Death Penalty.

With respect to the death penalty, Frederick David Graves says, "retribution is simply wrong" as a justification for capital punishment for murderers. This is actually a rather new sentiment in jurisprudence, and in history in general.

Going back all the way to Noah, we are advised: "If a man sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed." Then, in the laws of Moses for Israel, capital punishment is decreed for murderers. Part of the rationale for this is that "the blood of the victim cries out from the ground."

Then many centuries later, we are advised by the Apostle Paul as to Roman law that "the magistrate does not bear the sword in vain." Not to mention more recent British and American law.

In light of all this, exactly why is it, again, that retribution is invalid? Has "punishment" now somehow become a dead letter in American society?

Finally, with respect to "deterrence" as an alternative justification, it is rather more likely than not that the death penalty is a motivator, given how strenuously most murderers fight like anything to get life imprisonment as the option instead.

Thomas F. Harkins Jr.

Ft. Worth, Texas

The reply by Alan J. Denis to my previous letter about capital punishment displaces a landmark of juridical reasoning we should all be engaged in resetting for this and future generations.

The law must have a mind controlled by reason, a fixed set of principles impervious to personal opinion. If, as we were taught, there are four "elements" by which we may justify criminal proceedings: restraint, deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution, then our justices should stick to those elements ... just as winning lawyers require judges to stick to the elements of causes of action and not be permitted to vary because of personal bias. In decades past, judges adhered more closely to the rules of juridical reasoning, fixed guidelines by which they agreed to be constrained.

Those guidelines have of late fallen by the wayside, unwanted impediments to the mad march of progress so-called, blind to the ineluctable consequence to future generations.

Though we call published decisions "opinions," they are not supposed to be other than consequences of applying those principles of...