I’m shaken. By the school shootings that don’t stop. By the assassination at UVU. By the way conversations everywhere have turned back to gun control and now the death penalty.
This isn’t an abstract issue for me. A friend’s daughter was on the lawn during that shooting. I saw her on a walk a few days ago and I hugged her. The trauma was still in her eyes. That’s what justice is really about. Not theory. Not marble words above a courthouse. It’s human. It’s holding someone you love when their world has just been shattered.
That’s why I believe we need a bargain. Scrap the death penalty for almost everything. Murder, yes, even the worst murders — life without parole, lock the door, throw away the key. But I want the ultimate penalty for two categories: mass shootings, especially of kids in schools, and assassinations of major public figures.
Some argue this violates the Eighth Amendment. But “cruel and unusual” was meant to stop grotesque punishments like burning or quartering — not proportionate justice for crimes that rip at the fabric of community. There is nothing unusual about reserving the harshest penalty for crimes that shock an entire nation.
For everything else, prison for life. But if you try to wipe out a classroom of kids, or make yourself famous by killing a public figure, society must draw a line. That’s not cruelty. That’s clarity.
J. Tyson Dickson
Salt Lake City