(Continued from page 13)

"peace of mind" and "closure."
• It provides neither.
• The families of the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing anticipated they would have peace and closure when convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed. Those feelings were even stronger, they said, after McVeigh's federal execution was delayed by a month.
• But, one year after McVeigh's eventual execution, most family members reported they felt no peace, no closure nor any better than they did before the execution.
• The problem the United States has with capital punishment is not our pre-biblical "eye for an eye" sense of justice. Rather, it is the misguided notion that executing a

heinous criminal accomplishes more than simply the execution of a heinous criminal.
• Studies have shown:
• -- It costs more to execute a criminal than it does to imprison him for life;
• -- Executing a criminal does nothing to deter crime and;
• -- Execution does not -- despite what they may say ahead of an execution -- help the victims' families find peace or closure.
• Despite what people in many other countries may say, executing the darkest, most sordid members of our criminal society is not inherently wrong. Doing it under false pretenses, though, is inherently wrong. If we are too meek to accept the facts of why we are executing someone (the "fact" being we can) then, perhaps, we should not be doing it.
• Donald Moeller likely will die for the death of Becky O'Connell. But we would not honor our responsibility as a free people if we did not acknowledge the real reason for his death.
• ___
• The Daily Republic, Mitchell. Aug. 10, 2012
• Heat renews debate about global warming
• Five years ago, The Daily Republic opined that maybe there is something to all of this global warming talk.
• We openly noted that global warming is debatable, but also said that it is "hard to turn the other cheek when faced with news that Arctic sea ice is just half of what it was four years ago."
• Again, that was five years ago. And then, of course, the years after we wrote that featured wet and cool summers and downright frigid and snowy winters.
• It prompted a few folks to good-naturedly jab us every time a cold streak set in.

(Continued on page 15)