Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

When I was in the army, the first sergeant to get my attention told me about an incident in Korea. In a forward area he had come across a private raping a Korean woman. The sergeant drew his .45 and ordered the private to get off the woman. The private refused, so the sergeant shot him in the head. I'm okay with that. The private had a choice. The sergeant had a choice.

I'm not okay with having the government ponder at length and then execute human beings. It's not because I care about Tsarnaev. He had a choice. I'm not a good enough person to care about a terrorist who committed murder. But why should we trust the bureaucratic system enough to sanction the death penalty? We understand that some innocent people get executed. What is worse, the government-sanctioned death penalty makes brutish official behavior almost respectable. 

We are used to stacked decks, of course. A jury in a case like this excludes any citizen who doesn't favor death. As Albert Camus might put it, that's absurd. In a democracy the jury pool should include us all.