Yesterday was the closing performance of The Exonerated in Chattanooga. I saw my good friend, Alice there, and Sandy, too. Next stops are Suwanee (maybe), and Knoxville, both in January.

Kate Briere directed, and played the part of Sue Gauger, wife of one of the exonerated. She is a genius. I made a bunch of new friends working on this, people who I admire for their intelligence and their dramatic gifts... A couple were old friends - and I see a new side to them now.

Doing something new - outside the comfort zone - is a good reminder of just how much there is that you don't know. It keeps you humble, and it gives you new recognition for others' work that you might have taken for granted.

Working on a play like this one for several weeks running also forces you to spend time thinking about issues that you've never put much time into. I was never "for" or "against" the death penalty... I was sympathetic to the anti-death penalty view for the simple reason that I trust liberal sensibilities more than conservative ones, but I'd never really taken my own position on the matter. Now, I do.

To me, what it boils down to is a question of right motivation, and a question of right pursuit of the motivating goal. To summarize, the goal of justice is the right motivation for action in cases of capital crime; the motive of revenge is the wrong one. Those are my personal values and the valuse I ask my children to learn. They are the values I hope my readership has adopted or will adopt.

After analysis, and after asking about as many possible ways justice might be served in cases of capital crime as I could think of, and after examining the issue of whether the death penalty effectively creates justice in any of those ways, I have found that there are no instances where justice is properly served by captial punishment, and many ways in which justice is undermined by it. If justice is the goal, capital punishment is absolutely the wrong approach to reaching it.

Specifics? No time this morning - I'm once again late for work. I may follow up with another post or two on the subject, or I may discuss my view further in the comments of this post, if a reader suggests a way he or she believes justice can be met through capital punishment.

Have a nice Monday. Nice to be back to blogging again.