The Death Penalty: An Eye for an Eye

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guarantee that prospective ax murderers would pay heed. As Camus noted in his 1957 essay against capital punishment: "When pickpockets were punished by hanging in England, other thieves exercised their talents in the crowds surrounding the scaffold where their fellow was being hanged."

But U.S. society is not unprotected just because it lacks weekly or daily executions. "The issue is not whether we slay murderers or free them," notes University of Michigan Law Professor Richard Lempert. "It is whether we send them to their death or to prison for life." Prison is a far more manageable weapon than death, and the U.S. is not at all hesitant to put criminals behind bars: the population there has doubled since 1970, to 400,000. "One trouble with the death penalty," says Henry Schwarzschild, an A.C.L.U. official, "is that it makes 25 years seem like a ight sentence."

Opponents of capital punishment feel that prison terms without parole would deter as many potential murderers as the death penalty. Says Amsterdam: "The degree of punishment is not necessarily a deterrent even to someone who thinks rationally. What deters people from crime is the likelihood of getting caught and undergoing punishment." Reppetto agrees: "I always favor something that will get tough with a lot of offenders instead of getting very tough with just a handful."

To diehard proponents of the death penalty, deterrence hardly matters anyway. Declares Buckley: "If it could be absolutely determined that there was no deterrent factor, I'd still be in favor of capital punishment." Taking the lives of murderers has a zero-sum symmetry that is simple and satisfying enough to feel like human instinct: the worst possible crime deserves no less than the worst possible punishment. "An eye for an eye," says Illinois Farmer Jim Hensley. "That's what it has to be. People can't be allowed to get away with killing." Counters Amsterdam: "The answer can hardly be found in a literal application of the eye-for-an-eye formula. We do not burn down arsonists' houses." The scriptures do preach mercy as well as retribution. Last Saturday, in fact, Pope John Paul II sweepingly recommended "clemency, or pardon, for those condemned to death."

The Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell relies more peculiarly on Christian authority. He claims that Jesus Christ favored the death penalty. On the Cross, Falwell says, He could have spoken up: "If ever there was a platform for our Lord to condemn capital punishment, that was it. He did not."

But was Jesus ever vengeful? Ordinary people are. "Execution is primarily a vengeance mechanism," says Notre Dame's Hauerwas, a pacifist, "but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Vengeance is a way society gestures to itself that justice has force against injustice." A main point of criminal laws, after all, is to make private feuds unnecessary. "No society should put the burden on me to seek personal retribution," says New York University's Herbert I. London, a social historian. "The state has an obligation not to make me a killer."

During troubled times in the ancient Greek colonies, poor men would volunteer to be scapegoats. Each was housed and well fed by the authorities, and then,