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I Don’t Know About the Death Penalty · Commentary - TJ Meadows

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  Speaker 1: I don't know is not a cursed condition. Sometimes it's
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  Speaker 1: a blessing. Struggling with difficult ideas, really wrestling with them,
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  Speaker 1: can ultimately produce wisdom. And I don't know what I
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  Speaker 1: think about capital punishment. West Virginia has debated bringing back
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  Speaker 1: the death penalty before. And Senator Brian Helton says he'll
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  Speaker 1: try again, proposing capital punishment for certain heinous crimes against children. Nationally,
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  Speaker 1: the public leans toward the death penalty. Pew Research says
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  Speaker 1: 66% of Americans favor it for people convicted of murder.
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  Speaker 1: But that support changes when you start adding variables. The
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  Speaker 1: circumstances of the crime, the offender's age, the possibility of
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  Speaker 1: wrongful conviction, and exactly how the punishment would be carried out.
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  Speaker 1: Then there's Krista Pike. Pike, a West Virginia native, has
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  Speaker 1: spent decades on Tennessee's death row for the 1995 murder
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  Speaker 1: of Colleen Slemmer. Tennessee tried to execute Pike Wednesday night.
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  Speaker 1: It failed. After two doses of pentobarbital, Pike remained alive.
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  Speaker 1: She was taken to a hospital and received life-saving treatment.
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  Speaker 1: Governor Bill Lee then halted executions for the remainder of
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  Speaker 1: the year and ordered an investigation. And maybe this issue
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  Speaker 1: is so difficult because it sits at the intersection of religion, morality,
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  Speaker 1: and law. Some Christians point to Romans 13. Government does
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  Speaker 1: not bear the sword in vain. Others think about John 8,
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  Speaker 1: the woman caught in adultery, when Jesus tells the crowd,
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  Speaker 1: let the one without sin cast the first stone. What
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  Speaker 1: do we do with those passages? Are they answering the
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  Speaker 1: same question? Does one carry more weight than the other?
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  Speaker 1: Centuries of theological debate suggest that there's no easy answer.
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  Speaker 1: Morality doesn't simplify it much. If human life has immeasurable value,
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  Speaker 1: can deliberately taking a life ever be justified? Or does
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  Speaker 1: deliberately taking an innocent life create circumstances in which the
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  Speaker 1: offender forfeits his own? The law draws lines. Murder can
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  Speaker 1: qualify for capital punishment. Other crimes cannot. Courts consider age, intent,
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  Speaker 1: mental capacity, aggravating circumstances, and mitigating circumstances. Human beings are
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  Speaker 1: ultimately required to make extraordinarily difficult judgments about other human beings.
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  Speaker 1: And then there's another question. What if death is too easy?
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  Speaker 1: Part of me thinks perhaps the greater punishment is confinement
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  Speaker 1: until natural death, forcing someone to live every day with
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  Speaker 1: what he or she has done. My flesh gravitates towards that.
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  Speaker 1: But should justice... simply satisfy my flesh? Probably not. Here's
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  Speaker 1: what I do know. There's nothing intellectually weak about saying,
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  Speaker 1: I don't know. Sometimes certainty should be earned. Capital punishment
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  Speaker 1: will continue to be debated in our legislatures, tested in
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  Speaker 1: our courts, and ultimately shaped by the judgment of the people.
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  Speaker 1: We'll be better prepared to make those decisions if we
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  Speaker 1: wrestle with the question before the moment demands an answer.