Pull the plug on the death penalty.

It's a puzzle: not only does opinion poll after opinion poll in the United States show overwhelming support for capital punishment, they show no appreciable difference in the degree of blood lust among religious believers--including Catholics--compared to that among people of no particular belief.

This approval rating is a puzzle for a number of reasons. In the first place, it is unique among democratic nations throughout the world. The death penalty is a useful tool for dictators and in countries where tyranny rules, yet not even all of these practice capital punishment. And little by little over the years the death penalty has been abolished in most countries except the United States.

Keep in mind that in the United States capital punishment was proscribed for many years and was brought back, unreasonably, only in our times.

The popularity of the death penalty in our land of the free is also a puzzle because it has been universally condemned as immoral by religious leaders including Pope John Paul II and the American Catholic bishops.

Arguments in favor of the death penalty are various. Most obviously, taking the lives of persons who have committed heinous crimes would remove them from society so that they could not sin again. That argument had some validity when it was possible that criminals who had been sentenced to prison rather than to death could be paroled, sometimes after serving a much shorter sentence than was originally intended. But now that a life sentence with no possibility of parole is available to prosecutors and courts, that argument has lost its validity.

Second, the death penalty, it is argued, will act as a deterrent to others who might commit serious crimes. Study after study, however, has disproved the validity of that reason.

The notion of the death penalty simply as punishment has a certain practical sense, especially when the criminal has committed one or more murders. A life for a life. But execution cannot bring back a life already taken, and can there be any punishment more frightful than confining a person, especially a younger person, behind bars for a lifetime?

Another argument in favor of the death penalty, often unstated but perhaps the most common, is vengeance. But "Vengeance is mine," says the Lord, and the rest of us, even those who have suffered from the crime involved, are charged with the often terribly difficult task of forgiving. Loving our neighbors as ourselves includes sometimes despicable neighbors.

Speaking of forgiveness, what of the opportunity for the condemned to be forgiven for their crimes in the eyes of God? Some not ready to ask forgiveness from God and their neighbors, when sentenced, might come to that readiness only after years of contemplation in prison.

Then too, in recent years, a number of persons condemned to death and waiting on death row have been found not guilty after another person has been proved to be the real culprit. These highly publicized cases raise the question, "How many others have been sentenced to death and executed when they were innocent of the crime for which they were sentenced?" Perhaps there have been only a few of these unfortunates, but each of them was a precious person.

Finally, despite the popularity of capital punishment in the United States, our ambivalence about it is showing. We have moved from execution by hanging, often public, to the electric chair, to the gas chamber, to chemical injection in an effort to "off" people more "humanely." And no one except the person executed knows how humane their death was. Many years ago, the late and famous prison warden Lewis Laws described in this magazine--in hair-raising detail--what happens to a prisoner in the electric chair. Talk about cruel and usual punishment!

Catholic and other religious leaders have repeatedly deplored the death penalty as not consistent with the sacred dignity of human persons. In a letter written to Texas Governor George W. Bush in an unavailing attempt to spare Karla Faye Tucker from execution last spring, Bishop Placido Rodriguez of Lubbock, Texas eloquently stated the Catholic position on capital punishment:

"In the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the state has achieved its purpose in rendering the aggressor incapable of causing harm. There was no need for any further penalty than incarceration for life."

Bishop Rodriguez concluded his letter with a citation from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human life against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means because they are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person."