Since one of the presidential candidates is governor of a state famous for its executions, I think that a discussion of capital punishment might be in order. In hopes of beginning such a discussion, I will present here my own opinion on the subject.

I first wish to say that I think it is just to execute murderers and rapists. Such people deserve to die. Beyond that I would say that, however much they deserve to die, I doubt whether we, their fellow humans, have the right to give them what they deserve. That is, the justice of a punishment does not guarantee the justice of the one meting out that punishment.

When my sister destroyed my baseball glove by leaving it out in the rain, she certainly deserved to be punished, but that does not mean that I had the right to do the punishing. If I had made her stay in her room or had taken away her allowance, I would have been as much at fault as she was. Only my mother had the right to do those things. And even if my mother failed to punish her (which she did), that still did not give me the right to punish my sister.

I am not claiming here that we do not have the right to execute people. Perhaps we do. Perhaps we don't. I am saying only that, even if we have decided that execution is just, we must still ask the further question, "Just who has the right to do the executing?" This is a grave question, and any answer will affect every side of our moral and political thinking.

Having posed that question, I wish to make a proposal concerning the way execution should be carried out, if we indeed decide to carry it out at all.

Some will have heard of a Florida executioner who, when told that the electric chair that he used might malfunction, answered that it was all for the best because if that happened the criminal would suffer more. Most of us would agree that if we are to execute people, we ought to do it in a way that will not cause the criminal excessive suffering. This concern for the guilty man is, I think, noble.

But what we need most right now is concern for the executioners. When we see a man as hardened and dehumanized as that Florida executioner, we must ask ourselves how he came to be in such a state. Either he was like this before he was an executioner and signed up for the job because he would take pleasure in it or, he became like this because, by its very nature, his job is dehumanizing. If he was like this before he was executioner, then we have a problem because by offering jobs to such people we encourage their cruelty. If he became this way through the nature of his work, then we have done him a great disservice by pressing upon him the duties of an executioner.

Either way, I think that we must change the way we designate people to be executioners. The present system is neither fair to society, which suffers from having its members dehumanized, nor to individuals, who suffer from being dehumanized.

As a solution to this problem I would suggest that, if we are going to have executions, we choose our executioners by lotto, in the same way that we choose jurors. Just as we have jury duty, so would we have execution duty. If anyone balks at this, I would say that he has no right to support capital punishment. How can a man say that he believes in capital punishment if he is not willing to execute a criminal? Will he leave the dirty work to some else? That would be arch-hypocrisy.

If execution duty were made the common custom, a few things would happen. First, the terrible weight of killing a fellow human being would be taken off the professional executioner who should not but be crushed under such weight. And second, those self-righteous people who now run about crying for the execution of this or that man would then think twice before condemning another to death.

-Chris Brav is a junior at St. Olaf.