The debate over

Ours is a system where the punishment should be commensurate with the crime. Those who object and believe that capital punishment should be abolished must never have stood at a vigil for victims and looked at the faces of those who have been lost in senseless, barbaric crimes - faces framed in glass, wet with tears that never dry; faces that stare back, waiting for justice.

And waiting.

And waiting.

There are many reasons that I am an advocate for capital punishment. Let me tell you about a few.

Mark Duke was angry at not being allowed to borrow his father's truck. Duke and one of his friends, Brandon Samra, entered his father's house where Duke's father's fiancee, Dedra Hunt, and her two children were present. Duke executed his father at point-blank range. Samra shot Dedra Hunt in the face but failed to kill her. Samra and Duke then pursued Ms. Hunt as she fled upstairs with her two young children. Duke kicked in the bathroom door where Ms. Hunt was hiding with one of her children and shot her between the eyes. Duke then pulled 6-year-old Chelisa out of the shower, where she was hiding, slit her throat and left her to die. Seven-year-old Chelsea was hiding in a bedroom underneath a bed. Samra pulled her out from underneath the bed and slit her throat while Duke held her down.

Another occurred in 1979, when Billy Joe Magwood parked outside the Coffee County Jail and waited for Sheriff Neil Grantham to arrive. As Sheriff Grantham got out of his car and began to walk into the county jail, Magwood shot him in cold blood.

Then there are newer examples that prove that the need for such sentences has not dimmed with time.

On Aug. 26, 2002, Westley Devon Harris systematically executed the family of Janice Ball. He terrorized the Crenshaw County family, executing his victims one by one in a day-long killing spree. Without mercy, Harris took the lives of a 65-year-old woman, her daughter and son-in-law, and their three sons, while forcing his own 17-month-old daughter to witness the slaughter of those who had loved and protected her.

On June 17, 2004, Birmingham Police officers Charles R. Bennett, Harley Chisholm III and Carlos Owen were shot and killed while attempting to serve a misdemeanor warrant for domestic assault. These police officers entered a drug house and were simply doing their jobs, when the killer emerged from the apartment and opened fire. Two officers were shot in the back, and a third was shot in the face at point-blank range.

Tell these families and hundreds more that have lived through similar hells that we need a moratorium on the death penalty. Tell these families of horrific tragedies that claimed their sons or daughters, their mothers or fathers, their sisters or brothers that polls (polls that conflict and that, often, report manipulated results and the biases of those who conduct them) demand that we recalibrate our sense of justice so that the justice we dispense will let those responsible live while those left behind continue to grieve the ones who will never get to tell them goodbye.

If they must be told, you will have to tell them because I will be busy fighting to ensure that we never let them down. If you tell them, you have not only failed them, but you have also failed justice.

Those who are responsible for these crimes and for others like them were not given the death penalty. Rather, they earned it with their cold-blooded, calculating and, often, cavalier attitudes toward life and towards those they murdered.

If justice ever becomes consumed with protecting the guilty from a just sentence, it will have become unjust. To be sure, the death sentence must never be carried out in a way that allows the innocent to die. Just as surely, though, it must also never be allowed to operate in a manner that allows the justice we seek to die of old age.

A controversy as old as the law is encompassed in the debate over the death penalty. As it returns to your editorial page, you will no doubt amplify many voices, like those liberal voices that will decry the death penalty as discriminatory, the advocates who will renew their cries for a moratorium, and the academics who will cite questionable statistics and polls.

There will be many other voices that will, unfortunately, once again be in danger of going unheard - they are the voices of victims, of law enforcement, and of average Alabamians who have a strong sense of right and wrong.

I refuse to apologize for taking my stand with these. Alabamians should expect nothing less from their attorney general. I will not disappoint them. Troy King is attorney general of Alabama. E-mail: constituentaffairs@ago.state.al.us.