Tara Stroll’s piece on the death penalty (“The death penalty affirms the value of life”, page 7, Nov. 28) not only confuses the value of life with the cost thereof, but is also grossly under-researched. Stroll refutes the claim that the death penalty is racist by citing figures from the Death Penalty Information Center. She notes that “in cases since 1976 where the defendant was sentenced to death, 80 percent of the victims were white”. This statistic does little, in itself, to counter the racism argument as victims are not the ones being executed by the state. Perhaps, if Ms. Stroll had read further in the DPIC study she would have come across the fact that 42% of death row inmates are black, a figure grossly disproportionate to the national black population level of 12.3%. Ms. Stroll also rolls out the old “death penalty as a deterrent” argument, which is becoming less legitimate each year as the number of violent crimes in states with the death penalty continues to outpace states without capital punishment. According to a 2002 Department of Justice study, the difference in murders and other violent crimes nationwide between states with the death penalty and those without was an astonishing 36%. Meaning, states without the death penalty routinely cull 36% fewer murders than states with so-called “deterrent punishment”. Most appalling however, is Ms. Stroll’s blatant blasphemy of God’s word. She cites one example from the Bible that, through rough interpretation, could condone the death penalty. However, the countless number of passages that truly “affirm the value of life” show another Christian stance on capital punishment. Look to Matthew 5:38 (“If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also”) and Romans 12:17-19 (“Do not repay anyone evil for evil . . . do not take revenge, I will repay”), Ms. Stroll, if you would like to see exactly why the Vatican “has engaged itself in the pursuit of the abolition of capital punishment as an integral part of the defense of human life at every stage of its development, and does so in defiance of any assertion of a culture of death.” (Pope John Paul II at the World Congress on the Death Penalty, 2001). It is oversight such as this that allows for the spread of the pro-death stance. Partial or incomplete information does little to provide a credible position on important issues such as the death penalty; instead, it only redefines the value of life through the words of one person.

Nels Vulin CAS ’09 [email protected]