Buerger Bites
From the desk of the Jewish Times publisherVengeance
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.
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