Re­sponse to the let­ter by Is­rael Khan ("An­oth­er look at the death penal­ty," Wednes­day): The pri­ma­ry scope of any pe­nal-ty is to re­dress the dis­or­der caused by the of­fence. When his pun­ish­ment is vol­un­tar­i­ly ac­cept­ed by the of­fend­er, it takes on the val­ue of ex­pi­a­tion. More­over, pun­ish­ment, in ad­di­tion to pre­serv­ing pub­lic or­der and the safe­ty of peo­ple, has a med­i­c­i­nal scope: as far as pos­si­ble it should con­tribute to the cor­rec­tion of the of­fend­er.

If blood­less means are suf­fi­cient to de­fend against the ag­gres­sor and to pro­tect the safe­ty of peo­ple, pub­lic au­thor­i­ty should lim­it it­self to such means, be­cause they bet­ter cor­re­spond to the con­crete con­di­tions of the com­mon good and are more in con­for­mi­ty to the dig­ni­ty of the hu­man per­son. The Fifth Com­mand­ment states: "Thou shall not mur­der."

To­day, as a con­se­quence of the pos­si­bil­i­ties which the state has for ef­fec­tive­ly pre­vent­ing crimes, the cas­es in which the ex­e­cu­tion of the of­fend­er is an ab­solute ne­ces­si­ty are very rare, if not non-ex­is­tent.

There ul­ti­mate­ly re­mains no moral jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for im­pos­ing a sen­tence of death. Vi­o­lence begets vi­o­lence both in our hearts and in our ac­tions. By con­tin­u­ing the tra­di­tion of re­spond­ing to killing with state-sanc­tioned killing, we rob our­selves of moral con­sis­ten­cy and per­pet­u­ate that which we seek to sanc­tion.

Paul Kokos­ki

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