Because they did not receive a love of the truth, God sent them a strong delusion that they might believe a lie.

Karla Faye Tucker Meets Her Maker                          Index           

But Karla Faye--I'll call her Sister Karla--needed to die.  She forfeited any "right to life" when she brutally murdered two human beings made in God's image.  God's unchanging command, found in chapters 20 and 21 of Exodus,  is this:  You shall not commit murder; and whoever commits murder shall be put to death.  It's quite plain and straight-forward. The same God who took Karla Faye to heaven required her execution for murder. It makes perfect sense to me.

Jesus did not die to suspend all civil and criminal justice. Suppose I were arrested in the act of armed robbery. But while on the way to jail I am converted, truly converted. Am I forgiven? Yes, most certainly. Should I go to prison?  Yes, for the full term. God's forgiveness does not negate the demands of criminal justice.

Some argue that because Sister Karla was saved, changed and forgiven, she should be spared  the death penalty.  But why?  Why not spare her any penalty at all?  Why not just send her home with our blessing? No. If the right penalty for murder is death--and I'm certain that it is--then (saved or not) Karla needed to die.

She needed to die to remove the bloodguilt from the land. When justice is not done, a curse comes upon any community. No one can cancel Karla's debt to justice except her victims. But they are not available. No one can forgive a wrong done to another. If  I should offer to forgive the burglar who savaged your home, you would be puzzled and justifiably annoyed. Only the one who suffered the wrong can forgive the crime.

Therefore no one, not Pat Robertson, not the Pope, not even Gov. George W. Bush, had the right to cancel the debt Karla owed to justice: a life for a life.

If we had executed Sister Karla to prevent further axe murders, I'd be for clemency. If we killed her to quench our anger and outrage, I'd be against the death penalty. Even if we were trying to exact her "debt to society," I would have voted to spare her. But we had to execute Karla for a higher reason:  we had to satisfy justice, on which the whole moral frame of the world is founded.

Maybe Karla needed to die for her own sake as well. If she  had lingered long in this crazy country, where people call light darkness and darkness light, she might have come to think of herself as the victim, and thus lost the peace that made her death a total victory.