Killing to stop killing
For the first time in 17 years, the U.S. government has executed federal prisoners, killing 47-year-old Daniel Lewis Lee and 68-year-old Wesley Ira Purkey last week.
Daniel Lewis Lee and an accomplice murdered three people in 1996 — William Frederick Mueller, Nancy Ann Mueller and their 8-yearold daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Powell.
It was pure evil.
Perkey kidnapped and murdered a 16-year-old girl.
This was pure evil.
But how is that evil negated by
their murder by the state?
Lee received the death penalty, despite the objections of the Muellers’ surviving family members.
The point is not the killers’ evil but how we answer it.
It is not their lives that we cherish but life itself.
These executions have renewed the national debate on the death penalty:
• Do we trust the government with the power of life and death?
• Do we trust the justice system to get it right?
A 2014 paper by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan and Michigan State University found that 4% of people put on death row since the 1970s were falsely convicted.
• Finally, does the death penalty reflect who we are as Americans and the more perfect union we are ever striving to attain?
Ours is a system of limited government, one that questions the state and seeks to limits its power.
Our society is one based largely on the Judeo-Christian ethic, which limits the power of man to judge and grants to God what belongs to God alone.
Only God can judge a soul, give a life, or take one.
“Thou shalt not kill” does not have a footnote that says: “Except in the name of retribution.”
And answering killing with killing never did make any logical or moral sense.
That leaves us with mercy — the value and virtue of mercy.
After a white supremacist killed nine Black parishioners in 2015 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., the victims’ families publicly forgave the gunman. So, too, did the Amish community forgive after a deranged man killed five Amish schoolgirls in a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., and then took his own life.
Daniel Lewis Lee is now dead, as is Wesley Ira Purkey, but the pain their crimes caused has not abated. More killing cannot do that. Only mercy grants the capacity to even partially heal.