The recent and ghastly botched execution of a man in Oklahoma has rekindled my thoughts on capital punishment -- a practice outlawed in most civilized countries . Indeed , most of the industrialized world looks with horror on the United States , in this regard , as a primitive and backward country . Just in passing fact , capital punishment was banned in the Netherlands in 1870 , in Costa Rica in 1877 , in Colombia in 1910 . In allowing the death penalty , the United States stands with Libya , Uganda , Cuba , Egypt and Equatorial Guinea , among our other peers . It 's a sad commentary on justice in this country that , in a nation so plagued by capital murder , we should make it a state practice as well . Do we not see the connection ? You would guess that a nation obsessed with guns and violence -- just read the papers -- might at some point notice that when the state participates in this brutality , there is a tacit agreement that the most complete response to provocation is death . Two of the greatest writers of the19th century , Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy , passionately opposed the death penalty . Both were also Christians , and they understood perfectly well that the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that , under the old dispensation , an eye for an eye was appropriate . But Jesus said bluntly that not only should we never kill anyone , but we must turn the other cheek , resisting evil in a nonviolent way . This was n't something Jesus imagined was up for grabs . Dickens , the Shakespeare of the novel , argued against capital punishment on many grounds , but he was especially concerned about the matter of determining guilt in such an absolute way . Can we ever really know for sure that someone did something ? The death sentence is inevitably delivered by `` men of fallible judgment , whose powers of arriving at the truth are limited , and in whom there is the capacity of a mistake or false judgment . '' Tolstoy wrote a stirring essay in 1908 called `` I Can not Be Silent '' in which he described a multiple hanging , and found it repulsive on every level . He noted the priest who attended the execution and how he mumbled something about God and Christ to the condemned . After a vivid account of the hanging , he says with an ironic twang : `` All this is carefully arranged and planned by learned and enlightened people . '' He notes that the government who commits this killing is involved in the process `` from the lowest hangman to the highest official -- all support religion and Christianity , which is altogether incompatible with the deed they commit . '' Incompatible indeed . It has always struck me as bizarre that many of those who object most strenuously to abortion because it involves taking a life will quite happily condone capital punishment , as if this is somehow not taking a life . Does it make it less immoral for the individual , in its collective guise as `` the state , '' to kill someone ? Killing is killing , and when you give this ugly deed an official name -- capital punishment -- it 's still killing , and is grotesque for a supposedly humane nation to condone such a practice . As if we needed reminding , our Constitution bans punishments that are deemed `` cruel and unusual . '' In the eyes of the civilized world , murder is cruel and unusual punishment , best left to vigilante outlaws , the criminally insane and rogue states . State-sponsored murder fosters a culture of violence that permeates our society , creating a punitive state of mind that does nobody any good . And it has surely proven ineffective in preventing further killings . Indeed , it generates them .
Jay Parini : Botched Oklahoma execution reminder that few civilized countries do this . He says state-sponsored killing fosters a culture of violence in U.S. Parini : Dickens , Tolstoy found death penalty repulsive , hypocritical , unchristian . Parini : Odd that many who oppose abortion are OK with the state taking a human life .