I was away from The Corner yesterday, and also my e-mail; I have a lot of catching-up to do regarding yesterday’s death penalty brouhaha. I’m going to do my best to catch up today, though I can’t possibly answer all of this e-mail personally (and some of it is so vile that I wouldn’t want to answer it anyway). For now, let me say simply that I do believe criminals like the Illinois vermin convicted of ripping the unborn child from its mother’s womb, and killing the woman and her other children, deserve death. As I said in the piece, I believe that child rapists deserve death, which goes further than most are willing to go. But inasmuch as we have a reasonable way of making sure these people are kept away from society, and punished severely for their crimes, I am unwilling to support the current deeply flawed death penalty system. In other words, as much as I’d like the state to kill some or even most of these bastards, I am not willing to risk having the state kill innocents. Life in a supermax prison without possibility of parole is an unhappy compromise, but one I think we can live with. If we have to err, I’d rather that we err on the side of life. I’ll try to get to more specific points today, provided I can make good progress on this NRODT story Rich assigned me yesterday.