Ep. 92 – Why the death penalty can be pro-life

There have been two very different death penalty cases in the news recently, and each raises a different objection to capital punishment.

We'll start with this one.

It's a case out of Tennessee.

At the end of last month, Tennessee officials gave a woman named Krista Pike what was supposed to be a lethal injection.

Now, that's a form of execution where they put drugs into someone's system and those drugs are supposed to kill the person.

But Pike survived.

She has now left the hospital and has returned to prison.

What went wrong with the execution and whether Tennessee will execute her again is unclear.

All right, this case raises what I am going to term logistical arguments against the death penalty.

Okay, so it's not even about the morality of the death penalty.

It's just when people will say, oh, well, we can't do the death penalty.

For one, they'll say it costs too much money.

The death penalty costs a lot of money.

And then in this case, they'll say, well, look, we can't even do it.

We physically cannot execute people.

The prison officials, you had one job.

You had one job.

And Krista Pike is still alive.

All right.

So let's have a pause point.

Which of the great eight questions would you use to respond to this argument? I remember the argument is that, well, whatever you think about the death penalty, it costs too much money.

It takes too long to implement and we can't even do it.

We physically cannot execute someone.

And as a reminder, the grade eight questions are questions that we put in our mental toolbox to help us evaluate issues.

And they are question one, what happens next? Question two, has this been tried before? Question three, is there a principle involved? Question four, what are the trade-offs? Question five, what do you mean by that? Question six, is this an appeal to emotion or logic? Question seven, am I focused on the speaker or the argument? And question eight, what does the Bible say? Now remember, there are lots of ways to approach a topic.