从死刑囚犯中得出地道理.docxVIP

从死刑囚犯中得出的道理Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was gonna talk about today. We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln. He was sitting at the same table doing his math homework. And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine.My client was a guy named Will. He was from North Texas. He never knew his father very well, because his father left his mom while she was pregnant with him. And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old shetried to kill him with a butcher knife.She was taken away by authorities and placed in apsychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Willlived with his older brother until he committed suicide by shootinghimself through the heart. And after that Will bounced around from one familymember to another, until, by the time he was nine years old,he was essentially living on his own.That morning that I was sitting withKatya and Lincoln, I looked at my son, and I realized that when my client, Will, was his age, hed been living by himself for two years. Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder. And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime.But I dont want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment. I certainly think that my client shouldnt have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way Ive never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial.I think thats possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate -- maybe the most important corner -- where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous a