There’s nothing more awful than hearing about a young woman who is beaten, raped and murdered.

When the perpetrator is apprehended, you want revenge — an “eye for an eye,” as the Torah declares.

I tend to be against the death penalty, but find myself hoping that the guy who tortured and ended a beautiful life suffers horribly. When you see the grief on the face of parents of the dead, pain that you realize will never go away, you don’t want that murderer’s life spared.

Another sickening tragedy occurs when a person is finally freed after losing decades behind bars for a wrongful verdict. There have been instances of someone rotting for 10, 20, or even 30 years in jail, only to be released when the relatively new technology of DNA is applied to an old case. With such cases being overturned, including in Maryland, one has to think that at least one person has been wrongfully put to death.

A cold-blooded killer taking an innocent life is horrendous. For me, the government killing an innocent person on death row is equally harrowing.

Maryland is in a heated debate over trying to repeal the death penalty. The views from the Jewish community tend to fall along the bell curve. More liberal Jews and rabbis are working vehemently to overturn it; most right-wing and many Orthodox Jews are pro-death penalty.

The Baltimore Jewish Council took no stance on the matter because of such a very diverse Jewish outlook.

As we’ve reported, many Maryland Jewish lawmakers are working with Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Catholic, on the repeal. Rabbi Mark G. Loeb, a Conservative rabbi, was appointed by Mr. O’Malley to serve on the commission charged with recommending if the state should end the death penalty. Capital punishment, the group concluded, ought to be abolished here. However, state lawmakers are not so quick to make the change.

This is a tough issue for me; I’m persuaded by arguments on both sides.

I was telling a friend the other day that I often disagree with certain Jewish laws and regulations, which I feel need to be updated thanks to modern science and technology. For example, there are more humane ways to kill animals than with the prescribed use of a knife for slaughtering kosher meat. Yet, we don’t update the laws of kashrut.

However, with the death penalty, I think society would benefit from applying centuries-old Jewish law. I realize that both liberals and conservatives are doing just that while reaching different conclusions. The Torah, for example, approves the death penalty for murder. The Talmud, however, puts many conditions on its application.

Take that phrase “eye for an eye” from Deuteronomy. Later commentators said this referred only to monetary compensation. Also, Jewish law declares that for a Jewish court to apply the death penalty, two witnesses, unrelated to the murderer, need to have seen the crime. In the 21st century, I take this to mean that we need positive, indisputable identification for the act of murder.

I think this could be any combination of: two eyewitnesses, DNA evidence, or video of the actual murder. (Aren’t cameras everywhere these days?) If those do not exist, it should not be a capital case.

As much as we would like revenge, the risk of condemning an innocent man for murder must be minimized. We Jews need to help persuade the overall community of the need to end the practice of executing people without proper witnesses.

Just as with Jewish law, the secular law is getting more and more complicated. We need to simplify the process so that we can punish horrible people, prevent even one human from wrongful execution, and maintain a civil society.

Even with the incredibly painful emotional cost of such cases, to allow for capital punishment in our state, we must have strict, proper evidence.

During this whole recent Rush Limbaugh flap when he made all those powerful GOPers back down and apologize, I didn’t get worked up. Nor was I concerned when he publicly said he wanted President Barack Obama to fail at a time where we’re losing 500,000 jobs per month.

He’s an entertainer. He gets paid more money according to how many people listen to his rants. Last summer, because he says so many outrageous things, he was able to sign an eight-year, $400 million contract for attracting a lot of ears at a time when people are filling those ears with sounds from iPods, satellite radios and cellphones.

I felt the same way about Ron Smith, the conservative talk show host on WBAL radio. Now, though, he has a gig on Friday’s in the Baltimore Sun. The difference between radio and print is that you can’t count the number of eye balls being brought in because of a column. Certainly some newspapers pay columnists to write controversial things, but they tend to employ productive voices – from the left and the right. Radio and TV tend to hire personalities (Exhibit 1: CNBC’s Jim Cramer).

This is all to say that I wouldn’t normally comment on the wildly off base things Ron Smith often says on air. But when he writes for 250,000 readers a column that is blatantly and unfairly anti-Israel, I get upset and have to say something.

In his Friday the 13th column, Smith blamed the “Israel lobby” for forcing Charles W. Freeman Jr. to withdraw his name for being submitted as the head of the National Intelligence Council. Smith backed Freeman’s assertion that it was due to pro-Israel lobbying groups.

He went on to bash Israel writing in the Sun “The importance of this fight is that in the end, pro-Israel lawmakers and lobbyists got their way, which means there is little likelihood of any significant shift in our one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” 

Smith also cited in his OpEd piece other examples he thought where Jewish groups controlled Congress: “No congressional debate is ever allowed about the immense amount of aid we send to Israel.”

But when it came to Freeman, he forgot to mention that many in Congress, such as Virginia Republican Frank Wolf, were concerned about his running a Saudi-funded think tank, advising a Chinese company and describing the quashed Tibet uprising as “race riots.”

It’s hard to see what Smith’s motivation is in this piece. Was he trying to take a slap the Democratic president who promised change and Smith thinks it’s more of Bush’s Israel policies?  Or is it that Smith is simply anti-Israel? After all, the facts overwhelming point to Israel simply wanting to live in peace with neighbors who forced into major wars in 1948, ’56, ’67, and ’73. Or is it because in the last few years, Israel and literally walked out of Lebanon and Gaza, but was thanked by a barrage of missiles and suicide bombers?

Smith may not be an entertainer, but his assertions of a more even-handed approach to those who hide military headquarters in elementary schools is entertaining. 

I realize coming from a person who followed a legend, people shouldn’t compare people to their predecessors. Heck, I had to follow Chuck Buerger as Publisher of the Baltimore Jewish Times. He was seen as the finest in his field. I know how Doug DeCinces – who replaced Brooks Robinson at third base for the Orioles—felt.

But, I can’t help but see the let down with Pope Benedict XVI following Pope John Paul II, who made enormous strides in some many areas. Obviously I care mostly about the healing of the Catholic-Jewish relations.  Pope Benedict XVI made a mistake concerning Bishop Richard Williamson’s Holocaust denial.

Now, Benedict XVI goes to Africa to tell Africans that condoms aren’t enough to prevent AIDS. Perhaps, he didn’t ask Bristol Palin’s views on the issue, but she’s proof that “abstinence only” education is not working. The result can be unwanted children for kids. But in Africa it results in death from AIDS, an epidemic that is destroying the continent.

I realize that John Paul II also was against birth control, which violates Church doctrines. However, I could overlook some of his issues, given how much he accomplished. (Besides, he wasn’t my spiritual leader.) It doesn’t help that Benedict seems so out of touch with our world.

According to the USA TODAY, the Pope told reporters, “’You can’t resolve [pregnancy] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

What would work? According to the article, “The pope said that a responsible and moral attitude toward sex would help fight the disease.”

In the meantime, millions more will die if they follow the dictates of this life-long papal appointment.