enormous advantage over execution:

You can let an innocent person out. You can’t unkill them.

“But what if someone murdered your child?”

This is usually where the conversation goes. What if it were your daughter? Your spouse? Your child? Wouldn’t you want the murderer dead then? Maybe. If somebody murdered one of the people I love most in this world, I don’t know what I would feel.

I might hate them. I might want them to suffer. I might want to kill them myself.And that’s precisely why my rage shouldn’t determine public policy.

A civilized society should be able to hold someone accountable without becoming an instrument for the victim’s vengeance. It should be able to say: We understand your rage. We will protect you. We will protect others.

We will hold this person accountable.

But we won’t kill someone because killing them feels good right now.

Because justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing.

And then there’s Jesus

This has always been the strangest part of the death penalty debate for me. I grew up Christian. And Christianity centers its entire story around a man executed by the government. Jesus knows state-sponsored killing rather intimately. And when violence comes for him, one of his closest friends does exactly what most of us instinctively understand.

Peter reaches for a weapon. He strikes the people coming to arrest Jesus. He cuts off a man’s ear. Someone is threatening the person Peter loves, so Peter responds with violence.

And Jesus stops him.

Put away the sword.

“Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” And according to Luke, Jesus then does something almost incomprehensible. He heals the man Peter just attacked. The enemy. The man standing with the people who came to arrest him. Jesus heals him.

Hours later, Jesus himself is being executed. And Luke places these words on his lips:

“Father, forgive them.”

Not after they’ve apologized. Not after they’ve demonstrated sufficient remorse. Not after they’ve suffered enough to make the scales balance. They’re still killing him. And he asks for forgiveness.

“But Jesus told them to buy swords!”

He did. And when his followers tell him they have two swords among them, Jesus says that is enough. Two swords. For the whole group. Whatever we make of that difficult passage, it becomes pretty hard to interpret it as Jesus telling his followers to establish an armed movement when we keep reading.

Because shortly afterward someone actually uses one of those swords. And Jesus stops him. Then heals the wound. The sword gets its moment.

Jesus rejects it.

What about “an eye for an eye”?

Christians sometimes reach even further back:

Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth.

But that ancient legal principle wasn’t simply an invitation to vengeance. It also placed a limit on vengeance. Your family injures someone in mine, so I don’t get to slaughter your entire family. Punishment was to be proportionate. And Jesus takes his followers somewhere even more difficult. You’ve heard eye for eye…

But I tell you…

Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. That’s the maddening thing about Jesus. He keeps getting in the way of our perfectly reasonable hatred.

The woman waiting to die

There’s another Christian story I’ve always found impossible to separate from this question. A woman accused of adultery is dragged before Jesus. Her accusers know the law. They know the punishment. They are prepared to carry it out. Jesus doesn’t pretend adultery is wonderful. He simply refuses to participate in killing her.

Let the one without sin throw the first stone.

Eventually, there is nobody left willing to throw one. There is a legitimate textual-history issue here: this story does not appear in our earliest manuscripts of John’s Gospel. So I’m not going to build an entire theology of capital punishment on it. But Christians have treasured the story for centuries because they recognize something profoundly Jesus-shaped inside it:

Jesus stands between a condemned human being and the people who believe they are righteous enough to kill her.

Does killing killers stop killing?

Then there’s the argument that none of this matters because execution is necessary to deter murder. Except we don’t have evidence establishing that it does. The National Research Council concluded that existing research couldn’t reliably determine whether the death penalty decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide.

The National Institute of Justice points toward something much better supported by deterrence research: the certainty of being caught matters considerably more than making punishment increasingly severe.

And yet we keep returning to death. Why? Maybe because deterrence isn’t really what some of us want. Maybe we want someone to pay.

Some people need to die.

I keep coming back to those words. I understand the feeling underneath them. There are acts of human cruelty so horrific that vengeance can feel not merely understandable but righteous. But I don’t believe the purpose of civilization is to take our most primal impulses and institutionalize them.

I want society to be better than I might be on the worst day of my life. Protect us from dangerous people. Hold people accountable. Care for victims. Investigate the conditions that produce violence. Prevent the next murder. But don’t tell me that killing teaches us not to kill. And don’t ask me to trust an imperfect government, operating an imperfect legal system through imperfect human beings, with an irreversible power when we’ve already discovered more than 200 people it condemned to death who should never have been there.

When one human being kills another, we call it violence. I don’t believe violence becomes holy because the government does it for us. Maybe Jesus really meant it:

Those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Somewhere, somebody has to be the first one to put the damn sword down.