Dear friends, Once the government puts an innocent man to death, what is there to be done to bring him back to life? A disproportionate number of those men (and women) who are executed are non-white people and people who are poor. People with money (of any race, like O.J. Simpson) go scott-free, while innocent people are sometimes, occasionally, put to death for crimes they did not commit. Eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable, as people are prone to errors of judgment and of false memory; science has proven this to be the case; often, no DNA evidence was available when a person was first wrongfully convicted of killing (murdering) someone; and many people mistakenly identify another person for the actual perpetrator of a violent crime. Putting anyone to death although violates the Spirit of the Law "Thou shalt not kill." There is no place in a Christian, civilized country, for the death penalty. True conservatives, who believe inherently in limited powers for the government, should not surrender to the government the power of life and death: life is, and should always be, in God's hands, not in a judge's or a jury's hands. Since people are basically sinful, there is nothing to prevent government officials, or people with private, self-made opinions, from sentencing others to death from impure, vindictive motives, or because they believe, and wrongly so, that "The Bible says ...". Since we have, under our constitutional system, a separation of church and state, we cannot appeal to the Bible the enforcement of the civil and penal laws of our land; the Bible belongs to the Orthodox, and to all true Christians, wherever they be found, and not to the United States government, or to any government, for that matter. May God have mercy on all of us; what, but the mercy of God, is there to prevent injustice to any one of us being done by an over-zealous, theocratic government imposing the death penalty upon any of us as private citizens. If a person has really committed murder, the penalty should be, for all duly convicted, life in maximum security prisons, without possibility of release. Take care. Sincerely, Scott Harrington