Karla Tucker's legacy: the death penalty debate takes a turn.

Before Karla Faye Tucker's execution fades from our memories, it's worth pondering the legacy she left behind. After committing a brutal act, she repented and softened the hearts of tens of millions of Americans. She forced them to look afresh at what they really think of the death penalty.

The Tucker execution, I suspect, will be a turning point in our country's long and difficult debate over whether capital punishment is right. It is presumed that because support for the death penalty is now so overwhelming in the United States, it has always been thus. But that is not true. At other times in our history, most recently three decades ago, we looked far more skeptically upon this ultimate punishment.

We worried then about many of the things that Karla Faye Tucker forced us to think about now: whether executing someone is the best way to declare our mutual commitment to the principle that taking another's life is wrong; whether people who do truly terrible things are, from that moment on, pariahs who have no contributions to make to the rest of us; and, most basically, whether we're comfortable in our souls with the collective responsibility we assume when the state puts someone to death.

Foes of capital punishment often find themselves defending people who not only did awful things, but seem to have no remorse for having done them. They are hard-pressed to answer the families of murder victims shouting for just vengeance. The best case for the death penalty is that it is the only just sentence for a human being who takes the life of another. I am opposed to capital punishment but know that ! would want the person who killed a loved one to die. It would not seem fair that such a person would long outlive his or her victim.

But Tucker reminded us of all the irrationalities of the death penalty - how it is unevenly applied, how it answers one form of brutality with another and becomes a spectacle.

The power of the Tucker case came from the challenge her execution posed to Christian conservatives who support the death penalty in principle. Many of them came to believe that she, a born-again Christian who appeared truly to have repented of her double murder with a pickax, deserved clemency. The Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell rose to her defense and the language they used echoed arguments long made, ineffectually, by opponents of the death penalty. "Mercy," declared Roberton, "trumps justice."

Ron Carlson, the brother of one of Tucker's victims, voiced the core argument against capital punishment. "The reason I think that Karla should live is that I don't think that we, as human beings, have the right to take a life, whether it is for justice or whether it is in vengeance or revenge," he said. "We, human beings, did not create life. God creates this life. Therefore, I believe that only God should take the life."

Carlson reminded us that those who oppose the death penalty are not indifferent to justice or soft on crime or uncaring about victims. They simply believe that the taking of the life of a guilty person does not make up for the taking of innocent life. They know that to be truly "fair," the death penalty would have to involve the execution of thousands every year. They shrink from that prospect.

In 1966, opposition to the death penalty hit its peak. According to the Gallup Poll, 47 percent of Americans opposed the death penalty then and only 42 favored it. Doubts about the death penalty led to a decline in executions - in 1966, there was but one and in 1967 just two.

Support for the death penalty began rising in the face of the violent crime wave that started in the mid-'60s. The popular sense, not at all foolish, was that the criminal justice system was failing, neither punishing enough criminals nor delivering much justice. Advocating the death penalty was a loud and forceful way of saying: Enough.

But with crime rates abating and with tough laws on the books to jail the guilty, it may be possible for us to re-examine whether our support for the death penalty is genuinely rooted in a concern for justice or whether it in fact violates our sense of both fairness and mercy. Karla Faye Tucker, despite her vicious crime, may help us to do that. The Reverends Robertson and Falwell bore witness to our doubts.