Susan Smith

I found your July 11 editorial on the Susan Smith trial extremely offensive and patronizing. Beginning with the subheading: “Susan Smith is guilty; but would killing her make us all feel better?” you trivialize the desire of most Americans to see justice done. This woman has done what most could not even conceive of doing and you make it sound like the rest of us are crude and vindictive for wanting her to be put to death by execution (a far cry from “killing her,” as if it were some vigilante justice). Can’t we finally distinguish between the need for individuals to not take another’s life and the duty of society to protect itself?

Also, remember that two innocent children have suffered an awful death at the hands of their own mother! How could you possibly think that being the “object of hatred” is “punishment enough”?

DAVID REBER Whittier I am wondering if you would 1) have written it at all if Smith was indeed telling the truth abut her sons being abducted by a black man and 2) if your feelings on the death penalty would be the same. I happen to agree that sentencing this sick, pathetic woman to death gains nothing. However, the same gains would be realized regardless of who was responsible for the tragic deaths of those little boys.

I don’t believe in the death penalty, but in this case life in prison is not enough.

VALERIE MAGEE Laguna Niguel So you think that a trial (and death penalty) for Smith is “unneeded”? Why do some of us want the death penalty even though she would not be eligible for parole for 30 years? There are many of us who had been against capital punishment, but we are now more emphatically against the possibility of parole and the probability of recidivism in capital crimes.

STUART LUBIN Los Angeles