As Sister Helen Prejean, the death-penalty opponent, has put it, the question is not whether someone deserves to die but whether we deserve to kill him.
Drawing on the work of Philip Tetlock, a psychologist whose findings on the predictions of political pundits (they're mostly bunk) deserved to kill off that industry, Mr Silver finds reason to elevate one species of forecaster, the fox, over another, the hedgehog.
The question is: Do we deserve to kill them?
"But the really important question people don't ask is, 'Do we deserve to kill?'" .
"I think the threshold question is, 'Do we deserve to kill?'".
The men I've killed well 15-year-old boys with Guns is more like it but did I deserve to kill them did they deserve to die.
The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill?
Of the story Wills references (the woman caught in adultery), Jeanne Bishop notes, "He (Jesus) never said she didn't deserve to die; he suggested instead that those standing in judgment didn't deserve to kill her".
Capital punishment imposes an obligation on all of us: to stop what we are doing and, somewhere between lunch and the end of work, figure out whether we think a man we don't know at all killed someone, and deserves to be killed.
Is this the idea of justice of the new millennium, that someone gets killed because someone else decided this one deserves to be killed without a trial, without pause, without nothing?
