The death penalty is often deserved, but maybe we have to re-think imposing it.

I am one who believes that certain people, convicted of heinous crimes, deserve to be put to death and thus escorted into either oblivion or an aferlife, where they will be judged by an authority I can't begin to imagine. Raping and killing a child of six? Shooting a mother and all her children just because she didn't want to be married to you anymore? Mowing down any number of your classmates because you were depressed?

Off with their heads, I say! (And I'm a liberal Democrat!) It's the Old Testament judgment: an eye for an eye, etc. Simple and to the point: if you take a life without good reason, then yours must be taken. After that, you take your chances.

That way of thinking, though, is losing favor in the civilized world. Yes, Jesus first espoused it -- forgiving your enemies, turning the other check, blah blah -- but it seems that more and more intelligent people are buying into it. Most of the European countries have abolished the death penalty. In fact, we, the USA, are almost alone in killing our convicted criminals. The other countries who do so are not ones we want to be associated with.

And I am beginning to think that, despite my own gut feelings, I/we should defer to the Europeans in such matters, as they've been through catastrophic wars that make our own Civil War look like a spat between friends (which maybe, despite its own horrors, probably was). I'm seriously beginning to think that if the English and French and Germans, et al , have decided that the government shouldn't have the right to kill convicted criminals, then neither should we.

I come at it reluctantly, especially when I remember Jeffrey Daumer with his human body parts cooking on the stove or the Nazis killing people wholesale or any number of horrific cases of depraved men (almost always men) doing unspeakable things to innocent people in countries all over the glode.

But if all these people, in all these troubled countries, manage to resist the temptation to exact Old Testament retribution, shouldn't we, too?

Just like we, ultimately, have to admit their our parents were right about certain things, we may also have to concede that the older civilizations on this earth are likely right about this most difficult of dilemmas. So let's just grit our teeth and get on with it. Put the worst among us in prison forever, and if they're innocent, they have plenty of time to prove it. Forget them and move on with our lives.

And if our teeth are on edge, well, that's what dentists are for.