From here:
Russell Williams has gone off to prison, where he will have ample time — the next 25 years at least — to reflect on the evil he unleashed: the brave young women he tortured and killed, and the pain and suffering he inflicted on their loved ones.
It is more likely, however, that he will choose to reflect on how much he misses his cat, or on the bad luck of having tires with a unique pattern, and the misfortune of there being snow on the ground to make that pattern visible to police. Who knows what sociopaths reflect on when they are incarcerated? Who cares?
If ever there was a moment for a national discussion on a return to capital punishment, this is it. We have before us a serial torturer and killer, and a nauseating superfluity of evidence attesting to his crimes, not to mention his own detailed confessions.
Williams’ crimes were born of neither passion nor insanity. On the contrary, his crimes are distinguished by the dispassion and sanity he brought to bear in committing them. Williams led a double life with chilling efficiency and organization. He was so competent at compartmentalizing his professional life and domestic life from his life of perversion that his own wife and closest associates were totally bamboozled. That takes a high order of intelligence and ruthless planning to carry on. Everything he did was premeditated.
Williams has no right to live. He should die.
The arguments against the death penalty generally run along the lines of:
To kill someone is always wrong. It is difficult to maintain this pacifist position without hypocrisy while living in a society whose order and well-being are maintained by force or the threat of force.
To kill someone to punish them for murder makes the state as bad as the murderer. If that were true, the state could not imprison kidnappers or use force at all to maintain order since it would always be as bad as the criminal.
From a Christian perspective, to kill someone gives them less time to repent and turn to Christ. Alternatively, as Dr. Johnson noted, the threat of one’s imminent demise serves to concentrate the mind, so it could lead to accelerated repentance.
Capital punishment is not a deterrent. The original article addresses this to some extent. Common sense would tell us that insofar that any punishment is a deterrent against crime, the ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime should be more of a deterrent than imprisonment.
Capital punishment is wrong since human life is sacred. True, but if capital punishment is a deterrent, it would save lives and protect the innocent.
Capital punishment is irreversible. True; and the impossibility of correcting a mistake is one of the few convincing arguments against capital punishment.
Temporal justice has always seemed to me to be tinged with fraudulence; as Pascal noted, “if magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would of itself be venerable enough”. Nevertheless, if temporal justice has any meaning, I find it hard to see how someone like Russell Williams should not be put to death.
