Don't make Dylann Roof tenth murder victim

"I haven't shed a tear for the innocent people I killed." With those words and bizarre conduct in his sentencing hearing, 22 year old Dylann Roof appears determined to elicit a death sentence from the jury for slaughtering 9 blacks in a Charleston, SC church in June, 2015. Roof acted in his own defense, he claims, so his defense counsel couldn't enter evidence about his psychological condition Roof is determined to protect. "There's nothing wrong with me psychologically" Roof protested.

Psychology aside, Roof is clearly a defective human, acting out his violent fantasies the vast majority of us keep in check. But we expect better from our Uncle Sam who should be ennobling those of us living instead of callously degrading our political culture with calls for bloodlust. The US has become an outlier, one of only 53 countries of 193 that still practice state sponsored murder. Twenty-one of our fifty states have abolished it as well.

Murdering Roof won't bring back the victims. Executing him won't deter similarly disturbed creatures who haunt our life. Injecting him with lethal drugs is the wrong fix for what ails America. As the Bard wrote so well:

"The quality of mercy is not strain'd
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: It becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown"

Or in your case, Uncle, it's your funny hat.