COLUMN RIGHT / CHARLES W. COLSON : Harris Faces Vengeance, Not Justice : The death penalty has no social, legal or religious basis.

No one can consider Robert Alton Harris’ crimes without feeling both horror and the deepest sense of compassion for the families of his victims.

And it is only human to want revenge. On an emotional level, the most natural desire is to snuff out Harris and killers like him. But these feelings can obscure the larger issues: Is it prudent public policy for a nation to deliberately take life? If so, is our criminal-justice system capable of administering the death penalty justly and morally?

Though my fellow political conservatives--and some of my fellow Christians-- may consider me a heretic, my experience and conscience compel me to say no.

My years in politics deepened long-held conservative convictions about limited government. Excessive government power is too often abused by fallible humans. And to be able to deliberately take a life is the ultimate power.

My experience as a lawyer confirmed these convictions. I’ve seen firsthand that the judges, prosecutors and juries of our overburdened criminal-justice system are not infallible. The system is not fairly administered; of those sentenced to die, only a fraction are actually executed. A disproportionate percentage of that number are minorities.

And sometimes innocent people are executed. Judge Learned Hand was right: Better that 100 guilty people go free than one innocent person be sentenced to death.

Fortunately, freedom and death are not the alternatives. Convicted capital offenders should spend the rest of their lives in prison. And those years should not be idle ones. Offenders can never begin to pay for the lives of their victims, but they should be put to work, hard work, their wages used to offset the cost of housing them. Any balance should be paid into a victims’ compensation fund.

“But what about the Bible?” some of my fellow Christians may say. Yes, the Old Testament sanctions the death penalty. But it also provides procedural protections for capital defendants that our system does not. For example, Deuteronomy 17:6 states, “On the evidence of two (eye) witnesses . . . he that is to die shall be put to death; a person shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness.”

While the Mosaic code does not apply today, it nonetheless reflects God’s standards. I have visited most of the Death Rows in America and I can testify that they are filled with people convicted by circumstantial evidence, their convictions not even coming close to the certainty of guilt that biblical law demands.

Some capital-punishment proponents argue that the death penalty provides a strong deterrent to crime, that it saves innocent lives. If that were true, I would be forced to reconsider my views.

But deterrence works only if punishment is perceived by the offender as certain and immediate. Even in the most clear-cut American cases, years elapse between the commission of a crime and the execution of punishment. Even for the premeditated offense (which most capital cases are not), punishment is a vague threat, not a grim certainty.

And even certain punishment doesn’t always deter. In 19th-Century England, pickpockets were publicly hanged to discourage others from such crime. The executions had a carnival air; thousands would turn out to watch. But even as one pickpocket hung on the gallows, other thieves used the diversion to work the crowd below, emptying the spectators’ pockets.

Last Sunday, The Times printed an eloquent article by Steve Baker, father of one of Harris’ victims. Baker says that arguments about deterrence miss the point, that the purpose of Harris’ execution is “to punish one man for the brutal killing of two boys. No more and no less.”

Harris deserves punishment. But is punishment by death just?

Some argue that Harris must be executed to “pay” for the lives of the two teen-agers. But this devalues the victims’ lives. True justice rights wrongs for the benefit of both individuals and society at large. The gas chamber, lethal injection and the electric chair cannot do so.

State-sanctioned killing only accelerates the growing drift toward death in this country (of which capital punishment, abortion on demand and the euthanasia trend are symptoms). As we re-examine the terrible case of Robert Alton Harris, we should also look in the mirror as a society. Do we want the kind of culture in which justifiable anger over our crime crisis explodes into a demand for vengeance? If so, we will discover all too soon that true justice has not been served, nor the thirst for vengeance quenched.